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Africa’s Farmers Seek Private Money

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Busani Bafana, Sep 08, 2013
Sweetpotato breeder Jose Ricardo in Maputo Mozambique. Africa currently imports almost 40 billion dollars worth of food, and experts say that the continent needs to become more self-reliant.
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Africa currently imports almost 40 billion dollars worth of food a year, but it should implement measures to attract private sector investment in agriculture in order to reduce its food import bill and increase its self-reliance, experts in the sector tell IPS.
“In the next 10 years, African countries should not rely on food aid, but should produce their own food and buy from within Africa when they run out of food,” agriculture researcher and director of the Barefoot Education for Africa Trust, Professor Mandivamba Rukuni, told IPS.

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Africa’s Farmers Seek Private Money

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Africa faces sharp rise in climate adaption costs - UNEP

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Megan Rowling, Nov 19, 2013
An abandoned canoe is seen on a water hyacinth covered lagoon near the Makoko slum in Nigeria's commercial capital Lagos
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Africa faces climate adaptation costs in the range of $7 billion to $15 billion per year by 2020, and that figure could rise to around $350 billion annually by 2070 if global warming exceeds 2 degrees Celsius, a U.N. report said on Tuesday.

Even if the 2 degrees goal - agreed by nearly 200 governments in 2010 - were to be met, the cost of adapting to more extreme weather and longer-term climate shifts would still be around $35 billion per year by the 2040s and $200 billion per year by the 2070s, according to the U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP).

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Africa faces sharp rise in climate adaption costs - UNEP

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Better sanitation boosts children's test scores, decreases stunting - study

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Astrid Zweynert, Nov 19, 2013
A Jordanian worker uses a wheelbarrow to transport materials for building the Azraq Syrian Refugee Camp, the third of its kind, near Al Azraq, 80km (50 miles) east of Amman
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Access to improved sanitation can increase cognition in children, according to a new World Bank study, the latest research to link stunting and open defecation.

More than 2.5 billion people worldwide lack access to toilets, and one billion people practice open defecation.

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Better sanitation boosts children's test scores, decreases stunting - study

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Cooker reduces black carbon problem

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Roger Harrabin Sep 24, 2013
Why the old stove causes so much pollution - and how the new stove works
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It's a wonder gadget. It safeguards eyes and lungs.

It protects glaciers from melting. It saves forests. This miracle device is... a cooker.

The organisation Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves says the smoky mud stoves used in developing countries are a health problem thatdisproportionately affects women.

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Cooker reduces black carbon problem

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Good Electricity Grids Make Good Neighbors

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Daniel Kammen of University of California, Berkeley, Nov 20, 2013
Hell's Gate, Rift Valley, Kenya, a source of geothermal energy that will feed a new transmission line running between Kenya and Ethiopia. Photograph by Franca DelSignore, National Geographic Your Shot
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In the poem “Mending Wall,” Robert Frost asserted that “good fences make good neighbors.”  World history is replete with foreign policy built around physical walls, from Emperor Hadrian, to the Great Wall of China, to the Berlin Wall, the wall between Palestine and Israeli, to the U.S.-Mexico border.  Containment and isolation have often been the cornerstones of policy.

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Good Electricity Grids Make Good Neighbors

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Oceans face "deadly trio" of threats, study says

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Alister Doyle, Oct 3, 2013
A whale dives into the sea off the coast of Greenland's capital Nuuk, Oct. 17, 2012. REUTERS/Alistair Scrutton
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OSLO, Oct 3 (Reuters) - The world's oceans are under greater threat than previously believed from a "deadly trio" of global warming, declining oxygen levels and acidification, an international study said on Thursday.

The oceans have continued to warm, pushing many commercial fish stocks towards the poles and raising the risk of extinction for some marine species, despite a slower pace of temperature rises in the atmosphere this century, it said.

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Oceans face "deadly trio" of threats, study says

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Google Earth SHOCK: ZERO point ZERO ZERO SIX of world forests disappear each year Not to mention 'Great Reversal' density increase

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Lewis Page, Nov 15 2013
Map of World deforestation
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The technical team behind Google Earth have partnered with US government boffins to produce dramatic satellite maps showing how the area of the world covered by forests has changed across the years 2000 to 2012.

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Google Earth SHOCK: ZERO point ZERO ZERO SIX of world forests disappear each year Not to mention 'Great Reversal' density increa

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Deforestation in Amazon jungle increases by nearly a third in one year

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The Guardian, November 14 2013
Illegally logged timber, which has been confiscated, is floated down the Guam river delta in Brazil
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Deforestation in the Amazon increased by nearly a third over the past year, according to Brazilian government figures released on Thursday.

The data confirms a feared reversal in what had been steady progress over the past decade against destruction of the world's largest rainforest.

Satellite data for the 12 months through the end of July 2013 showed that deforestation in the region climbed by 28% compared with a year earlier.

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Deforestation in Amazon jungle increases by nearly a third in one year

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MDG designer fears UN goals will ‘degenerate into wish list’

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Arthur Neslen Sep 18 2013
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 An architect of the UN’s Millennium development Goals (MDGs) says he fears that a lack of strong leadership at the UN could lead to its poverty eradication goals being replaced by an over-politicised and unachievable “wish list” after 2015.

Jan Vandemoortele told EurActiv that UN member states were becoming “uneasy” about discussions on a framework to replace the MDGs in 15 months time, which are due to begin in New York on 22 September. 

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MDG designer fears UN goals will ‘degenerate into wish list’

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