IRIN Global | GLOBAL: Cheap ways to adapt to less water, or more | Asia East Africa Global Great Lakes Horn of Africa Latin America and Caribbean Middle East Southern Africa West Africa | Afghanistan Angola Bangladesh Burkina Faso Burundi Benin Botswana DRC Central African Republic Congo Cote d'Ivoire Cameroon Comoros Cape Verde Djibouti Egypt Eritrea Ethiopia Gabon Ghana Gambia Guinea Equatorial Guinea Guinea-Bissau Haiti Indonesia Israel Iraq Iran Jordan Kenya Kyrgyzstan Cambodia Kazakhstan Laos Lebanon Sri Lanka Liberia Lesotho Madagascar Mali Myanmar Mauritania Mauritius Malawi Mozambique Namibia Niger Nigeria Nepal OPT Papua New Guinea Philippines Pakistan Rwanda Seychelles Sudan Sierra Leone Senegal Somalia Sao Tome and Principe Syria Swaziland Turkmenistan Chad Togo Thailand Tajikistan Timor-Leste Tanzania United Arab Emirates Uganda United States Uzbekistan Vietnam Western Sahara Yemen South Africa Zambia Zimbabwe | Environment Natural Disasters | News Item

IRIN Global | GLOBAL: Cheap ways to adapt to less water, or more "Many of the most effective water-related adaptation measures are free,' noted Morrison, who is�the UN Development Programme Water Governance Facility Project Manager at SIWI.

Here is a list, based on some of Morrison's suggestions and community-based adaptation measures compiled by the UK-based International Institute for Environment and Development."

World Population Forecast to Top 7 Billion in 2011 - NYTimes.com

World Population Forecast to Top 7 Billion in 2011 - NYTimes.com: "Projections, especially over decades, are vulnerable to changes in immigration, retirement ages, birthrates, health care and other variables, but in releasing the bureau’s 2010 population data sheet, Carl Haub, its senior demographer, estimated this week that by 2050 the planet will be home to more than nine billion people."

United Nations Millennium Development Goals

United Nations Millennium Development Goals: "'It is clear that improvements in the lives of the poor have been unacceptably slow, and some hard-won gains are being eroded by the climate, food and economic crises,' UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in the foreword to the Millennium Development Goals Report 2010, issued on 23 June."

IMPACT Model | International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

IMPACT Model | International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI): "The IMPACT model is designed to examine alternative futures for global food supply, demand, trade, prices, and food security. The IMPACT model allows IFPRI to provide both fundamental, global baseline projections of agricultural commodity supply, demand, trade, prices and malnutrition outcomes along with cutting-edge research results on quickly evolving topics such as bioenergy, climate change, changing diet/food preferences, and many other�themes."

Knowledge Products | International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Knowledge Products | International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI): "IFPRI Knowledge Products are research tools, best practices, and services, which IFPRI shares as international public goods to increase use and impact in development and facilitate policy and�decisionmaking."

OpEdNews - Diary: Halving Hunger Through "Business as Unusual"

OpEdNews - Diary: Halving Hunger Through "Business as Unusual": "Currently, 16 percent of the world is undernourished. In his recently published report, Halving Hunger: Meeting the First Millennium Development Goal through 'Business as Unusual', Fan voiced his concern that efforts to meet the first Millennium Development Goal (MDG) of halving the proportion of undernourished people by 2015 are 'moving in the wrong direction.' Taking projected population growth into account, the number of undernourished needs to fall by an average of 73 million per year in the next five years."

Innovative thinking on agriculture in the Greater Mekong Subregion

Innovative thinking on agriculture in the Greater Mekong Subregion

Experts warn rapid losses of Africa’s native livestock threaten continent’s food supply � ILRI News

Experts warn rapid losses of Africa’s native livestock threaten continent’s food supply � ILRI News:
Resilient disease-resistant, 'ancient' West African cattle, such as these humpless longhorn N'Dama cattle, are among breeds at risk of extinction in Africa as imported animals supplant valuable native livestock.

From the Oakland Institute—The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger � NJ Hunger Action and Advocacy

From the Oakland Institute—The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger � NJ Hunger Action and Advocacy: "Oakland (CA): The High Food Price Challenge: A Review of Responses to Combat Hunger, a report by the UK Hunger Alliance and the Oakland Institute, provides a thorough review of national and international responses to global hunger. Featuring case studies from individual countries and regions that confronted the food price crisis using diverse strategies, the report shows that beyond providing aid money, it is imperative that governments and international institutions rethink their policies to mitigate hunger"

AllHumanity Group: FAO opens up database to help fight world hunger

AllHumanity Group: FAO opens up database to help fight world hunger: "The FAOSTAT (http://faostat.fao.org) database contains more than one million data items covering 210 countries and territories with records going back to 1961, FAO said in a statement.
'FAOSTAT is a powerful tool that can be used not just to see where hunger occurs, but to drill down and better understand why hunger occurs -- and what might be done to combat it,' Pietro Gennari, FAO Statistics Division Director, said.
FAOSTAT includes data on agricultural and food production, use of fertilisers and pesticides, food aid shipments, food balance sheets, forestry and fisheries production, irrigation and water use, land use and trade in agricultural products."

Cash for Conservation: Threats and Promises of Paying Communities for Their Biodiversity: Scientific American

Cash for Conservation: Threats and Promises of Paying Communities for Their Biodiversity: Scientific American: "Payments for environmental services, or PES, is one of the most controversial areas of conservation. Large environmental organizations have been criticized for long ignoring, and sometimes exacerbating, the plight of the world's poor. But over the last decade, The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and other organizations have helped launched PES projects to protect, for instance, watersheds in South America and Africa. Furthermore, PES is going to play an even bigger role as the international community debates schemes to pay countries for the carbon stored by avoiding deforestation, an approach taken by the U.N. Development Programme called REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries)."

Representing a Sustainable World – A Typology Approach | Clifton | Journal of Sustainable Development

Representing a Sustainable World – A Typology Approach | Clifton | Journal of Sustainable Development: "This paper presents, in the form of a typology, the findings of a current research project concerned with what it means for there to be a sustainable world. The typology if framed around key sustainable world dimensions and how each of these is considered in terms of Reformist and Transformational approaches to giving meaning to a sustainable world and how this might be achieved. Key themes evident in the typology are discussed namely the primary sustainable world goal of flourishing life, the anthropocentrism-ecocentrism divide, approaches to human interests satisfaction, and optimisation vs resilience living. The paper notes the mere descriptive nature of the typology and concludes with some thoughts on ways in which the typology might be critiqued to identify which approach, Reformist or Transformational, is more likely to see the primary goal of a sustainable world achieved."

Innovations in research - ECOHEALTH: IMROVING THE HEALTH OF PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT | R&D Mag

Innovations in research - ECOHEALTH: IMROVING THE HEALTH OF PEOPLE AND THE ENVIRONMENT | R&D Mag: "IDRC’s work on the links between environment and human health builds on decades of support for health research.

From an early focus on biomedical research, in 1992 IDRC launched its Health, Society and Environment program, which brought together specialists in different fields to explore how environmental factors influence health. With the creation of IDRC’s Ecosystem Approaches to Human Health program in 1996, a larger range of expertise was brought to bear on a wider spectrum of factors."

Protecting Biological Diversity: The Effectiveness of Access and Benefit-sharing Regimes (Hardback) - Routledge

Protecting Biological Diversity: The Effectiveness of Access and Benefit-sharing Regimes (Hardback) - Routledge: "During the last ten years the enormous global loss of biodiversity has received remarkable attention. Among the numerous approaches undertaken to stop or lessen this process, access and benefit-sharing (ABS), a market-based approach, has emerged as among the most prominent. In theory, ABS turns biodiversity and genetic resources from an open access good to a private good and creates a market for genetic resources"

World Environment News - Analysis: New U.N. Body To Put Value On Planet - Planet Ark

World Environment News - Analysis: New U.N. Body To Put Value On Planet - Planet Ark: "The world relies on a range of services nature provides -- water filtration by forests, pollination by bees and a supply of wild plant genes for new food crops or medicines.

If nature charged for these, how much would it cost?

Most such values are excluded from measures of national economies and from prices and markets which would force businesses and governments to recognize them, and the result has been a bias toward development over conservation.

U.N. states have proposed a new body, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), to advise on valuing nature and conservation targets."

Conservation Planning as a Transdisciplinary Process. BELINDA REYERS. 2010; Conservation Biology - Wiley InterScience

Conservation Planning as a Transdisciplinary Process. BELINDA REYERS. 2010; Conservation Biology - Wiley InterScience: "Despite substantial growth in the field of conservation planning, the speed and success with which conservation plans are converted into conservation action remains limited. This gap between science and action extends beyond conservation planning into many other applied sciences and has been linked to complexity of current societal problems, compartmentalization of knowledge and management sectors, and limited collaboration between scientists and decision makers. T"

Dealing with the Clandestine Nature of Wildlife-Trade Market Surveys. SHANNON M. BARBER-MEYER. 2010; Conservation Biology - Wiley InterScience

Dealing with the Clandestine Nature of Wildlife-Trade Market Surveys. SHANNON M. BARBER-MEYER. 2010; Conservation Biology - Wiley InterScience: "Illegal international trade in wildlife (excluding fisheries and timber) has been valued at more than US$20 billion. A more precise figure has not been determined in part because of the clandestine nature of the trade, and for this same reason even regional and local levels of wildlife trade are difficult to assess. The application of recent developments in wildlife field-survey methods (e.g., occupancy) now allows for a more-accurate estimation of wildlife trade occurrence, including its hidden components at a variety of scales (e.g., regional, local) and periods (e.g., single season, 1 year, multiple years)."

World Food Program USA

World Food Program USA: "More than 1 billion people are struggling with hunger every day. Most of them are children. WFP USA is a U.S.-based nonprofit organization that supports the World Food Program’s life-saving mission."

Is the Next Global Food Crisis Now in the Making?

Is the Next Global Food Crisis Now in the Making?: "(July 17) -- Recent weeks have produced a series of grim and related headlines: Russia has declared a state of emergency because of drought in 12 regions, while in major wheat exporter Ukraine, severe flooding may depress crop yields. Dry conditions threaten Vietnamese rice production. The USDA has projected a disappointingly low Midwest harvest, and China has raised questions on the demand side by doubling its imports from Canada."

Commitment To Global Food Security | Home | Editorial

Commitment To Global Food Security | Home | Editorial: "The leaders of the world's eight major economies renewed a commitment made last summer to improving global food security."