2 December 2008 – The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) today launched a campaign to raise awareness of the humanitarian implications of climate change, calling for improved disaster preparedness and response measures in countries that suffer most from extreme weather events. “This campaign highlights our huge concerns about the humanitarian impact of climate change,” Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator J more...
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14 November 2008 – The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) enlisted the help of North American youth to help tackle climate change. The “Kick the Carbon Habit” education campaign was launched at a three-day event in Chicago featuring 20 youth representatives, between the ages of 18 and 22, from the US and Canada. The new project seeks to raise awareness of the importance of resource conservation, and UNEP stressed the importance of education and youth leadership in addressing globa more...
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WEDNESday, 3 December 2008. Adapting to climate change is a major issue in the climate change talks, particularly for people in the world’s poorest countries. Most of these countries account for only a miniscule contribution to the greenhouse gas emissions that are accelerating the rate of climate change, yet they stand to suffer the most from climate change. To get a sense of the problem, the first question in an interview with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon by a Polish newspaper was wh more...
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The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Poznań opened on Monday, 1 December. The Conference is a milestone on the road to success for the processes which were launched under the Bali Road Map.The meeting comes midway between COP 13 in Bali, which saw the launch of negotiations on strengthened international action on climate change, and COP 15 Copenhagen, at which the negotiations are set to conclude. The Conference includes the 29th sessions of the Convention’s subsidiary bodies - SBS more...
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IIED. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has provided US$10 million to the nongovernmental organisation Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI) to support the urban poor in Africa, Asia and Latin America to take action to improve their housing, water and sanitation. It is the first time a major US foundation has made a significant investment to address urban poverty in these regions. The grant is also unusual in that it will go direct to grassroots groups that gather under the umbrella of SDI, more...
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IIED. Africa now has a larger urban population than North America and has 25 of the world's fastest growing large cities. Half of the world's urban population now lives in Asia, which also has half of the world's largest cities and fastest growing large cities. These are among the findings published by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in the 2007 edition of its analysis of urban change, which it has issued periodically since 1986.
The research highlights the g more...
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IIED. Imagine this. You share your source of drinking water — a single standpipe — with 50,000 other people. Your toilet is an open drain. You often wake up thinking this is the day you might be evicted from the home and the neighbourhood you have painstakingly built. This is reality for many of the people living in the world’s slums, shantytowns and other informal urban settlements. But what is less publicized about the ‘bottom billion’, as some call them, is the quiet revolution spre more...
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