Empowering women essential for improved climate response

15/03/2022 0 Comments read Environment & Development, Gender

A girl making the Cambodian bamboo sticky rice with black beans in Battambang Province. Enabling women to participate in environmental decision-making is key to building a sustainable future for all. Photo Credit: © Neena Bhandari

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 15.03.2022 (SciDev.Net): Women possess essential knowledge and skills, particularly at the local level, in the conservation and management of natural resources but have limited say in environmental decision-making, according to a report by UN Women Asia and the Pacific.

The report was published ahead of the 66th Commission on the Status of Women which is focusing on achieving gender equality in the context of climate change, environmental and disaster risk reduction policies and programmes. It says engaging women in these areas is critical to effective climate action.

“Women’s relationship to the environment is different to men’s in several complex but interlocking ways,” says Sarah Knibbs, officer-in-charge at UN Women Asia and the Pacific. “They are more exposed to some of the risks and also have a unique contribution to make to the solutions.”

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‘Restore tropical forests’ to address climate change

23/02/2022 0 Comments read Environment & Development, Health & Science

Photo Credit: © Neena Bhandari

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 23.02.2022 (SciDev.Net): Restoring biodiverse tropical forests could be a nature-based solution to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and address climate change, scientists show in a study that simulates how forests will respond to future climate scenarios on earth.

According to the study, limiting global warming caused by human activity to less than two degrees Celsius requires rapid reduction in greenhouse gas emissions as well as reduction of carbon in the atmosphere.

Peter Talaas, secretary general of the World Meteorological Organisation, says that sea level rise and the melting of glaciers may continue until 2060 because of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “Of course, if we had carbon removal techs we could change the big picture, but so far that’s not the case,” Talaas said at a meeting ahead of the 28 February release of a section of the sixth report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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Micro-estimates of wealth data ‘can help tackle poverty’

26/01/2022 0 Comments read Environment & Development, Health & Science

By Neena Bhandari

Sydney, 25.01.2022 (SciDev.Net): A data project charting poverty levels in detail across the global South could help policymakers better target social assistance and humanitarian aid, researchers say.

The COVID-19 pandemic has deepened poverty globally, with an estimated 97 million more people, most of them in LMICs, pushed into extreme poverty in 2021, according to the World Bank. But a dearth of reliable and up-to-date poverty data in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) poses a major challenge for governments and civil society.

To bridge this data gap, researchers at the University of California (UC), Berkeley, and the Data for Good programme, which collates data from Meta platforms such as Facebook and Instagram, have developed a public data set of Relative Wealth Index (RWI), which provides micro-estimates of wealth of all populated areas in the 135 LMICs. The study was published in PNAS on 18 January.

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