A UN climate impact report, released on Monday, gives the clearest and most comprehensive evidence yet that the earth we call home is in deep trouble. It reinforces the sobering view that climate change is real, it’s happening now and it’s affecting the lives and the livelihoods of people as well as the sensitive ecosystems that sustain life. This is ...

Governments the world over have been handed a warning by the world’s leading climate scientists that society is vastly underprepared to deal with the increased risks posed by climate change impacts that the world is no longer able to avoid. The second instalment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), released in Yokohama, Japan on Monday, ...

A five-day meeting that commenced on Tuesday involving government representatives and scientists, and convened by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to finalise a report assessing the impacts of climate change on human and natural systems, options for adaptation, and the interactions among climate changes, other stresses on societies, and opportunities for the future, ended Saturday. The meeting, the ...

Environment activists, operating under the aegis of the Nigerian ASP Implementation Network (NASPIN), have said that residents of the city are sitting on an environmental time bomb as a result of the large scale pollution of the Lagos Lagoon. The NASPIN is an independent, non-profit national alliance of voluntary groups, made up of non-governmental organisations and civil societies that are ...

Global warming, an offshoot of the climate change phenomenon, is being transformed from a threat of environmental doom to a promise of financial boom, thanks to a range of emerging profit-spinning prospects. As the unsavoury impacts of climate change persist on one hand, the positive side, on the other hand, is throwing up numerous opportunities for investors. “It doesn’t mean ...

In the last few weeks, global attention has been drawn to the United Kingdom where the wettest winter in 250 years has emptied more than an ankle deep of flood onto the streets of the City of London and other parts of the Kingdom. The phenomenon, which the Government is still battling to contain, has flooded over 300 properties along ...

The No REDD in Africa Network (NRAN) and its allies have condemned the evictions and forced relocation of the Sengwer Indigenous People in Kenya’s Cherangany Hills, as well as the World Bank-funded Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) programme in the country. In an open letter to the United Nations and the Kenyan government, the NRAN states: “The forced relocation of the Sengwer People proves the urgency of cancelling ...

I sympathise with the new Minister for Environment, Lawrencia Labara Mallam, in terms of the enormous and challenging situation her coming to office will face based on the challenges of the environment sector. First is the problem of a short term of service (probably from now till May 2015) and second is the peculiar political intensity of the country culminating ...

The percentage of land owned by women is disproportionately small considering their crucial contribution to agriculture and especially the food security of households and communities. The existing gender inequality in access to and control over natural resources is regarded as an obstacle to their sustainable management and to sustainable development in general. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights stipulates that ...