Robert Hickson • Jul 18, 2013 •
While there is a lot of attention on the rising power of China, the stuttering development of India, and the potential of Brazil and Russia, think ahead to Africa. The Washington Post has written a nice piece about the rising demographic might of Africa, based on UN projections. Barring major catastrophes (famine, disease, war, environmental collapse, … Read More
Bryan Walker • May 19, 2012 •
The NZ Herald business supplement recently carried a thoughtful feature by Peter Huck in which he described moves to combat climate change at lower levels than the floundering international negotiations. He begins with a report on Desertec Industrial Initiative, the German-led consortium which this year hopes to trial in Morocco a concentrated solar power plant [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Jan 15, 2012 •
It’s all too easy for wealthy America and Europe to treat climate-induced migration as a border security issue. Gregory White, Professor of Government at Smith College in Massachusetts, argues in his recent book Climate Change and Migration: Security and Borders in a Warming World that a security-minded response to the phenomenon is both inappropriate and [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Dec 28, 2011 •
I warm to any writer who identifies the solution to climate change in the simple terms employed by Patrick Bond in his recent book Politics of Climate Justice: Paralysis Above, Movement Below: leave fossil fuels in the soil, halt deforestation, transform our economies so that renewable energy, public transport and low-carbon systems replace those currently [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Nov 28, 2011 •
How better to journey to the climate conference at Durban than through the African countries along the way which are already grappling with climate change? That’s the route John Vidal, the Guardian’s environment editor, has been following over the past ten days and reporting on in a series of articles. He started in Egypt. The [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Aug 12, 2011 •
The horrifying pictures of famine in the Horn of Africa haunt us as human tragedy, and the more because they carry with them the question of whether this has something to do with climate change. Are we going to see more and more of this kind of suffering as climate change impacts begin to mount? [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Jun 22, 2011 •
I thought of Oxfam’s recent report on food justice while I was reviewing Christian Parenti’s book Tropic of Chaos. He wrote of how climate change impacts are compounding the existing economic and political problems of many poorer populations. This is also very evident in Oxfam’s report on the alarming new surge in hunger as higher [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Jun 20, 2011 •
The title piqued my curiosity: Tropic of Chaos: Climate Change and the New Geography of Violence. Christian Parenti’s book is about what he calls “the catastrophic convergenceâ€, when the dislocations of climate change collide with already-existing crises of poverty and violence. He points to evidence, often in tropical countries, that political, economic and environmental disasters [...] … Read More
Gareth Renowden • Jun 16, 2011 •
A busy news week sees Glenn and Gareth discussing volcanoes in Chile and Africa, busy pumping ash into the atmosphere and disrupting flights in South America, Australia, New Zealand and the Middle East, an extreme spring in the USA, drought in Europe and a warm autumn in NZ, a new UN report on black carbon [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • May 23, 2011 •
Interconnectedness is a major theme of Changing Planet, Changing Health: How the Climate Crisis Threatens our Health and What We Can Do about It. Jeffrey Sachs describes the book in his preface as “a scientific detective story of the first order, told with brilliance and relish by one of the world’s great ecological detectivesâ€. The [...] … Read More