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Looming over Viet Nam’s southeast Binh Thuan province, the Dai Phaong windfarm is a testament to international cooperation.
Christine Kagimu, a mother of six from a small town outside the Ugandan capital, Kampala, presses a button on her electric-powered induction cooker and quickly brings a pot of water to the boil.
For Meshach Alford, a farmer from the town of Saint Paul’s in the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, the realities of climate change are all too real.
“I have planted crops and there has been no water for weeks, for months,” he says. “Even when you put your hand 18 inches (45 centimetres) deep in the soil, it’s still dry.”
Prova Mridha still remembers Cyclone Sidr, which swept through Bangladesh in 2007 causing widespread devastation. The mother of one left behind her livestock and hid from the storm in a local school, which had been turned into a makeshift shelter.
“When I returned home, I found the livestock were killed or had been swept away,” she recalls.
When the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) launched the podcast Resilience in 2021, it was meant to be an antidote to the doom and gloom that surrounds the discussion on climate change.
At a somewhat fractious UN Climate Conference (COP29) dominated by finance, the final agreement in Baku, Azerbaijan saw developed countries pledge to “take the lead” in raising US$300 billion annually for developing countries by 2035.
Water is the lifeblood of our planet and freshwater ecosystems play a key role in sopping up planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions and making our societies resilient to climate disasters. But the delicate balance of water availability and the habitats that keep it clean and supply it are under mounting pressure from climate change and often receive short shrift during international climate talks.
Shelton Nyakundi, an 18-year-old student at the Menengai boarding school in Nakuru, Kenya, believes one simple thing could make the difference between the academic success and failure of many pupils: light.
World leaders will gather next week in Baku, Azerbaijan for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, known as COP29, where they are expected to discuss how to channel billions of dollars to developing countries grappling with the climate crisis.
For Ahumwire Justine, a banana farmer from Shuku, in Uganda’s southwest, a day last October brought home just how vulnerable her plantation was to extreme weather.
That day, a devastating rain and hailstorm destroyed 300 of her banana trees and killed two of her cows. The damage was so bad, she and her family considered leaving their two-hectare plot, which was not insured.
Azima Magonde Giston is walking through his cacao plantation, which sits on the fringes of a lush rainforest in the northern part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). He scans the trees for ripe cacao pods and, spotting one, uses a long bamboo pole with an axe-like tip to knock it down, leaving the surrounding foliage untouched.
For much of his life, cattle farmer Asherly William Hogo was consumed with finding water for his herd. Hogo, who is in his early sixties, still has vivid childhood memories of rising in the middle of the night, gathering his animals and setting out across Tanzania’s parched central rangelands in search of water.
For billions of people across the developing world, particularly children and women, mealtime starts by firing up a kerosene stove, lighting a charcoal grill or setting some logs ablaze.
Hassaan Mohamed, the Deputy Minister of Climate Change, Environment and Energy of Maldives, knows what runaway climate change would mean for his country.
And he is worried.
A combination of rising seas and water shortages poses what has been called an existential threat to the Indian Ocean archipelago, the lowest-lying country on Earth.
A couple of years ago, in the turquoise waters off the coastal village of Mahébourg in Mauritius, a Japanese oil tanker ran aground.
The world is warming at a record pace, with unseasonable heat baking nearly every continent on Earth.
So far, it has been a successful year in the courts for climate change activists.
In June 2020, Tropical Storm Amanda descended on El Salvador’s capital, San Salvador. Gale-force winds and torrential rains triggered more than 150 landslides and 20 major floods, tearing apart roads, electrical lines and almost 30,000 homes.
It is restoration day in a village high in the Andes and the mood is festive.
After limbering up with a traditional dance, dozens of volunteers each grab an armful of bushy green saplings. Then they clamber onto pickup trucks, motorbikes and horses and stream up a treeless mountainside to plant them.
Set amid the rapidly growing city of Kingston, Jamaica’s capital, is a small commercial garden run by the community group the Abilities Foundation. Neat rows of fruits and vegetables line the plot, which helps fund vocational training for students with special needs.
Alongside the produce is a tank that harvests rainwater and a network of tubes that disperses it into the garden. That system is crucial.
Two of the largest reservoirs in America, which provide water and electricity to millions, are in danger of reaching ‘dead pool status,’ a result of the climate crisis and overconsumption of water, experts say.
It was a late evening in April 2018 when Philbert Ntaciyica, exhausted from the non-stop heavy rain battering his roof, wondered if his farm would survive this latest storm.
When the 12-hour downpour finally eased in Nzove, a village perched on a hillside in north-eastern Burundi, Ntaciyica emerged from his home to find no crops or topsoil. All had been washed downhill by the deluge, and along with them, his livelihood.
Grand Cape Mount County in Western Liberia is home to Lake Piso. This large lake accommodates a sizable mangrove forest that is essential to the lake’s ecosystem and village areas as it provide protection against erosion and absorbs harmful storm surges. One of the biggest advantages of the mangrove forest is its ability to sequester large amounts of carbon from the atmosphere and store it underwater in the soil for the next millennia. This capability is essential in the fight against climate change and will become increasingly vital in the years to come.
EPIC-Africa’s growing program partnership with Uganda, co-funded by UN-Habitat and Mbale City, is an exemplary model of the power of collaboration between communities, local governments, and universities that EPIC-N strives to consistently represent. Starting in 1997 when the University of Makerere recognized the pressing need to address development challenges faced by slum dwellers in Mbale city, students became involved in various activities to fill the gaps that a shortage of professional city planners was causing.
In the week since the UN Climate Change Conference (COP28) came to an end, a cyclone slammed into Australia, torrential rains pelted the United States of America and a punishing drought continued to decimate crops in Zimbabwe.
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The development of the GAN involved a broad UNEP-facilitated consultative process, including an international consultation meeting and four regional consultations.