Page 98 - Urbanization News Today

The Climate and Ocean Risk Vulnerability Index: Measuring Coastal City Resilience to Inform Action As the climate crisis continues to worsen, climate finance remains a fraction of what is needed. The Climate Policy Initiative estimates that $579 billion was spent on average on climate finance in 2017/18. This includes domestic and international investment from both the public and private sectors towards climate mitigation and adaptation actions. Of this amount, only $30 billion—five percent�...

The Third Wave of Environmental Peacebuilding For most of 2020, news, politics, policy, and research in the United States and abroad were dominated by the challenges posed by COVID-19, a rapidly unfolding global pandemic unprecedented in scale and cost. For much of the world, however, COVID-19 in fact competed with many other highly destructive events including a cascade of environmental disasters. Swarms of locusts pushed much of the Horn of Africa into or close to famine; 30 severe storms inc...

SIXTH TONE SIXTH TONE Why a Silk Road Travelogue Is Taking China by Storm Despite China’s massive investment in Central Asia, the region remains an enigma to most ordinary Chinese. But a hit new book aims to change that. Like many in China, Liu Zichao used to consider Central Asia a strange and mysterious land.  The former journalist recalls being on an assignment in the western Chinese city of Khorgos in 2010 and a local truck driver telling him that on the other side of the snow-capped mou...

Aiming for A World Where Everything Is Circular: Q&A with Indonesia Plastic Bag Diet Cofounder Tiza Mafira “What bothers me is that people tend to look at these rivers and these polluted beaches and think ‘somebody needs to clean it up’—that’s just completely wrong. Because not only is it almost impossible and inefficient, but it’s really not the solution. The solution is prevention,” says Tiza Mafira in the film, Story of Plastic, as she takes a boat trip down the polluted Ci Liw...

In Africa, for example, the first post-independence wave came with some governments deciding to move their capital cities.

Climate Change Front and Center in U.S. and Brazil Relations in Biden-Bolsonaro Era As the warm relationship between U.S. President Donald Trump and Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro comes to an end with the former’s electoral defeat in November 2020, the next two years (Bolsonaro is up for reelection in 2022) could prove to be strenuous for the bilateral relations of the two largest economies in the Western Hemisphere. President-elect Biden has signaled that combatting climate change will be a...

What Does a Biden-Harris White House Mean for Women and Girls? Everything. The significance of the Biden-Harris administration for the world’s women and girls cannot be overstated. The current status of women and girls is grim. The COVID-19 pandemic and four years of dangerous policies designed to strip women and girls of their reproductive and economic autonomy and punish them—first for their biology, and second for their gender—have slowed and even reversed decades of progress toward ge...

Putting a Lid on Fish Boxes and Other Foamed Polystyrene Marine Debris Where the murky brown waters of the Pearl River meet the opaque green South China Sea, a trail of floating plastic debris is gathered by the currents as they flow past Macao, Shenzhen, and Hong Kong. I first noticed this floating litter while standing on the deck of a research vessel in 2017, scanning the waves off the western coast of Lantau island for signs of Indo-Pacific humpback dolphins as part of a monitoring program ...

New U.S. Global Fragility Strategy Recognizes Environmental Issues as Key to Stability A new Global Fragility Strategy, released late last year by the U.S. Department of State, signals a growing awareness of the role that environmental issues play in fragility, conflict, and peace. According to the State Department’s Office of Foreign Assistance, in the last five years alone, “the U.S. government has spent $30 billion in 15 of the most fragile countries in the world.” These “large-scale...

 E-Mail IMAGE: The only records of the newly-identified lichen Cora timucua are 32 specimens in museum collections collected in Florida between 1885 and 1985. Up to 90% of its native pine scrub... view more  Credit: Robert Lücking GAINESVILLE, Fla. --- Scientists have found a new species of fleshy verdigris lichen, thanks to DNA analysis of museum specimens. Misidentified by its original collectors, the lichen is only known from 32 specimens collected in North and Central Florida scr...