2020 has been a year of nature-based solutions.
So what awaits us in 2021?
NbS must empower the indigenous and local people and engage them in their design and implementation, and must not be enforced from outside. Photo:Philip Gain
In 2020, Nature-based Solutions, or NbS, has emerged as a much-talked-about environmental concept in Bangladesh. While the Covid-19 pandemic has put the whole world in turmoil, we do have other challenges to tackle climate emergency, disaster risks, food and water insecurities, extreme poverty, and unprecedented biodiversity loss. In simple terms, NbS are the actions we take with the help of nature to overcome these societal challenges.
Environmental News For The Week Ending 20December 2019
This is a collection of interesting news articles about the environment and related topics published last week. This is usually a Tuesday evening regular post at
GEI (but can be posted at other times).
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Note: Because of the high volume of news regarding the coronavirus outbreak, that news has been published separately:
Some of the COVID-19 graphics presented in the above articles have been updated below.
Also, mentioned in two articles near the end of the disease collection is that there is a new strain of the virus circulating in southeast England that is 70% more infectious than the common strain. Since these news collections were assembled, England has locked down London and several European countries have restricted travelers from the country. I expect that we ll have more news on that in this coming week.
GlacierHub by Lily Roberts and Nidup Gyeltshen |December 23, 2020
At the Thimphu Ambition Summit, held on December 9, government leaders delivered clear ambition statements that showcased their individual government’s leadership on climate action, throwing their weight behind holding the world to the 1.5C warming target set out in the Paris Agreement.
The high level virtual event was organized by Bhutan to build political momentum on climate action and to discuss critical issues faced by least developed countries (LDCs), such as climate finance and green economic recovery. The summit was held in Thimphu, the nation’s capital.
The 2015 Paris Agreement required nations to submit new revisions of their nationally determined contributions (NDCs) efforts by each country to reduce national emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change by 2020 to replace the original ones which were first outlined in 2015. However, the COVID-19 pandemic made it impossible t
2Famine Early Warning Systems Network, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
3Ethiopian Environment and Forest Research Institute (EEFRI), Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
Long-term urban land use land cover change (LULCC) dynamics and climate change trends in Southwest Ethiopia s four urban centers were examined for 60 years. Remote sensing, aerial photos, and Landsat, temperature, and rainfall data were analyzed from a climate change perspective over the Jimma, Bedelle, Bonga, and Sokorru urban centers of southwest Ethiopia from 1953 to 2018. Based on geospatial analysis and maximum likelihood supervised image classification techniques to classify LULCC categories, the Mann-Kendall test was applied to perform trend analyses on temperature and rainfall. The LULCC analysis revealed that built-up areas over the urban centers had shown an increasing trend, with the highest increment by 2,360 hectares over Jimma, while vegetation, wetland, and cropland declined due to conversion of plain lands to built-up areas
Clearing Niger Deltaâs Augean Stable
By Jerome-Mario Utomi     Listen to article
To buttress the imperatives of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practice to the nation, Barrister Babatunde Raji Fashola,(SAN), Former Governor of Lagos State and now the Minister for Housing and Works while commissioning the Ajose Adeogun Street, a road executed by Zenith Bank limited, in September, 2008, remarked as follows:
“We recognize that the engine of growth and development for any developing nation today lies in the ability to strategically cultivate and harness private as well as public sector effort, thereby opening up vistas of opportunities for the public-private partnerships that will contribute not only to the millennium development goals but also the nation’s overall development.