Volcano erupts on St. Vincent: What happens if you get caught in a natural disaster away from home? Korin Miller
St. Vincent s La Soufrière volcano has been erupting since late last week, and the situation continues to get worse. Officials say that a huge explosion rocked the volcano and eastern Caribbean island on Monday, spewing ash and hot gas into the air. It s destroying everything in its path, Erouscilla Joseph, director of the University of the West Indies Seismic Research Center, told the Associated Press. Anybody who would have not heeded the evacuation, they need to get out immediately.
The global average temperature that month was 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.53°F) above the 20th-century average.
Damage from an EF3 tornado that devastated portions of Calhoun County, Alabama, on March 25, 2021, killing five and injuring 10. Five separate U.S. severe weather outbreaks in March caused over $1 billion in insured damages, cumulatively. March also featured the first EF4 tornado of the year: a 170-mph twister that hit Georgia March 25-26. (Image credit: National Weather Service, Birmingham, Alabama)
March 2021 was the eighth-warmest March since global record-keeping began in 1880, 0.85 degrees Celsius (1.53°F) above the 20th-century average, NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, NCEI, reported April 13. NASA also rated March 2021 as the eighth warmest March on record.
April 10, 2021
Government and investors are quickly moving to quantify the risks posed by climate change and make that part of their financial decision-making. But many companies remain unsure how to measure the threat of climate change to their business, and whether or how to report those risks to investors and the public.
Financial regulators in the US are grappling with that question now. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) opened a 90-day public comment period in March that will inform the first update to federal climate risk disclosure guidelines in a decade. Shareholder groups and asset managers like BlackRock (CEO Larry Fink wrote in February that “climate risk is investment risk”) are pressuring boardrooms to improve corporate transparency around climate risks. Without better disclosure, corporate managers have little incentive to avoid plowing capital into assets and supply chains that could collapse after natural disasters and dump massive costs on insurers,
Scientific due diligence for humanitarian Disaster Risk Financing: A guide for data scientists and humanitarian practitioners
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NEW TOOL LAUNCHED FOR RESPONSIBLE USE OF SCIENTIFIC DATA WITHIN HUMANITARIAN PROJECTS
A global network of NGOs has today launched a new guide for scientists and humanitarians to encourage the responsible use of scientific data in humanitarian decision-making.
This guide has been developed by Start Network as a result of its work with the Drought Risk Finance Science Laboratory (DRiSL) and is being launched as part of its work to shift humanitarian funding from reactive to proactive, from late to early, using data as a key driver of proactive decisions.
April 7, 2021
By Sarah Fecht
In honor of Earth Day on April 22, the Earth Institute has a variety of great events and stories lined up for you throughout the entire month of April. Find out more here and here.
Sarah Giles, a PhD student at Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, makes geological observations in the outback of South Australia. Photo: David Lankford-Bravo
As we go about celebrating Earth Month and Earth Day, it’s worth reflecting on how far we’ve come since last year’s Earth Day. A year ago, we were a month into the pandemic and I remember foolishly pondering whether there might still be Earth Day events in person. Little did I know that we’d still be isolated after more than a year filled with fear, tragedy, loneliness, frustration, and boredom. At times, it has seemed like the pandemic was too big to solve and that it might never end.