The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may soon suggest a 2% drop in agricultural output per decade. Seen against further population growth and sharply rising demand for food, we are facing a creeping disaster. A climate-resilient agriculture is an adaptable agriculture, built on crop diversity: Plants from anywhere in the world may hold the answers to climate challenges, including the wild relatives of our domesticated crops that can survive under extreme conditions. Whether mitigating the causes of climate change or preparing for its impacts, the world’s crop diversity represents a heritage of human ingenuity that helps counter the man-made threat of our age.
Population movements following environmental stress can be a huge development challenge if we do not know where people are going and in what numbers. There are few methods for acurately and rapidly track population movements after disasters. Without knowledge of the locations of affected people, relief assistance is compromised. This research takes lessons from analysis of post-quake Haiti mobility patterns using mobile CDR (call data record), and applies them to Cyclone Mohasen, which swept across Bangladesh on the 20th May 2013. Using CDR from users of Grameenphone, the largest cellphone operator in Bangladesh, we estimate the magnitude and trends of population movements. Geographic positions of SIM cards were determined by the location of the mobile phone tower through which each SIM card connects when calling.
Most climate related hazards in Bangladesh are linked to water. The climate vulnerable poor—the poorest and most marginalized communities living in remote villages along Bangladesh’s coastal zone that are vulnerable to climate change impacts and who possess low adaptive capacity are most affected by lack of access to safe water sources. Many climate vulnerable poor households depend on small isolated wetlands (ponds) for daily drinking water needs and other domestic requirements, including cooking, bathing and washing. Similarly, the livelihoods of many of these households also depend on access to ponds due to activities of small-scale irrigation for rice farming, vegetable farming and home gardening. This is particularly true for those poorest and most marginalized communities living in Satkhira, one of the most vulnerable coastal districts in south-west Bangladesh.
The peace processes of both Northern Ireland (generally viewed as a relative success story in conflict management) and Sri Lanka (widely viewed as exemplary of the failure of liberal peace building) witnessed resurgence in the early 1990s, coinciding with the post-Cold War emphasis on liberal peace building. The 1990s and the 2000s were marked by a series of interactions between Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka at a multitude of levels, from policymaking, academic, peace activist to business community interaction.