As the slash-and-burn deforestation peat-burning agricultural practices of communities and companies in Southeast Asia continue, their peoples are suffering the worst air quality on record. Particularly hard hit are Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore. The fires mainly burn on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, with the smoke travelling across the narrow Strait of Malacca to Malaysia […]
I went to hear a most interesting talk the other night, centered on how we need to get much smarter, quick, about agriculture and what we eat. Jonathan Foley, the Director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, gave the broad outlines of our dilemma relative to climate change and […]
Bonn is home base for the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and it’s where meetings are taking place this week to advance international agreement. With Copenhagen in the rear-view mirror and Cancun up ahead, there is a lot of discussion going of technical matters, and lots of side meetings […]
My colleague, Elizabeth Balkan, writing the other day at the FPA blog on Energy, had a good update on the state of affairs on REDD, forestry and climate change: Seeing the Forest for the Trees: Shaping Financing to Prevent Deforestation. She looks particularly at the Waxman-Markey draft and how it embraces this critical aspect of […]