Cambiamento climatico

The weekly round-up on the climate crisis and data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. After more than four years of negotiations, repeated delays due to the COVID-19 pandemic and late-night talks, on December 18, nearly 200 countries - among them not the United States or the Vatican - they signed an agreement at COP15 on biological diversity, hosted by Canada and China, to halt biodiversity loss by 2030.The agreement, defined as one of a kind, appears to have been imposed by the Chinese president, ignoring the objections of some African states. The Democratic Republic of Congo's (DRC) negotiator appeared to block the final deal presented by China, telling the plenary that he could not support a document that did not create a new biodiversity fund, distinct from the existing UN Global Fund. Environment Facility (GEF).China, Brazil, Indonesia, India and Mexico are the largest beneficiaries of GEF funds, and some African states wanted the final agreement to include more...

“An unprecedented situation.”Thus a Quebec minister he described the hundreds of fires that fire crews have been trying to put out across Canada for weeks.A formula that we are hearing repeated a little too often lately to comment on the extreme events that are affecting the entire globe.According to Emergency Preparedness Minister Bill Blair, more than half of the 414 fires across the country are out of control, and the hottest and driest months of the year are yet to come. In Canada we are increasingly seeing two moments in which there are peaks in fires:in late summer and spring.“When the snow melts in the early spring and the warm, dry weather arrives very early, you have this window of vulnerability,” explained Paul Kovacs, executive director of the Institute for Catastrophic Loss Reduction at Western University.“Spring fires are much more frequent than they were 20 or 30 years ago.And if in the next few weeks we can have some peace of mind wi...

Of Francesco Panié* They account for a third of global emissions, but remain systematically excluded from international climate policies.Since this year, however, food systems and agriculture have finally made inroads in the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.At COP 27 in Sharm El-Sheikh there was a lot of talk about these issues, especially in the new dedicated pavilion, set up by FAO and managed together with the CGIAR network of research centers and the Rockefeller Foundation. Just the FAO he's pushing to be more involved in discussions on how to integrate the agriculture and food sector into national plans that should ground the goals included in the 2015 Paris Agreement.For now it has only succeeded to a small extent:this is demonstrated by the fact that there have been no advances on the part of the working group on agriculture born in 2017 at COP 23 in Bonn.His mandate was renewed for four years at the end of the Eg...

Lack of interventions to adapt the territory to extreme meteorological events, insufficient safety works with respect to hydrogeological instability, even increased land consumption.Following the severe flood in Emilia-Romagna, a heated debate arose on the interventions that could have avoided the flooding of tens of thousands of homes and the death of 15 people.Above all, we talked about lack of prevention, that is, what has not been done in recent years to make the population safe.And also of bad governance of the territory, or what has been done badly.Meanwhile, on Tuesday 23 May the Council of Ministers approved a law decree which allocates around two billion euros to deal with the emergency:the measure contains a series of indications for the population of the affected areas, including the suspension of the payment of taxes, contributions and energy utilities from 1 May to 31 August, the redundancy fund in derogation for all employees for up to 90 days, and an allowance lump...

The weekly round-up on the climate crisis and data on carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere. When gas prices soared uncontrollably every day on European markets last summer, bill prices skyrocketed and supply difficulties portended a cold winter, Europe it seemed one step away from catastrophe.  Because energy prices around the world are skyrocketing These were the tones of the main European leaders.German Economy Minister Robert Habeck warned of "catastrophic" industrial closures, disrupted supply chains and mass unemployment.The president of France, Emmanuel Macron, urged citizens to turn down the heat.While former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev predicted a harsh winter for Europe:“The cold will come soon.Europeans will freeze in their homes,” he said last June. And instead it went better than one could have imagined.Worst-case scenarios did not materialize.The European Union has so far managed to overcome the energy crisis caused by the Rus...