Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Christiana Figueres has been appointed executive secretary of the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, succeeding Yvo de Boer. She has been a member of the Costa Rican negotiating team since 1995 and is founder of the Center for Sustainable Development in the Americas.

"I have known Christiana Figueres for many years," said de Boer, "and can testify to her deep commitment and work to establish the robust and effective international climate regime... She is familiar with the different interests a successful outcome of negotiations must address and can help stakeholders to find common ground. I wish her every success." United Nations secretary general Ban Ki-moon expressed his gratitude to de Boer for his "dedicated services and tireless efforts on behalf of the climate change agenda." Small island states had supported the appointment of Figueres, a candidate from a smaller developing country, opposing the contender from South Africa, a member of the BASIC group of larger developing nations.

Making use of temperature recordings gathered by flotation devices sampling the upper 700m of the ocean, an international team of researchers has confirmed that the top ocean layer has warmed significantly over the period 1993 to 2008. Earlier recordings from expendable bathythermographs are not as accurate as more recent data from Argo floats, said Gregory Johnson from the Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory (PMEL) in the United States. "However, our analysis of these data gives us confidence that, on average, the ocean has warmed over the past decade and a half, signaling a climate imbalance."

The research team was led by John Lyman of PMEL and the Joint Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. "Ocean heat content is a very good indicator for how the entire planet is warming," Lyman observed. The seas act as a huge planetary heat sink with 80 to 90 per cent of the heat trapped by greenhouse gases in the ocean, he explained. The additional energy stored in the ocean's surface layer over the study period would be sufficient to power nearly five hundred 100-watt light bulbs for each of the 6.7 billion people on the planet.

A United Nations report has called for a new "green revolution" led by Africa's small farmers in order to reduce extreme poverty and hunger. Ineffective farming techniques and wasteful post-harvest practices, according to the 2010 Technology and Innovation Report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), have left sub-Saharan Africa the region most likely to miss the Millennium Development Goals on poverty and hunger. The new green revolution for Africa should be built on technology and innovation and aimed at the needs and capabilities of the millions of smallholder farmers as well as at coping with varying climate conditions.

Africa's capacity to provide food has declined by one-fifth over the past 40 years, UNCTAD secretary-general Supachai Panitchpakdi observed as the report was launched. "There has been a severe deterioration in the way that agriculture should have been addressed, supported by the national governments, supported by the international community and also supported by the kind of technology and innovation methodology that could really prove to be of great help as it has done in Asia," he said. Africa was once a net food exporter, the report notes, but is now dependent on imports for food due to a sustained lack of public investment and the exclusion of the private sector from agriculture.