Tiempo Climate Newswatch

"The world was at a crossroads in Cancún and took a step forward towards a climate-safe world," Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said, in the run-up to the Bangkok Climate Change Conference. "Now governments must move purposefully down the path they have set," she continued. A clear work plan for 2011 is needed, Figueres said, including work on institutions for climate funding, technology cooperation and adaptation.

The Bangkok talks are likely to focus on technical issues. "My sense is they will agree a work plan and that they will move ahead on technical issues that don't get political," commented Mark Kenber of The Climate Group, a global coalition. "And I think there's enough agreement around for countries to move ahead with the technical issues. But when it gets political, when it gets to Kyoto 2 and what the eventual legal agreement might look like, then there are still a lot of divisions." The climate treaty secretariat is designing a prototype registry that will match developing country actions to developed country support and will be presented at the next negotiating meeting in Bonn in June.

In a new assessment, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has called for action now to prepare for "potentially catastrophic" impacts on food production as slow-onset changes in climate develop. "Coping with long-term changes after the fact doesn't make much sense," warns Alexander Müller of the FAO's Natural Resources Department. "We must already today support agriculture in the developing world to become more resilient," he continued.

The report from the FAO considers the implications of the Cancún Agreements for food security. It recommends that food security be used as an indicator of vulnerability to climate change and that greater space should be given to the risks associated with slow-onset impacts of climate change. Staple food varieties need to be developed that are better adapted to expected climatic conditions. Genetic material stored in gene banks should be screened with regard to future conditions and additional genetic resources must be collected given the risk that they may disappear. It is suggested that governments consider food security as a socio-economic safeguard when developing climate mitigation measures, capturing synergies and managing trade-offs between competing land uses. For example, "the success of REDD+ could well depend on how successfully its interface with agriculture is managed," the report observes. There is a need, Müller says, to "move beyond our usual tendency to take a short-term perspective and instead invest in the long-term."

"By 2050, big cities that will not have enough water available nearby include Beijing, New Delhi, Mexico City, Lagos and Tehran," warns Robert McDonald from The Nature Conservancy in the United States. "China and India will be particularly hard hit unless significant new efforts are taken by their cities."

McDonald's conclusions are based on a study of per-capita water availability for major cities in the developing world as climate changes. McDonald and his co-authors used a hydrological model, demographic projections and climate change scenarios to estimate future water availability both in and around the urban areas. "Cities go as far away as they need to to get enough water," explained McDonald. "That's why we calculated the amount of water at various distances from cities, to figure out how far away cities might need to go to get water. That correlates with how much infrastructure cities need to build, or how much money they need to spend."