Tiempo Climate Newswatch

Tracking the fast start financial pledges to support poorer nations respond to climate change made under the Copenhagen Accord is proving difficult, concludes the latest assessment by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in the United States. For example, what climate aid is covered by the 2011 United States budget is not clear: "We haven't been able to make sense of the numbers," commented analyst Clifford Polycarp.

While pledges of nearly US$28 billion have been announced to meet the US$30 billion Copenhagen commitment, the information available on the funding from donors is neither complete nor consistent. Whether or not finance is "new and additional," in the words of the Accord, is a critical concern. Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, for example, have all included existing commitments from 2008 in their post-Copenhagen pledges. To build trust, WRI recommends that developed countries improve their fast-start finance reporting by, for example, including detailed and transparent information on scale, method for determining that the money is new and additional, channelling institutions, objective, geographic distribution, status of the pledge and type of financial instrument.

Global sea level could rise by up to a metre during the present century, according to a new assessment by the Australian Climate Commission. The projection is higher than the 2007 estimate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which, it was acknowledged, was based on incomplete information. "We're five years down the track now, we know more about how those big ice sheets are behaving," said report author Will Stefen of the Australian National University, Canberra.

At the lower end of the range of projections, a rise of half a metre, the report warns that significant impacts could still occur as, for example, sea-level rise increases the risk of inundation in the coastal cities of Sydney and Melbourne. "This is the decade we have to act," concluded Climate Commission chair Tim Flannery. "In Australia we are seeing the impacts more clearly, we've seen the sea level rise that was predicted, we've seen the decline in rainfall continue particularly in the southwest of Western Australia, we've seen impacts on the Great Barrier Reef and so forth," he said.

Climate change is increasing the risk of allergies, according to research from the United States Department of Agriculture. The ragweed season has been extended by more than two weeks in areas of the northern United States and by almost a month in parts of Canada. Pollen from ragweed, used in the study as an allergy marker, can cause hay-fever and asthma flare-ups.

"This is not something that's hypothesized, this is not something that's modelled, this is not something that may or may not occur depending on the math that you do," commented author Lewis Ziska. "This is something that we're actually seeing on the ground in recent years." Ragweed blooms when the days start getting shorter and stops flowering as the first frost occurs. Global warming has delayed the first frost, extending the ragweed season.