14 Feb 2012 - On Friday 26 Jan 2012, adelphi’s exhibition on "Environment, Conflict and Cooperation" (ECC) has been launched at the World Social Forum with a focus on the civil societal preparation of the upcoming UN environmental conference “Rio+20”. The exhibition was jointly conceptualized by adelphi and the Brazilian environmental organization “Vitae Civilis”. It addresses the question, how climate change, environmental degradation and resource scarcity can be drivers of social and political conflict.
Over the past months, adelphi has developed a regional component for the exhibition together with the Brazilian environmental NGO “Vitae Civilis”. For the presentation in Brazil, the complete exhibition has also been translated into Portuguese. The regional component discusses the interlinkages between water scarcity, food and energy security. Moreover, it addresses the question how climate change could aggravate the existing problems or create new environmental challenges and what impact this will have on the living conditions of the Brazilian population.
The exhibition has been developed at the initiative of the German Federal Foreign Office and will be shown in other Brazilian cities in the course of this year. In parallel, similar exhibitions with regional components have been launched in China, South Africa and India.
For more information on the exhibition on "Environment, Conflict and Cooperation", please visit:
http://www.ecc-exhibition.org/en/project.htm
French environment minister Nicolas Hulot has resigned live on national radio in a surprise move that will come as a blow to president Emmanuel Macron’s green credentials. Nicolas Hulot had not made the French president aware of his decision to quit, he told radio presenters, adding his time in office had been an ‘accumulation of disappointments’.
Liberia’s largest palm oil producer, Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL) pulls out of the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) – how can rural communities cope with the impacts? The forests near GVL’s Liberian plantations are not only sacred sites of the region's people but also heavily populated with chimpanzees, leopards, pygmy hippopotamus and forest elephants which are significant not only to the local ecosystem but globally.
Mine closures have caused social and political turmoil in many regions, for example in South Africa. But there are ways of planning and managing the phase-out so that when the inevitable happens, people are better prepared. A new study looks at opportunities beyond mining and finds that infrastructure that supports mining can also be put to new use.
Population pressure, a lack of economic opportunities, environmental degradation, and new forms of travel are contributing to human displacement and unsafe migration on an unprecedented scale. And as millions more people see climate change erode their livelihoods, the problem will get worse in the absence of visionary global leadership.