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NewSecurityBeat

The blog of the Wilson Center's Environmental Change and Security Program
Showing posts from category urbanization.
  • “Journalist on Water Beat Helped Cape Town Avoid ‘Day Zero’”

    ›
    Guest Contributor  //  April 18, 2018  //  By Wilson Center Staff
    Cape-Town

    This story by Daniella Cheslow comes courtesy of PRI’s The World and  originally appeared on pri.org.

    Saya Pierce-Jones got a cactus for Valentine’s Day and she keeps a bottle of treated wastewater on her desk. These are the souvenirs Pierce-Jones has kept as the water reporter for Cape Town’s Smile 90.4 FM over the past year.

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  • Ten Years, Nine Floods: Local-Level Climate Adaptation in China

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    China Environment Forum  //  March 29, 2018  //  By Julia Teebken
    picture 1 huang zezhen

    The Lanjiang river in Eastern Zhejiang, China, reached its peak water level of 100 feet the night of June 25, 2017. Lanxi residents remember this day as “6.25,” marking the worst flood since 1955. Elsewhere in China that month, 7.3 million people were affected by floods, landslides, and heavy rains in northwestern Sichuan Province alone. Northern Guangxi suffered direct economic losses of 2.9 billion RMB (US$460 million). In the autonomous regions, 92,000 people were relocated. Flash floods caused the deaths of 10 people and forced 76,800 people to evacuate from Shanxi Province.

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  • China’s Green Bonds Finance Climate Resilience

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    China Environment Forum  //  March 22, 2018  //  By Lily Dai & John Matthews
    green bonds image

    In 2014, we met with some of the technical leads of a major Chinese river basin authority in Beijing and asked them whether they were more worried about pollution or climate change impacts. Both, the engineers replied. Pollution affects us every day, they said, but changes in the climate erode our ability to supply drinking and irrigation water, manage floods, and generate electricity.

    China must address its environmental and climate change challenges, such as reducing water pollution and building resilience to droughts, floods, and long-term climate shifts. But existing sources of finance have not met the growing demand for environmental projects.

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  • The Next “Day Zero”: Water Scarcity and Political Instability Beyond Cape Town

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    Guest Contributor  //  March 22, 2018  //  By Nazia Hussain
    Karachi-Water

    Cape Town is running dry. But thanks to its sophisticated water management efforts, the city may ride out the crisis. However, other cities that lack these capacities are less likely to survive Day Zero. Especially in developing countries, where urban water services are often provided by informal or illegal actors, running out of water could have dangerous ripple effects for peace and security.

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  • Urban Risk or Resilience? Opportunities for Improving Informal Settlements in Urban Africa

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    From the Wilson Center  //  March 13, 2018  //  By Saiyara Khan

    “Most risk in African cities is not catastrophic. It’s not even episodic, but it is every day,” said Mark Pelling, a professor at King’s College, London, at a recent event on urban risk and resilience in sub-Saharan Africa. With rates of rural-to-urban migration reaching record highs, more than half of the urban residents in sub-Saharan Africa live in informal settlements, where they lack basic infrastructure and access to critical resources. Integrated projects like Pelling’s Urban ARK seek to build more resilient communities in cities and informal settlements. “African cities are dynamic and are growing,” said Pelling—but so is the vulnerability of their residents to environmental change, natural disasters, and conflict.

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  • Managing Sludge Mountains: What Beijing Can Learn From Brazil

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    China Environment Forum  //  March 2, 2018  //  By Carl Hooks & David Bachrach

    This is the second article in a series of case studies of innovative wastewater treatment plants in Brooklyn and Brazil from China Environment Forum and Circle of Blue’s Choke Point China initiative, which since 2010 has been exploring challenges and solutions to water-energy-food confrontations in the world’s most populated country. Read the first article here.

    Just days before the 2016 Summer Olympics began in Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian city faced an unsavory problem: how to handle its overwhelming sewage. Nearly half of Rio’s municipal wastewater flowed untreated into Guanabara Bay, where the waters were so polluted by sludge that direct contact was deemed a health hazard to Olympic athletes.

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  • Hot Times: Waste-to-Energy Plants Burn Bright in China’s Cities

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    China Environment Forum  //  November 27, 2017  //  By Siyi Mi
    siyi waste image

    $1 billion sales in two minutes. More than 250,000 purchases every second. Singles’ Day, China’s annual retailing extravaganza, absolutely crushes Black Friday: E-commerce giant Alibaba raked in $17.8 billion in gross sales during last year’s event, more than double the combined total of $6.8 billion in sales during the United States’ 2016 holiday shopping kick-off. The shopping spree lasts only 24 hours, but its environmental impacts will extend for decades.

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  • From Disaster Risk Reduction to Sustainable Peace: Reducing Vulnerability and Preventing Conflict at the Local Level

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    Guest Contributor  //  November 21, 2017  //  By Florian Krampe & Roberta Scassa
    Nargis

    The summer of 2017 was a stark reminder that climate change exacerbates both the intensity and frequency of natural disasters—and that the most vulnerable people are most severely affected. A recent study shows that from 2004-2014, 58 percent of disaster deaths and 34 percent of people affected by disasters were in the most fragile countries, as measured by the Fragile States Index. Disasters in these countries receive considerably less media coverage than the recent hurricanes that hit the United States. This lack of attention also leads many policymakers to overlook a possible opportunity: By working together to reduce fragility and vulnerability, could we not only better prepare for disaster, but also help prevent conflict? We have the policy tools to take an integrated approach to climate, conflict, and disaster—but we need the political will to use them.

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