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Opportunity Costs: Evidence Suggests Variability, Not Scarcity, Primary Driver of Water Conflict
›Nearly 1 billion people lack reliable access to clean drinking water today. A report by the Water Resources Group projects that by 2030 annual global freshwater needs will reach 6.9 trillion cubic meters – 64 percent more than the existing accessible, reliable, and sustainable supply. This forecast, while alarming, likely understates the magnitude of tomorrow’s water challenge, as it does not account for the impacts of climate change.
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Accelerating a Cycle of Violence: Tallying the Damage to Gaza’s Youth
›August 25, 2014 // By Sarah MeyerhoffAmid stop-and-start ceasefires, the tally of death and destruction from the recent conflict in the Gaza Strip has begun. Whatever the final losses incurred – casualties and damage are considerable with estimates varying significantly depending on the source – Gaza’s youngest residents are likely to be most profoundly affected.
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What Can Iraq’s Fight Over the Mosul Dam Tell Us About Water Security?
›The fight for control over “the most dangerous dam in the world” is raging.
Since its capture by Islamic State (IS) militants on August 7 and subsequent attempts by Iraqi government and Kurdish forces to take it back, Iraq’s Mosul Dam has been one of the central components of the government’s surprising and rapid collapse in the country’s northern and western provinces. In fact, one might see the capture of the Mosul Dam as the moment IS ascended from a dangerous insurgent group to an existential threat to Iraq as a state.
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Somali Refugees Show How Conflict, Gender, Environmental Scarcity Become Entwined
›Under international law, someone who flees their country because of conflict or persecution is a refugee, but someone who flees because of inability to meet their basic household needs is not. In the case of Somalia, it is increasingly difficult to make any meaningful distinction between the two.
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Ian Kraucunas on Bridging the Science-Politics Divide for Climate Change
›“Climate change is not just a far-away thing that affects far-away people,” says Ian Kraucunas, deputy director of atmospheric sciences and global change at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in this week’s podcast. “It affects things people here in the U.S. care about – and, in fact, that includes national security.”
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Alissa J. Rubin and Tim Arango, The New York Times
Rebels Capture Iraq’s Largest Dam
›August 8, 2014 // By Wilson Center StaffSunni militants captured the Mosul dam, the largest in Iraq, on Thursday as their advances in the country’s north created an onslaught of refugees and set off fearful rumors in Erbil, the Kurdish regional capital.
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Family Planning and Environmental Sustainability Assessment Aims to Shed Light on Pop-Environment Link
›As global environmental change accelerates, understanding how population dynamics affect the environment is more important than ever. It seems obvious that human-caused climate change has at least something to do with the quadrupling of world population over the last 100 years.
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Don’t Forget About Governance: The Risk of Tunnel Vision in Chasing Resilience for Asia’s Cities
›Asia is going through an unprecedented wave of urbanization. Secondary and tertiary cities are seeing the most rapid changes in land-use and ownership, social structures, and values as peri-urban and agricultural land become part of metropolitan cityscapes. All the while, climate change is making many of these fast-growing cities more vulnerable to disasters.
Showing posts from category water.