COVID-19 may have forced the 50th anniversary of Earth Day to be commemorated online last year, yet millions of people participated in calls to action. As we begin to look beyond the pandemic, however, it's vital to remember that we cannot go back to business-as-usual as far as our planet is concerned.
Last week the World Cocoa Foundation, a membership organization of more than 100 cocoa companies, held its annual partnership meeting in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the meeting is for governments, cocoa companies and farmers to identify and tackle the sector’s largest sustainability challenges. A 90-minute session was devoted to the topic of land tenure. The prominence of the session, as well as the seniority of the presenters – the Head of Sustainable Sourcing for Hershey’s and the Deputy Director General of Cote d’Ivoire’s Land Agency among them – is a powerful signaling effect.
NASA’s Applied Remote Sensing Training Program (ARSET) has opened a new open, online webinar series: Earth Observations for Humanitarian Applications. Refugees, internally displaced people (IDPs), and other displaced populations are made more vulnerable to climate change impacts due to their socio-political marginalization. This three-part, intermediate training presents concrete strategies for mapping localized climate conditions with risks faced by refugee and IDP communities around the world.
The training will focus on flood risk assessments and specific challenges for assessing flood risk in refugee and IDP camps; gauging long-term heat stress in refugee camps and the challenges with decision making surrounding heat risk; and monitoring drought effects on agricultural landscapes in refugee settings using Earth observations (EO) to explore the correlations between anomalies in crop productivity and weather-based factors
Our planet faces multiple and complex challenges in the twenty-first century. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development commits the international community to act together to overcome them and transform our world for present and future generations.
Rubber prices in northern Laos have fallen significantly over the last few years, eroding much of the initial enthusiasm of both farmers and government officials about rubber providing a way out of poverty for poor upland farmers. This thematic study examines responses to this price drop by Lao rubber growers and state institutions in northern Laos. It also examines the reasons that prices are what they are, given that price volatility was identified as a risk during the mid-2000s, and that in at least some cases, steps were taken to protect contract farmers from falling prices.
