International Conservation & Development

The World Health Organization (WHO) recently released its latest global urban air pollution database, including information for nearly 3,000 cities—a doubling from the 2014 database, which itself had data from 500 more cities than the previous (2011) iteration. These increases in coverage in air pollution measurement and reporting is encouraging, but the WHO numbers reveal that we still have a ways to go to construct a comprehensive and accurate picture of global air quality.

Fellow Heather Coleman of Oxfam America writes we need to chart a more coherent climate finance policy agenda and determine how progress on climate will be measured.

Switzer Fellow and Colorado State University Professor Maria Fernández-Giménez has received the Order of the Polar Star from the government of Mongolia, the highest civilian honor the country presents to foreign nationals. Fernández-Giménez was selected due to her long-standing commitment to researching Mongolia’s extensive rangelands and how natural and human communities are adapting to ecological and economic change.

The Global Land Project third Open Science Meeting (GLP 3rd OSM 2016)will be held from 24 - 27th October 2016 in Beijing, the capital of China. The upcoming GLP 3rd OSM 2016will be organized by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences under the coordination of Scientific Steering Committee and International Project Office of GLP.

Climate change-related food scarcity can lead to 500,000 deaths around the world by 2050, a new study has found. The research was the first to come up with an estimated number of deaths, based on changes in diet composition due to global warming.

Eco-certification schemes are many and varied, but just how effective are they? Now one of the first rigorous evaluations finds that certification schemes in Chile, along with a voluntary agreement between timber companies and NGOs, have reduced deforestation by 14%.

For thousands of years, the marshes at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern day Iraq were an oasis of green in a dry landscape, hosting a wealth of wildlife. The culture of the Marsh Arab, or Ma'dan, people who live there is tightly interwoven with the ecosystem of the marshes.

Fellow H. Bruce Rinker provides some individual and community actions to reduce the pernicious global problem of marine plastics pollution.