World

We are proud to announce the video contest "Water, Climate and.....Action!"

Water, Climate and…..Action!  Enter your short film in the contest!

The first week of August 2010 brought extreme flooding and landslides to many parts of Asia. By August 11, floods in the Indus River basin had become Pakistan’s worst natural disaster to date, leaving more than 1,600 people dead and disrupting the lives of about 14 million people, reported Reuters. Across the border in northeast India, flash floods killed 185 with 400 still missing, reported BBC News. Floods in North Korea and northeast China buried farmland and destroyed homes, factories, railroads, and bridges. And in northwest China, rain triggered a massive landslide that left 702 dead with 1,042 missing, reported China’s state news agency, Xinhua. All of these disasters occurred as a result of unusually heavy monsoon rains, as depicted in the above image.

Content & Image Courtesy: Whitley Fund for Nature

The Whitley Fund for Nature (WFN) is a UK registered charity offering "Whitley Awards" to outstanding nature conservation leaders around the world. Whitley Awards are both an international profile prize and a form of project grant (currently £30,000 over one year, with a top prize of £60,000 over two years). Whitley Awards were developed to recognize effective leaders and communicators from around the world who are applying sustained, effective efforts to conserve the natural
environment. Conservation needs success stories and champions, and the Whitley Award winner network is a celebration of success taking place all over the world. WFN supports conservationists who already have proven results behind them and are ready to scale up their success and activities.

This past weekend was the only international film festival on water, worldwide—Voices from the Water, held in Bangalore in several different locations. Working for a water NGO, I made my schedule free to catch up on some of these movies, to understand what the current issues are and what the film circle is capturing through their lens that we don’t necessarily see from our biased eyes.

Content Courtesy: Takagi Fund for Citizen Science

The Takagi Fund for Citizen Science (the Takagi Fund, Tokyo, Japan) will invite grant applications for the year 2011 from groups and individuals in Asia pursuing "Citizen Science". The deadline for submission of applications for this round is 30 September, 2010.

The paper by the Challenge Program on Water and Food deals with the impact of climate change on water resources & glacier melt and potential adaptations in Indian agriculture. Global climatic changes will have major effects on precipitation, water availability, glacier/ice melt, and sea level rise. Climate-induced changes in hydrological conditions will affect the magnitude, frequency, and damage costs of future extreme events.