Environment Archive

Editor’s note: This is a response to WPR’s Global Insider interview with Alan D. Hemmings, “Marine Reserve Failure Undermines Antarctic Treaty States’ Credibility.” Characterizing the Commission for the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources (CCAMLR) as a “failure” due to its inability to agree on marine reserves in the Antarctic is unnecessarily alarmist and a misrepresentation of the enduring robustness of this group of decision-makers. While there is a need for Antarctic marine protections, the existing process is working. The CCAMLR’s members are bound by obligations contained within the international Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources and […]

A meeting in Hobart, Australia, of countries charged with protecting marine life in the waters around Antarctica closed last week without a vote on a joint proposal by New Zealand and the United States to create a marine protected area in the Ross Sea.* In an email interview, Alan D. Hemmings, an environmental consultant and specialist on Antarctic governance and environmental management, discussed the bid to protect the Ross Sea. WPR: What is at stake in the discussion over creating a protected area in the Ross Sea? Alan D. Hemmings: At stake is, critically, the Ross Sea ecosystem — what […]

This summer’s drought in the U.S. has triggered the third major food price spike in the past five years, leaving the world’s poor to wonder if global leaders learned anything from the first two. To judge by their actions so far, they haven’t. The food crisis of the past five years has indeed energized food and agricultural policymakers, bringing long-overdue attention to chronic problems, from underinvestment in smallholder agriculture to overreliance on high-input industrial production. It has seen welcome new institutions brought into being and existing ones revitalized, stimulating new investment in agricultural research and serving as a reminder that […]

More than half of the world’s total population, currently roughly 7 billion, now lives in cities. As the world’s population increases to a projected 9 billion by 2050, so too will the trend toward greater urbanization. Urban growth is most rapid in the developing world, where cities grow by an average of 5 million residents every month. By 2050, urban dwellers will likely account for 67 percent of total population in the developing world and 86 percent in the developed world. Many of the world’s cities, and some of its biggest, may be particularly vulnerable to climate change and the […]