Editor’s Note: This article is part of an ongoing series on food security around the world. The impacts of a drastically warming climate are already being felt in Mongolia, where air temperatures have risen at three times the global rate since the 1940s. Average precipitation is declining and extreme weather disasters are more frequent, posing challenges for the country’s agriculture sector, which accounts for one-tenth of GDP and employs one-third of the labor force. In an interview with WPR, Tungalag Ulambayar, the research director of Saruul Khuduu Environmental Research & Consulting in Ulaanbaatar, discusses the threat that climate change poses [...]
Editor’s Note: Every Friday, WPR Senior Editor Robbie Corey-Boulet curates the top news and analysis from and about the African continent. The scene did not inspire much confidence in the credibility of upcoming elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo. On Thursday morning, residents of the Central African country’s capital, Kinshasa, awoke to smoke billowing out of a warehouse where ballot boxes and voting machines were being stored. The election commission reported that at least 8,000 voting machines had been destroyed, but said the elections, scheduled for Dec. 23, would go ahead as planned. The immediate reaction to the fire, [...]
It’s easy to be discouraged these days by the state of progress on addressing climate change. This week’s United Nations climate change conference in Poland risks concluding without having made any meaningful progress, in part due to obstruction from the U.S. delegation. The failure would come at a bad time. In late November, the U.S. federal government released the fourth national climate assessment, a series of reports mandated by a 1990 statute called the Global Change Research Act. These blockbuster assessments, produced roughly every four years, comprise hundreds of pages of detailed analysis of climate change’s impact on various ecosystems, [...]
