Dr Orville Grey (left), senior technical officer with responsibility for Adaptation in the Climate Change Division, listens intently to Clifford Mahlung (right), one of Jamaica’s senior negotiators for the upcoming United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COPI21) in Paris, and Jeffrey Spooner, head of the Meteorological Service of Jamaica during a workshop yesterday.

Agriculture officials say a variety of the dasheen plant has proven to be resistance to drought and soil with high salinity and could provide be beneficial to the Caribbean where the agricultural sector depends on seasonal rainfall.

“This crop is already tested in the Caribbean, it was planted in Trinidad and the feedback is very positive,” said Samson Vilvil Fare, the Associate Programme Coordinator, ARD Policy of the Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation.

He told a weeklong Caribbean Pacific Agri-food forum here that the new variety of the dasheen had been developed in the Pacific as part of a project aimed at developing climate change resistance crops and plants that may soon be available to Caribbean farmers through the Caribbean Agriculture Research and Development Institute (CARDI).

Fare explained that the crop was developed by the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees in the…

The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) has approved a technical assistance grant to Belize to help make the country’s water sector less vulnerable to climate change impacts.

“Investing in the water sector is critical to the economic and social development of our borrowing member countries, including Belize. This grant reinforces CDB’s commitment to helping the Region respond to the new challenge climate change presents to water security,” said Andrew Dupigny, director of projects (acting), CDB.

In Belize, where climate change impacts threaten the water sector, Belize Water Services Limited (BWS) must take actions to improve resilience and integrate climate change considerations in its operations.

The grant from CDB will help finance consultancy services to support BWS’ efforts to:

• Develop a climate risk and vulnerability assessment (CRVA) for three water system;

• Formulate an adaptation plan of action responding to the vulnerabilities identified;and

• Build the necessary capacity for BWS to…

Reposted from: https://suedreamwalker.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/a-letter-from-albert-einstein-to-his-daughter-about-the-universal-force-which-is-love/

In the late 1980s, Lieserl, the daughter of the famous genius, donated 1,400 letters, written by Einstein, to the Hebrew University, with orders not to publish their contents until two decades after his death. This is one of them, for Lieserl Einstein.More can be found about Lieserl here

…”When I proposed the theory of relativity, very few understood me, and what I will reveal now to transmit to mankind will also collide with the misunderstanding and prejudice in the world.
I ask you to guard the letters as long as necessary, years, decades, until society is advanced enough to accept what I will explain below.
There is an extremely powerful force that, so far, science has not found a formal explanation to. It is a force that includes and governs all others, and is even behind any phenomenon operating in the universe and has not yet been…

Climate Change Issues are hurting agricultural productivity in Barbados and other countries in Latin America and the Caribbean.

That’s the conclusion of a new study conducted by three researchers and just released by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).

Michee Arnold Lachaud (University of Connecticut), Boris E. Bravo-Ureta (University of Connecticut and University of Talca, Chile), and the IDB’s Carlos E. Ludena investigated the impact climatic conditions had on productivity and output in agriculture.

They said the study’s main finding “is that climatic variability has negative impacts on production and productivity”.

“These adverse impacts are significant and vary across countries, sub-regions and regions.

On the basis of information from the fifth assessment report from the [Inter-Governmental Panel On Climate Change], climatic variability will reduce productivity across [Latin America, and the Caribbean] in the scenarios considered.

“Specifically, our forecast revealed that between 2013 and 2040 climatic effects can be expected to decrease productivity …

Recently, at the University of the West Indies, the Caribbean Policy Research Institute (CaPRI) launched its latest research piece critiquing the performance of Caribbean states on reaching targets set by the United Nations’ (UN) sponsored Millennium Development Goals (MDG) initiative launched back in the year 2000, aimed at ending poverty and improving the health and welfare of the poorest people over a 15-year period.

This global initiative was intended to encourage developing countries around the world, under eight general headings to; eradicate extreme poverty; achieve universal primary education; promote gender equality and empower women; reduce child mortality; improve maternal health; combat HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases; ensure environmental sustainability; and engage in a global partnership for development. This UN initiative was considered the facilitator of developmental progress aimed at developing countries.

UN goals ignored

Fifteen years on, and now at the end of the MDG programme, CaPRI’s assessment of this…