Cross-posted from ThinkProgress Green.
“The Nepalese government has exhausted funds to drain the Tsho Rolpa (Nepal’s biggest glacial lake), which poses an immediate threat to at least 10,000 people,” said Samjwal Bajracharya, the lead author of a new report on the status of glaciers in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region, also known as the Third Pole.
Thai Airways International will lose about $100 million in revenues in Q4 due to the flood crisis, airline president Piyasvasti Amranand said Tuesday.
Efforts to establish water as an agenda item in its own right in climate change negotiations are gaining momentum in Durban.
“I really think the U.S. population needs to understand that this is not just their historical responsibility, but this is their future that they’re compromising,” U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said of American inaction on climate pollution.
“There is a tremendous effort to shift the blame so the rich countries do as little as they can,” India’s environment minister, Jayanthi Natarajan, said on Monday.
The civil society movement is now targeting the U.S. as the primary blocker to the success of the climate talks.
“Practical progress” is being made on the long-term cooperative agreement track that is built around the Cancun Accords, the Climate Institute’s Erwin Jackson reports:
Australian climate change minister Greg Combet believes the U.N. climate change talks are making good progress even though a comprehensive agreement will not be reached in Durban.
Australia and New Zealand said on Monday they could link their carbon trading schemes as soon as 2015, immediately after Australia’s government moved from a fixed carbon tax to the world’s second-largest market scheme to cut pollution.
Key parties — including the U.S., Australia, and the E.U. — have indicated that they could agree to the “middle ground” Green Climate Fund report that Fund Transitional Committee co-chair Trevor Manuel of South Africa introduced last Wednesday, as long as it is a part of a more balanced package.
Money raised by curbing ships’ carbon emissions would be used to finance the Green Climate Fund, according to a draft text being negotiated at the U.N. climate talks in Durban.
