Climate Change

The agricultural union Agri SA has requested over $1 billion in government subsidies to help farmers through the crisis, but a cut-price solution could soon be available -- from an unlikely source.

Johannesburg schoolgirl Kiara Nirghin, 16, recently won the Google Science Fair's Community Impact Award for the Middle East and Africa with her submission "No More Thirsty Crops."

RNZI reports Labour is also calling for the government to take a humanitarian approach to people from the region who are overstayers in New Zealand.

United Nations warns if sea level rise continues at the current rate, the Pacific atolls of Kiribati and Tuvalu could be completely submerged within decades.

Terry Edwards has lived on Kiribati's main atoll of Tarawa his entire life.

The people there feared for the future, he said.

"We are so afraid and we think about Kiribati, Kiribati maybe in future is going to sink, we worry about it."

A Scholar for the Islands Society, Genevieve Neilson, said climate change funding for Pacific countries is improving with the US contributing $US500 million to the Green Climate Fund, and new programmes starting in the region.

But she said Pacific states would like greater opportunity to make decisions about how the money was spent.

"If it's being decided in a boardroom somewhere which programmes are being run or how programmes are going to be run or funded then that can really take away from the closer needs of the community."

The ITC is the joint agency of the United Nations and the World Trade Organisation and advises and trains producers on how to reach international markets.

Following a visit to Fiji, Arancha Gonzalez identified climate change as being the biggest challenge to Pacific farmers being able to access international markets.

OCOF is an online forum which allows climate officers in pacific countries including Vanuatu to share their seasonal climate outlooks.

It is a monthly teleconference where they(climate partners) get together to discuss and analyst past happenings and possible implications, the Director at the Climate Division of the Vanuatu and Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department (VMGD), Philip Malsale explained.

“Together, we’ve shown what’s possible when the world stands as one,” he said. “We met the moment.”

While he saw the agreement as a global achievement, he emphasised what had been accomplished by America since he entered the White House.

The Palestinians say they will submit to the U.N. secretary-general their instruments of accession to the global climate change convention.

At climate talks in Paris, experts called for strong language on respecting human rights and the rights of indigenous people to be included in the agreement.

Craig Mokhiber of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights says the climate crisis is a human rights crisis and it needs to be addressed as such.

“It’s clear they have made progress,” said Jennifer Morgan from the World Resources Institute, “but it is not over till it is over.”

The numbers of options for ministers to decide from has been radically reduced – a gamble from the French presidency of the COP.

The new version of a deal would commit 195 countries to slash net carbon emissions to zero in the second half of this century, involving radical cuts in fossil fuel use and a significant rise in deployment of clean energy and carbon capture technologies.

The cyclone last March levelled thousands of homes and destroyed virtually the entire food crop of the subsistence farmers. With an average income of less than $3,500 (U.S.), Vanuatu was hard-pressed to address the devastation caused last spring by Pam and it was forced to rely heavily on foreign aid.