PREP: Value Chain - Climate Change Resilience

Leading companies from the food and beverage, insurance, investment, technology, and energy industries have jointly released a guide to climate change resiliency planning. ‘PREP Value Chain Climate Resilience’ includes a step-by-step tool, Business ADAPT, for businesses to assess and prepare for the risks and opportunities posed by climate change.

The Business ADAPT tool provides five simple steps to help companies understand and act on the climate related risks that they face.

The steps are targeted towards company executives and senior managers, and provide detailed guidance in sectors that are considered highly vulnerable including water and energy utilities and companies in the food, beverage, agriculture and general manufacturing industries.

The five steps are:

1. Analyze the issues - Have you started thinking about the resilience of your business in the face of climate-related impacts?
2. Develop an internal strategy - Have you mobilized the right team to address climate resilience?
3. Assess risks and opportunities - Have you taken steps to assess the areas where opportunities to build climate resilience or invest in emerging market opportunities exist in your business value chain?
4. Prioritize actions - Have you taken steps to identify and assess measures to build climate resilience in your value chain?
5. Tackle actions, and evaluate progress - How will you successfully implement actions to build climate resilience in your value chain, and evaluate and monitor the effect of your actions over time?

PREP Value Chain Climate Resilience has been written by The Partnership for Resilience and Environmental Preparedness.

PREP is a one-year pilot partnership formed to address the risks and opportunities that climate change impacts pose to businesses and the communities on which they depend.

Members include Calvert Investments, Earth Networks, Entergy, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc., Levi Strauss and Co., Starbucks and Swiss Re. BSR and Ceres are also partners. Oxfam America serves as PREP's secretariat.

The firm Acclimatise served as lead authors of the report.

Read PREP Value Chain Climate Resilience.

NASA - ASTER Captures New Image of Pakistan Flooding

In late July 2010, flooding caused by heavy monsoon rains began in several regions of Pakistan, including the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Sindh, Punjab and parts of Baluchistan.

According to the Associated Press, the floods have affected about one-fifth of the country.

Tens of thousands of villages have been flooded, more than 1,500 people have been killed, and millions have been left homeless.

The floodwaters are not expected to fully recede before late August.

The Advanced Spaceborne Thermal Emission and Reflection Radiometer (ASTER) instrument on NASA's Terra spacecraft captured this cloud-free image over the city of Sukkur, Pakistan, on Aug. 18, 2010. Sukkur, a city of a half-million residents located in southeastern Pakistan's Sindh Province, is visible as the grey, urbanized area in the lower left center of the image.

It lies along the Indus River, Pakistan's longest, which snakes vertically from north to south through the image and is the basis for the world's largest canal-based irrigation system. As reported by the British Broadcasting Corporation, Sukkur is one of the few urban areas in the region that has thus far escaped widespread destruction from the flooding, which has affected an estimated 4,000,000 people in the province.

Relief camps have sprung up across the city to house some of these displaced people. The land along the Indus River in this region is largely agricultural, and the flooding has taken a heavy toll on the region's crops and fruit trees.

The ASTER image is located at 27.8 degrees north latitude, 68.9 degrees east longitude, and covers an area of 62.4 by 77.6 kilometers (38.7 by 48.3 miles).

With its 14 spectral bands from the visible to the thermal infrared wavelength region and its high spatial resolution of 15 to 90 meters (about 50 to 300 feet), ASTER images Earth to map and monitor the changing surface of our planet.

ASTER is one of five Earth-observing instruments launched Dec. 18, 1999, on NASA's Terra spacecraft. The instrument was built by Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry. A joint U.S./Japan science team is responsible for validation and calibration of the instrument and the data products.

The broad spectral coverage and high spectral resolution of ASTER provides scientists in numerous disciplines with critical information for surface mapping and monitoring of dynamic conditions and temporal change.

Example applications are: monitoring glacial advances and retreats; monitoring potentially active volcanoes; identifying crop stress; determining cloud morphology and physical properties; wetlands evaluation; thermal pollution monitoring; coral reef degradation; surface temperature mapping of soils and geology; and measuring surface heat balance.

The U.S. science team is located at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. The Terra mission is part of NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C.

More information about ASTER is available at http://asterweb.jpl.nasa.gov/.

Image credit: NASA/GSFC/METI/ERSDAC/JAROS, and U.S./Japan ASTER Science Team

China's Intransigence Blamed for Breakdown of Copenhagen summit

China's Blocking Tactics Blamed for Breakdown of Copenhagen summit

Leaders have gathered for the final scheduled day of the UN climate summit, amid uncertainty over the shape of any eventual deal.

A draft political agreement drawn up by a small group of countries including the UK, US and Australia was rejected during overnight discussions.China is proving to be intransigent in working towards an agreement.

It appears their intention has been to block progress and disrupt global unity on Climate Change and Global Warming.

Delegates described the situation as "confusing" and "desperate". There is extreme pessimism that an agreement will be reached by the end of today, the last day of the conference.

US President Barack Obama flew in to a very difficult situation. He has berated the nations for being unwilling to reach an agreement and told the conference "not to talk but to act".