Mike Edwards
Mike Edwards is the Catholic Agency for Overseas Development's climate change adviser. He has worked on climate change issues since the early 1990s and holds a PhD on the links between climate change and security in small island developing states. At CAFOD, Mike works with programme staff and partners as they develop adaptation strategies to climate change. He is also setting up a partnership with University College London on innovative approaches to disaster risk reduction.
What does climate change mean for beauty?
For those of us who admire Antoni Gaudi's architecture, it is fitting that the latest round of international climate change negotiations (before the big ones in Copenhagen) are being held in Barcelona. Gaudi loved nature, and he was inspired by the shapes and forms that only nature can create. Yet he believed firmly that architecture, or at least differences in architectural styles, were influenced and underpinned by society and politics. ...
Fracture with nature underlying cause of climate change
Most scientists, scholars and activists would agree that the causes of man-made climate change can be traced to the industrial revolution - a time of immense human ingenuity and activity. During that time, energy from burning fossil carbon was harnessed, at a scale never previously seen, to turn nature into 'products' and thence into financial capital. I would argue, however, that the causes of climate change, at least the mind-set that resulted in the threat of climate change, can be traced back to much earlier times - indeed, to the dawn of western philosophy and a relatively innocuous statement from dear old Socrates! ...
Ethics, not weather, obligates climate action
We would appear to be living in an increasingly hazardous world. Over the last few weeks we have witnessed wildfires in California, typhoons in the Philippines and the continuation of devastating droughts in East Africa. There has been a tendency, in the media and among the environment and development community, to attribute human agency to all meteorological hazards - basically, every time the weather "misbehaves" there are people who want to project human agency onto the catastrophe offering the event as "evidence" of climate change. ...
Is military planning the answer to climate uncertainty?
Pretty much everyone working on climate change wants certainty - they want certain science, and they want certainty around what the impacts are going to look like and how they are going to be experienced. Unfortunately, at this stage, science can't provide the information and the answers planners want. We need, therefore, to work with scientific uncertainty for the foreseeable future. ...
CLIMATE CHANGE BLOG: Does poverty equal vulnerability?
Read pretty much anything on the links between climate change and development and you'll soon stumble across a statement along the lines of 'poor people are the most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change'. It's hard to refute this. People living in poverty simply don't have the resources to cope with a changing climate, especially when they have to cope with so many other stresses. ...
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