Topic: climate change

2011/2012 was a transition period as WRI said goodbye to President Jonathan Lash and welcomed new President Andrew Steer. With ample wind in our sails from 18 years of Jonathan’s leadership, the Institute’s accomplishments—many captured in this report—reflect both the strength and versatility he instilled in the organization.

Forest carbon monitoring systems are necessary for tracking the effectiveness of national forest policies aiming to mitigate GHG emissions. This issue brief highlights the broad, fundamental technical capacity needs for forest carbon monitoring based on an assessment of current capacity gaps in seven countries.

This case study documents the issues related to accessing, processing, and applying climate information in order to help farming communities take robust, low-risk agricultural adaptation measures. The study focuses on central India’s Bundelkhand region, which straddles the provinces of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh.

The Nepalese government lacks crucial information and evidence necessary for climate change adaptation decision making. Despite this challenge, there has been significant movement around climate change adaptation in the country, most notably the successful development of the National Adaptation Programme of Action (NAPA) in September 2010 by the Ministry of Environment. This case study examines how Nepal’s NAPA process identified urgent and immediate priorities in a situation of significant data gaps and uncertainty.

By examining the HighNoon project in north India, this case study explores how adaptation-relevant information can best be packaged and disseminated to different users and audiences at the state, district, and block levels. It also explores what kinds of information are of most interest to various stakeholders and how different types of information can contribute to adaptation decision making.

WRI has calculated the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from our own operations since 1999. This report provides a comprehensive description of WRI’s 2010 greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory and introduces our new GHG reduction targets.

The United States has been experiencing ongoing extreme heat, droughts, and wildfires. This fact sheet examines the connection between climate change and these recent extreme weather events.

Governments, businesses, and citizens in South Asia all need access to good information to make decisions in a changing climate. However, the uncertainty of climate change’s impacts, complexity associated with climate vulnerability, and the lengthy time-frame along which global warming will unfold make the “adaptation information agenda” unclear. This paper, which served as background for a South Asian regional workshop on information use in climate adaptation decision-making, aims to identify barriers to information use for climate adaptation in South Asia and proposes four areas of further inquiry, which were discussed at the workshop. Read more