Issue

Environment and Climate Change

Earth's average temperature has risen approximately one degree Fahrenheit in the last 50 years. By the end of this century, it will be several degrees higher, according to the latest climate research.

But global warming is doing more than simply making things a little warmer. It's changing rainfall, causing heat waves, and making sea level rise, all of which create human suffering.

Environment and Climate Change brings together reporting from Pulitzer Center grantees on the abilities of communities in diverse regions to bounce back and adapt to the impacts of climate change: One highlight includes in-depth reporting by Nathaniel Rich on the response to global warming during the 1979-1989 decade—an article that takes up the entire issue of The New York Times Magazine. Our journalists investigate climate change in the Arctic—the effects on indigenous communities, the destruction of the fragile natural environment, and the conflict between humans and polar bears. One interactive, award-winning multimedia project, "Sea Change," looks at ocean acidification, its impact on fishing, people's livelihoods, and food security. The documentary "Easy Like Water" features a solar-powered school boat in Bangladesh, where flooding may create 20 million "climate refugees" by mid-century.

Other stories covered here range from the future of the residents of Kiribati, a low-lying island nation in the Pacific, to the biological diversity of the rainforest in Peru, and the psychological effects of climate change on the inhabitants of Australia and Fiji. How does the melting Arctic ice cap affect our lives? How do overfishing and exploitation of mineral resources beneath the ocean’s surface jeopardize food sources need to sustain the planet’s ever-expanding population?

As part of the Pulitzer Center's long-term support for climate change reporting, the Rainforest Journalism Fund was established to provide capacity for local journalists operating in the rainforest regions of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, as well as international journalists reporting from those regions. The Fund represents a major investment in global environmental and climate reporting, with plans to support nearly 200 original reporting projects along with annual regional conferences designed to raise the level of reporting on global rainforest issues such as deforestation and climate change.

 

Environment and Climate Change

100 Days to Copenhagen

As the world looks towards the December summit in Copenhagen, the Nepali government, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, DFID and Danish Embassy are arranging their own pre-Copenhagen negotiations for Himalayan nations. On August 31st and September 1st, representatives from the Himalayan region are scheduled to meet in Katmandu to debate and strengthen South Asian positions before the meeting in Copenhagen.

We've talked to Nepali experts on climate change and it's impact on South Asia:

Bangladesh: On the Boat to Bhola

I am writing from the overnight ferry from Dhaka to Bhola island. Glenn and I spent the morning shooting interviews and b-roll footage at a dismal slum in Dhaka that is home to over 1000 displaced people from the island of Bhola. Bhola, one of six southern islands in Bangladesh, is home to 1.6 million people. But many thousands of people are leaving Bhola as erosion caused by rising sea levels and strong currents swallows the land. Some predict half the island could be gone in 30 years time.

Bangladesh: Reporting on Water

We will be heading off for Bangladesh on Aug. 22 to explore the "ground zero" of climate change and innovative adaptive strategies they are developing there. We will be traveling to Bhola, a large coastal island that has reportedly lost half its land mass over the past decade, to report on the "children of climate change" whose families are battling to stay there. We have just secured an interview with Dr.

The Kashmir Question

William Wheeler wrote about the potential water conflict brewing between India and Pakistan. Here, in another dispatch, he looks at the question of Kashmir in growing tensions over a limited resource.