Adapt or die: Africa presses for more climate support news4jax.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from news4jax.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
KAMPALA, Uganda (AP) African leaders and campaigners are pressing the international community to do more to help poorer and vulnerable nations adapt to climate change, seizing on evidence showing the continent to be the most endangered by the effects of global warming.
The head of the African Union, Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi, said the continent needs the world to contribute $12.5 billion of the $25 billion it needs to accelerate an adaptation program over the next five years.
1. United States
Harbor porpoises have made a comeback after the banning of gill netting in key coastal communities of California, new research shows. Gill nets are a cheap and effective way for commercial fishers to catch loads of sea bass and halibut by the gills, but they also wreak havoc on other species, including sea otters, some sea birds, and the lesser-known harbor porpoise. The latter exclusively lives in shallow waters. Being unable to detect the nylon mesh using echolocation, the porpoises would frequently drown after getting tangled in gill nets. Aerial surveys for harbor porpoises, which began in 1986, allowed researchers to identify and track four distinct porpoise populations off California’s coast as gill netting bans rolled out over the following decade. The latest assessment of that data shows the groups affected by gill netting have doubled their populations since the bans were put in place, and are now beginning to stabilize. It’s the first documented case
Kerry was among world leaders who converged virtually on the Netherlands for the summit seeking to galvanize more action and funding to adapt the planet and vulnerable communities to the effects of climate change.
“We saw the heat waves. We saw the fires. We saw the (melting) Arctic,” top NASA climate scientist Gavin Schmidt said earlier this month about the effects of the warming. Adaptation is not an option, it is an urgent task for this generation and those to come,” Chile President Sebastián Piñera said in a video message.
The Netherlands-based Global Center on Adaptation last week called on governments and financers around the globe to include funding for adaptation projects in their COVID-19 recovery spending.