Climate change

This book describes how an era of biohappiness, based on the conservation and sustainable and equitable use of biodiversity, can be launched. It deals with all aspects of conservation such as in situ, ex situ and community conservation, and also covers conservation issues relating to mangroves and other coastal bioresources, whose importance has grown with the emerging possibility of sea-level rise from global warming.

Scientists used a network of interdisciplinary studies to investigate the ecological effects of marine managed areas (MMAs) dispersed widely across the tropics. The results indicate that rigorously enforced MMAs can be an effective management tool to reduce overuse of natural resources and conflicts among different uses of the ocean. In addition, MMAs can provide important data for adaptive management of marine resources.

For a large number of developing countries, agriculture remains the single most important sector. Climate change has the potential to damage irreversibly the natural resource base on which agriculture depends, with grave consequences for food security.

This report is a comprehensive overview of country-led efforts on climate change adaptation supported by the UNDP-GEF partnership with financing from the GEF-managed LDCF, SCCF and SPA funds. It examines the strategies, approaches and impacts to date of UNDP’s adaptation programme and presents the preliminary achievements and lessons learned from projects in the UNDP-GEF portfolio (GEF-3 and GEF-4, 2006-2010).

Part 1 of this final report outlines current global environmental problems and serves as an introduction to the entire report. Part 2 gives the results of the Conference discussions. Chapter 1 summarizes the data and reference materials that were submitted to the Conference, and demonstrates how serious current environmental problems are by giving actual data on global warming, loss of biodiversity and others. Chapters 2 and 3 summarize the results of the discussions.

This publication presents several case studies of selected natural and cultural World Heritage sites in order to illustrate the impacts of climate change that have already been observed and those which can be anticipated in the future. For each of the featured sites, some adaptation measures are also reviewed. It is hoped that these examples would not only be of interest to World Heritage professionals and practitioners but also to the public at large.