The Outlook brings together the commodity, policy and country expertise of both organisations, providing an assessment of agricultural market prospects for production, consumption, trade, stocks and prices of the included commodities.

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http://www.agri-outlook.org

Residents salvage all they can from the country's rising waters. A photo slideshow from Time.com.

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http://www.time.com

As part of the Poverty Mapping Project, FAO  prepared a Food Insecurity, Poverty and Environment Global GIS Database (FGGD) for global analysis of food insecurity and poverty in relation to environment.

http://geonetwork3.fao.org/fggd/

This map may be used to show areas in which biodiversity is threatened in relation to poverty on a continental scale. Areas where high percentage of underweight children - used as a proxy for poverty - coincide with a high occurrence of amphibian species and endemic bird areas - a proxy for biodiversity - may indicate areas in which poor people likely have no other choice than the unsustainable extraction of resources, in turn threatening biodiversity .

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http://maps.grida.no

Conservation scientists generally agree that many types of protected areas will be needed to protect tropical forests. But little is known of the comparative performance of inhabited and uninhabited reserves in slowing the most extreme form of forest disturbance: conversion to agriculture. We used satellite-based maps of land cover and fire occurrence in the Brazilian Amazon to compare the performance of large (>10,000 ha) uninhabited (parks) and inhabited (indigenous lands, extractive reserves, and national forests) reserves. Reserves significantly reduced both deforestation and fire.

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http://whrc.org

Since the Rio Conference of 1992, which declared the conservation of biodiversity and the creation of national parks to be priorities, resettlements resulting from conservation projects in Central Africa have been on the increase, as people living inside protected areas are relocated. Hardly any of these resettlements have been successful. There has been resistance to moving in the first place, and even returns to former villages inside the national parks. Resettlement is still the most common way to deal with people who happen to live in African national parks, but the risks which arise from these resettlements have led some scientists to rethink their position.

This article focuses on the Congo River Basin. It reviews the only ‘official’ relocation programme in the region (Korup National Park, Cameroon) and evaluates different approaches of national parks in Equatorial Guinea, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo (Brazzaville) and Gabon. The author uses the Impoverishment Risk and Reconstruction model introduced by Cernea to evaluate the risks faced by the resettled populations, and to elaborate some social and environmental guidelines to mitigate them.

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http://people.ucsc.edu

Future changes in climate pose significant challenges for society, not the least of which is how best to adapt to observed and potential future impacts of these changes to which the world is already committed. Adaptation is a dynamic social process: the ability of societies to adapt is determined, in part, by the ability to act collectively. This article reviews emerging perspectives on collective action and social capital and argues that insights from these areas inform the nature of adaptive capacity and normative prescriptions of policies of adaptation.

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http://www.uea.ac.uk

Climate change is hitting coastal areas hard: rises in sea levels, ocean acidification, extreme events, bleaching and death of coral are all climate impacts which will require adjustments socially and economically. A new IUCN report, published today, provides practical guidance for coastal communities and industries to adapt to climate change.

As talks under the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) are currently ongoing in Bonn, the IUCN report “A Framework for Social Adaptation to Climate Change: Sustaining Tropical Coastal Communities and Industries” is a guide to assess the vulnerability of coastal communities and provides economic and social tools to build resilience and avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

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http://www.iucn.org

Data are gathered from ADB developing member countries’ Initial National Communications and/or National Action Programs on Climate Change. The quantity and quality of information entered are based on these national reports. Thus, coverage is not necessarily consistent across countries.

http://aric.adb.org/climate-change.php