Category: Worth Reading and Watching

Every year on 22 May, the United Nations celebrate The International Day for Biological Diversity to commemorate the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Jean Carlo Rodríguez de Francisco and Ina Lehmann explain why the CBD and its state parties should urgently address economic growth and why the resetting of economies after the COVID-19 pandemic and the UN Biodiversity conference in October might provide an important window of opportunity.

In the run-up to the federal elections, the German Development Institute / Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik (DIE) will be publishing a special series of the Current Column under the title “Impulses for the Bundestag Elections” over the next few months. To kick off the series, Prof. Dr Anna-Katharina Hornidge and Prof. Dr Imme Scholz outline guidelines for German development policy in the 21st century.

Food insecurity and hunger continue to threaten the lives and livelihoods of millions of people. In the context of the United Nations Food Systems Summit 2021, BICC researchers published a briefing paper that looks at the multiple dimensions between current food crises and violent conflicts and identifies four key areas for a comprehensive response that addresses food insecurity and violent conflict.

This paper reviews the evidence on slow-onset events presented in the Special Report on Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) and the Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC), both published in 2019. It analyses how the reports, and recent literature cited in them, deal with the eight types of slow-onset events, specified by the UNFCCC.

Mountains are highly sensitive to climate change. Their elevated areas provide essential ecosystem services both for the surrounding mountainous regions and particularly for adjacent lowlands. Impacts of a warmer climate affect these services and have negative consequences on the supply of water, on biodiversity and on protection from natural hazards.

With climate change and socioeconomic trends expected to exacerbate the risk of urban heat stress, implementing adaptation measures is paramount to limit adverse impacts of heat on urban inhabitants. Identification of the best options needs to be based on sound, localised assessments of risk, understood as the interaction of hazard, exposure and vulnerability. Yet a review of the literature reveals that minimal research to date considers the perceived impacts of heat among urban residents.

Climate change and urbanization have increased disaster risk in cities and urged the need for effective disaster risk management and risk-informed urban planning. However, up-to-date data that can support risk assessments is often lacking. The ever increasing spatial and temporal resolution of remote sensing sensors offers tremendous opportunities to support risk assessments in cities. In a pilot project for the coastal city of Monastir, Tunisia, multi-temporal optical remote sensing and spatial analysis have been used to support the assessment of current and future exposure, vulnerability, and risk associated with flash floods and coastal erosion.

The fronts of two rock glaciers located in South Tyrol (Italian Alps) failed on 13 August 2014, initiating debris flows in their downslope channels. A multimethod approach including climate, meteorological, and ground temperature data analysis, aerial image correlation, as well as geotechnical testing and modeling, led to the reconstruction of the two events. An integrated investigation of static predisposing factors, slowly changing preparatory factors, and potential triggering events shed light on the most likely reasons for such failures. Our results suggest that the occurrence of front destabilization at the two rock glaciers can only partly be explained by the occurrence of heavy rainfall events.

Using the interdisciplinary certificate programs on sustainable development offered by the German Universities of Tübingen and Duisburg-Essen as case studies, we analyze the potentials and challenges of teaching programs on sustainable development for promoting regional transition. Leaning on the multi-level-perspective-approach, we have used qualitative interviews to shed light on the design of cooperation between the university and regional partners as well as the creation and integration of transdisciplinary learning spaces. This paper shows that the impact of such teaching formats on the regional transition consists primarily of awareness and network building.