In the recent past, spells of extreme heat associated with appreciable mortality have been documented in developed countries, including North America and Europe. However, far fewer research reports are available from developing countries or specific cities in South Asia. In May 2010, Ahmedabad, India, faced a heat wave where the
temperatures reached a high of 46.8uC with an apparent increase in mortality. The purpose of this study is to characterize the heat wave impact and assess the associated excess mortality.

The emergence of the El Nino weather phenomenon is likely to coincide with the monsoon season (June-September) this year, India Metrological Department’s (IMD) Regional Climate Centre in Pune said in its Seasonal Climate Outlook for South Asia (April-July) report.

Christian Aid publishes a report showing the devastating effects of climate change, with communities worldwide, particularly in worst hit poorer countries, being forced to change their way of life.

This report published by the Centre for Food Safety, outlines the climate requirements for successful food production, and examines two competing food production methods – industrial and organic – to reveal how they contribute to the climate problem, how resilient they are in the face of escalating climate shocks, and how organic agriculture can actually help to solve the climate crisis.

Projected future scenarios of climate suggest that climatic conditions in Nepal will worsen, which may imply even more frequent occurrences of climate-related extremes and negative impacts on food production.

This working paper presents a holistic approach for how a city can customise its rapid vulnerability assessment in order to understand what is required for building climate resilience.

The terrestrial ecosystems of North America have been identified as a sink of atmospheric CO2 though there is no consensus on the magnitude. However, the emissions of non-CO2 greenhouse gases (CH4 and N2O) may offset or even overturn the climate cooling effect induced by the CO2 sink. Using a coupled biogeochemical model, in this study, we have estimated the combined global warming potentials (GWP) of CO2, CH4 and N2O fluxes in North American terrestrial ecosystems and quantified the relative contributions of environmental factors to the GWP changes during 1979–2010.

Climate change is one of the defining issues of our time. It is now more certain than ever, based on many lines of evidence, that humans are changing Earth’s climate. The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, accompanied by sea-level rise, a strong decline in Arctic sea ice, and other climate-related changes.

Hot weather extremes have increased around the world in the past 15 years despite a slowdown in the overall pace of global warming, a study showed on Wednesday.

Natural disasters including droughts, floods and earthquakes cost China 421 billion yuan ($69 bln) in 2013, official data showed on Monday, nearly double the total in the previous year.

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