NCDP Perspectives

This post was originally published on March 5, 2018 in CNN. Cape Town, South Africa, is set to run out of fresh water for its 4 million citizens on July 15. On that day — known as “Day Zero” — the city plans to set up 200 water access points for gathering 6.6 gallons of water per person per day. That’s 200 access points for a critical resource, shared among 4 million people. The tragedy is that with proper planning and effective early interventions, this crisis could have been averted. Many experts believe that warning bells were chiming as early as 1990, but now Cape Town may have the dubious distinction of being the first major developed city calling in the military to keep the peace over water scarcity. It’s immaterial whether or not you believe climate change is to blame, because disaster preparedness and mitigation are crucial either way — and could have helped Cape Town. But this issue of water scarcity and preparedness isn’t just limited to a city in Africa.

This post was originally published on February 9, 2016 in The Huffington Post blog. By most accounts, December’s international climate conference in Paris was an unexpected and landmark success. Virtually every nation on earth now understands what’s at stake and all have reached common understanding about what needs to be done to slow the advance of unmitigated planetary warming. Still, in spite of overwhelming scientific evidence that dangerous levels of planetary warming and human-induced climate change are real, hard-core resistance to well-established

Climate Change as a Human Factor Climate change is defined as change in global or regional climate patterns, which may

The consequences of climate events are not borne equally. Local populations cope with drought in the arid Sahel much differently