Barbara Kiser's blog

So the ‘junk shot’ of golf balls and shredded tyres failed to plug the Deepwater Horizon gusher in the Gulf of Mexico. There was a strange circularity about BP’s idea of fixing this petroleum-fuelled nightmare by clogging it with petroleum-derived products.

The future sprawls before us — urban sprawl, that is. John Vidal of the UK Guardian says that in 50 years, we could see ‘vast “mega-regions” which may stretch hundreds of miles across countries and be home to more than 100 million people’.

In fact, they’re here already: the gargantuan Hong Kong-Shenhzen-Ghaungzhou conurbation, to take just one example, houses more than 120 million people.

Whether in-migration to these regions is a trickle or a flood (and the downturn has apparently had a mixed effect on migration to cities), the urban pull remains powerful, as the poor chase jobs and escape degraded rural environments or conflict.

Is the biodiversity drain speeding up? As Juliette Jowit reports in a recent Guardian, a study by Simon Stuart of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Species Survival Commission reveals that humans are driving extinctions ‘faster than new species can evolve’.

That might not surprise some in Madagascar — the California-sized ‘eighth continent’ off Africa’s southeastern coast, and a crucible of species from lemurs to octopus trees. This positively sizzling biodiversity hotspot is in danger of becoming little more than a barren political minefield.

All of which strikes a bleak note in this, the International Year of Biodiversity.

A vast blue box dropped onto a tabletop: this is the Koncerthuset, where IIED’s Development and Climate Days came to a close yesterday.

Day 4 of Development and Climate Days: Mitigation, Finance and the Private Sector

Thousands of people make up a COP, from campaigners, lobbyists, negotiators and journalists to NGO and UN staff, presidents and ministers.

Day 3 of Development and Climate Days: Planning Adaptation

Day 2 of Development and Climate Days: Justice, Ethics and Humanitarian Issues
 

Day 1 of IIED’s Development and Climate Days: Land, Water and Forests

Arriving at any big event in midflow is always disorienting: the play has begun and you’ve come in right after the interval.