Feature Article

As host to the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, Brazil will draw international attention to its policy on climate change, but the measures announced so far are not commensurate with the recently set reduction goal.

In January 2012, the first Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) report was presented to the UK government to inform national adaptation policy. Regarding the agricultural sector, we and our colleagues used a risk-metric approach to assess consequences for crop yield. Writing in Nature Climate Change, Semenov et al. present a critique on the crop yield metric used in our analysis. Although we do not refute the scientific evidence presented, we do question its purpose. (Correspondence)

Writing in Nature Climate Change, Lin and colleagues show that the combined effect of storm climatology and sea-level rise will greatly shorten surge-flooding return periods. Future climate effects may cause the present-day 100-yr and 500-yr surge flooding in New York City (NYC) to occur every 3–20 yrs and every 25–240 yrs, respectively. (Correspondence)

The Rio+20 conference (20–22 June 2012) will be held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It will focus on two main themes — development of a green economy while fostering sustainable development and poverty eradication, and the institutional frameworks necessary to achieve these goals, including the strengthening of international environmental governance. Areas identified for 'priority attention' are employment, energy, sustainable cities, food security, and sustainable agriculture, water, oceans and disaster readiness.

Will negotiating parties be able to sort out their differences at Doha?
At the most recent UN meeting on climate change at Bonn, deep divisions that have existed between countries came to the fore, obscuring progress on the “delicately balanced” political deal that was agreed to just five months ago in December at Durban. As 195 countries gathered for the first time after the very important turnaround in Durban to negotiate a new deal for 2020, questions of how the burden of containing climate change will be shared resurfaced.

International agreements to limit greenhouse gas emissions require verification to ensure that they are effective and fair. Verification based on direct observation of atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations will be necessary to demonstrate that estimated emission reductions have been actualized in the atmosphere. Here we assess the capability of ground-based observations and a high-resolution (1.3 km) mesoscale atmospheric transport model to determine a change in greenhouse gas emissions over time from a metropolitan region.

The People’s Union for Democratic Rights (PUDR) strongly condemns the ongoing repression by the state on the
peaceful protest against the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Project in Tamil Nadu, particularly since 8 May 2012. It condemns the policy of using tactics of threat and intimidation to crush a democratic movement. (Letters)

Disagreeing with R Vijay’s “Structural Retrogression and Rise of ‘New Landlords’ in Indian Agriculture: An Empirical Exercise” (EPW, 4 February 2012), the authors argue that the explanation for declining tenancy may not hold and that the hypothesis on the emergence of “new landlords” and the importance of tenancy can be explained by the changing terms of tenancy in the country.