Natural Disasters61
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The Caribbean’s Growing Disaster Hotspots
The 125 million people of the Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico region are highly exposed to hurricanes, floods and landslides–and it is not only because of bad weather. Increasing numbers of the poor are crowding into confined areas that are most prone to destruction–low-lying flood plains, too-steep hillsides, and the like. Robert Chen, director of the Center for International Earth…
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Charcoal, Construction and Coffins: Tracing Links from Disasters to Deforestation in Haiti
Reliance on fuel wood in the Port-à-Piment watershed area of Haiti—a contributing factor to deforestation there—may be exacerbated by natural disasters.
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Is New York City Ready for Drought?
All day long a flood of thousands scientists and students ebbs and flows across San Francisco’s 4th Street and Howard Avenue, coursing between the cavernous Moscone West and Moscone South convention buildings. The AGU is like a supercomputer of earth science, with human currents of data swapping information, heading from one talk to another, processing…
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Parched for Peace: The Fertile Crescent Might Be Barren
This past October, the Levant Desalination Association and Nosstia, an organization of expat Syrian scientists, arranged a conference in the capital city of Damascus to discuss Syria’s water crisis.
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New York Earthquake Barely Causes a Stir
Though the earthquake that no one really noticed yesterday was the largest to hit the New York area in 18 years, it’s important to note that it wasn’t an unusual event. One person in a WNYC story was quoted as saying that he had fun. Researchers at the Earth Institute have kept close tabs on…
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Plastic Bottles, Compost Toilets and Rainwater Catchment: Simple Solutions for Haiti’s Clean Water Crisis
There are many other low-cost, high-impact approaches to alleviating the clean water crises in places like Haiti, so it’s worth mentioning a few.
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COP16 event on Climate Services & Disaster Risk
December 3: COP16 event in Cancún on Climate Services and Disaster Risk Management.
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Parched for Peace: A Miniseries on the Mideast Water Crisis
For a vast majority of the past fifty years, oil and its abundance defined the Middle East. In coming years, however, that part of the world may well be defined by the dearth of a different natural resource: water.
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Measuring Earthquakes in Western New York
Each year, dozens of small, mostly harmless earthquakes quakes rattle the northeastern United States and southern Canada, and one quite active area runs along the shores of lakes Erie and Ontario, in western New York. In order to learn more about what generates these, and the possible threat of something bigger, scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth…
