The construction of consistent time series of land use presents a key challenge when accounting for elective land use-based activities under the Kyoto Protocol (wetland drainage and rewetting (WDR), cropland management (CM) and grazing land management (GM)), in which current land use-driven greenhouse gas emissions are compared to a reference situation in 1990. This case study is the first to demonstrate the feasibility of using high-resolution land-use proxies from different datasets for Kyoto accounting in a data-rich case study region in Germany.

Changing dietary preferences and population growth in South Asia have resulted in increasing demand for wheat and maize, along side high and sustained demand for rice. In the highly productive northwestern Indo-Gangetic Plains of South Asia, farmers utilize groundwater irrigation to assure that at least two of these crops are sequenced on the same field within the same year. Such double cropping has had a significant and positive influence on regional agricultural productivity. But in the risk-prone and food insecure lower Eastern Indo-Gangetic Plains (EIGP), cropping is less intensive.

The EU Water Framework Directive (WFD) promotes a change of European water governance towards increased stakeholder participation and water management according to river basins. To implement the WFD, new institutional arrangements are needed. In Sweden, water councils have been established on the local level to meet the requirements of the WFD of a broad stakeholder involvement in water management. The aim of this paper is to contribute to the knowledge on institutional arrangements for meeting the WFD requirements on stakeholder participation in local water management.

A multi-pollutant modelling framework for England and Wales is described. This includes emissions of nitrate, phosphorus and sediment to water and ammonia, methane and nitrous oxide to air, and has been used to characterise baseline (no uptake of on-farm measures) and business-as-usual (BAU) annual pollutant losses, comparing these with the loss under a range of new policies aimed at increasing the uptake of relevant source control measures to 95% across England and Wales.

This year's 2nd edition of the European Security and Defence Union journal is looking into climate change as global security and humanitarian challenge. Janani Vivekananda, Senior Adviser for Climate Change and Peacebuilding at adelphi, has contributed to the journal with a piece on the climate security crisis currently plaguing the Lake Chad basin. Lake Chad is a geophysical and ecological miracle.

The NATO Parliamentary Assemblies’ Science and Technology Committee drafted a new report on Food and Water Security in the Middle East and North Africa. The report underlines that pressures on natural resources and connected impacts on food production are factors that contribute to the (in-) security of the MENA region. The document summarizes causes as well as possible technical and governance approaches to improve food and water security in the region. The initiative shows that the role of environmental resources is increasingly taken seriously in the sphere of security policy.

Shortly after releasing a report on its climate change strategy in July 2017, the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations presents a new report at COP23 - this time focusing on the organization's concrete work on climate change.

Internal climate migrants are rapidly becoming the human face of climate change. According to this new World Bank report, without urgent global and national climate action, Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Latin America could see more than 140 million people move within their countries’ borders by 2050.

As water is the most disruptive element in the ongoing climate crisis, how land is managed plays a major role in taming this disruption. This publication shows that avoiding, reducing and reversing land degradation can have positive long-term gains in water security.

This new report by the PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency in collaboration with the Clingendael Institute and other Dutch research institutes points to pressure on security and migration arising from too little, too much or polluted water. Many integrated solutions are possible to divert this trend towards a sustainable and climate-resilient world.

South Asia is on the front line in confronting the implications of climate change and addressing the consequences for security.

To analyse this and more, the Global Military Advisory Council on Climate Change (GMACCC) has just released its report “Climate Change and Security in South Asia”. GMACCC is a global network of military and security experts working on the security implications of climate change. President BIPSS, Major General A N M Muniruzzaman, ndc, psc (Retd) is the Chairman of GMACCC. He is also a lead author of this report.

This report combines the conclusions of several scientific studies and the opinions of numerous researchers and specialized organizations that have focused these past few years on the link between climate and security. It highlights the essential contributions of a collective group of experts in order to concentrate on this issue and encourage institutions such as foreign and defense ministries to adopt new approaches.