Knowledge Base highlights and editors' picks

Top stories and editors' picks from the most recent additions. Explore the whole Knowledge Base.

Every week the PreventionWeb team of editors selects the latest news and research, reports and publications on disaster risk reduction – here is their selection of the latest must-read content.

African women carrying water back to their villages.

Update

10 May 2023

Cultural significance of health should be incorporated into modern disaster risk reduction strategies

At the University of Eastern Finland, Institute of Public Health and Clinical Nutrition, researchers took an interest in exploring and investigating further health and livelihoods impacts associated with climate change in ASALs.

University of Eastern Finland

Satellite view of the wildfires in a field

Update

9 May 2023

Earth’s climate is changing. IBM’s new geospatial foundation model could help track and adapt to a new landscape

Built from IBM’s collaboration with NASA, the watsonx.ai model is designed to convert satellite data into high-resolution maps of floods, fires, and other landscape changes to reveal our planet’s past and hint at its future.

IBM Corporation

Update

9 May 2023

Ground-breaking data platform plays key role in tackling acute food insecurity in food crises

Detailed, comprehensive and timely data is essential to address the impact of shocks such as droughts, earthquakes or conflict on agricultural production and livelihoods in parts of the world affected by food crises.

Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations - Headquarters

Update

9 May 2023

Early wildfires, heat waves show grim signs of global climate crisis

An early, aggressive wildfire season in Alberta, alarming, summer-like temperatures in parts of the Mediterranean, scorching, road-melting heat to South Asia, and torrential rain causing deadly floods in Congo - all signs of anthropogenic climate change.

The Energy Mix

Research briefs

8 May 2023

UC Irvine, NASA JPL researchers discover a cause of rapid ice melting in Greenland

Researchers uncovered a previously unseen way in which the ice and ocean interact. They said their findings could mean that the climate community has been vastly underestimating the magnitude of future sea level rise caused by polar ice deterioration.

University of California, Irvine

Two women walking through the flooded streets of Lagos, Nigeria.

Update

8 May 2023

Flooding in Nigeria is on the rise – good forecasts, drains and risk maps are urgently needed

Nigeria is one of the most flood-prone countries in west Africa. Many areas experience annual flooding. This happens during heavy rainfall and one of the reasons is poor drainage systems.

Conversation Media Group, the

Sand storm hitting the city of Basra in Iraq, 2022

Update

8 May 2023

Sandstorms are a growing menace, here's how we can minimise their impact

Most sandstorms are natural events, but they are being exacerbated by climate change, drought, land degradation and unsustainable management of land and water resources.

World Economic Forum

Research briefs

5 May 2023

Extreme April heat in Spain, Portugal, Morocco & Algeria almost impossible without climate change

A large area of South Western Europe and Northern Africa experienced extremely high temperatures usually only seen in July and August, at the end of April 2023.

World Weather Attribution

Agriculture worker in a pineapple field under a cloudy sky

Update

8 May 2023

Our tropical fruits are vulnerable to climate change. Can we make them resilient in time?

Plants provide almost every calorie of food we eat. For millennia, farmers have bred grains, fruit and vegetable varieties to get larger harvests and plants better able to tolerate different climates.

Conversation Media Group, the

View from space on Fiji in Melanesia in the South Pacific Ocean and its coral reefs

Update

8 May 2023

Simplifying climate change information for communities a key Pacific priority

The Pacific Climate Change Centre (PCCC) is working with eight Pacific countries to enhance and integrate knowledge brokerage on climate change into aspects of the work they are doing in their communities.

Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme