Science and innovation for development

This book demonstrates how science and innovation can be harnessed to tackle today’s biggest challenges in poor countries. Its scope includes: (i) the impact of climate change and other future threats and how science can contribute to building sustainability and resilience; (ii) three of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) - reducing hunger, improving health and protecting the environment.

The book links environmental sustainability (MDG 7) to poverty reduction, and demonstrates that poor communities in developing countries are most likely to be affected by disasters brought about, or exacerbated by, environmental degradation, such as landslides and flooding. It values the use of earth observation systems in monitoring of natural disasters like fire, flooding, earthquakes and typhoons.

It also analyses the global climate change impacts and related disasters such as flash floods, storm surges, tornados and cyclone winds, river bank erosion and drought, then identifies their drivers (tropical convection, the alternation of the monsoons and the El Niño-Southern Oscillation/ENSO), as well as their near term consequences: warmer or colder regions; drought- or flooding-prone regions; higher sea levels; storm surges; greater variation in the weather and more intensive extreme events – hurricanes, tropical cyclones, floods and droughts. It uses examples to show that developing resilience to climate change builds on the various approaches to disaster risk reduction that have been successfully practiced over the years.