The 2014 Climate Summit in New York is part of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s strategy to engage global leaders and advance climate action and ambition. The Summit is intended to be a solutions-focused Summit that is separate from, but complementary to, the UNFCCC negotiating process. It aims to provide evidence that leaders across sectors and at all levels are taking action, thus expanding the reach of what is possible today, in 2015, and beyond.
Conference Hotel:
Wyndham Pittsburgh University Center – 100 Lytton Avenue, Pittsburgh; (412) 682-6200
"On Memorial Day weekend in 2011, an unattended campfire in Bear Wallow Wilderness sparked a small brush fire that quickly turned into a holocaust, burning through 538,000 acres and destroying 32 homes in the process. It cost taxpayers more than $79 million to suppress. The Wallow fire was the largest fire in Arizona history, with almost 6,000 people evacuated during the weeks it burned. The San Carlos Apache Indian Reservation, just to the west of where the fire started, was hardly touched."
Some nuclear power plants could face hazards from climate-driven sea-level rise much greater than the levels they were designed for.
"A new study finds that when more precipitation falls as rain instead of snow, stream flows in drainage basins decline. This could complicate matters for areas that need snowmelt for water."
"Saying there’s a 'race against time,' an advocacy group said this week that climate change – leading to sea level rise and worsening wildfires – is putting some of the nation’s most significant historical sites at risk."
"Bosnia said on Monday that more than a quarter of its 4 million people had been affected by the worst floods to hit the Balkans in living memory, comparing the "terrifying" destruction to that of the country's 1992-95 war."
"A federal appeals court has refused to reconsider a major decision in the long-running battle over the 2010 gulf oil spill, leaving in place an earlier ruling that forces the British oil company BP to pay some businesses for economic damages without the businesses having to prove the losses were directly caused by the spill."
"The removal of a 2,500-ton deposit of coal ash in the Dan River from a spill in North Carolina has begun."
"Centuries from now, a large swath of the West Antarctic ice sheet is likely to be gone, its hundreds of trillions of tons of ice melted, causing a four-foot rise in already swollen seas."
