By Kaitlyn Waring and Hanane Lahder
Farmers in Morocco are experiencing unprecedented challenges brought about by extreme droughts, high temperatures, and other impacts of climate change. The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) has developed long-standing projects focused on organic fruit and nut tree agriculture in order to adapt to these conditions while enabling farming families to grow, harvest, process, and sell endemic agricultural products.
(Full Story)
|
By Yossef Ben-Meir and Kaitlyn Waring, Marrakech
Recent assertions have suggested that tree planting is not as effective a climate solution as once thought. Bill Gates argued in 2023 that the idea of planting enough trees to solve the climate crisis is “complete nonsense,” and the efficacy of tree planting has been a widely debated topic.
While it is clear that only planting trees cannot solve the world’s climate issues, nor will any single action, arguments for moving away from it altogether are often dismissive of the true potential that culturally-appropriate and holistic tree programs can have within larger development initiatives.
(Full Story)
|
The High Atlas Foundation (HAF) has initiated a positive intercultural and development project that is now gaining scale, and we have been able to secure domestic and international public and private investment for it.
(Full Story)
|
By Yossef Ben-Meir, Marrakech, Morocco
I do not know if it is a rule or commonplace as to whether a small act in the area of social development can launch thousands, even countless, small and large acts of sustainable change and growth. In Morocco, there may have been such a relatively modest action taken 32 years ago although at the time, without the pattern in history to gauge its significance, it seemed as big or grand as any good action. What came of it, with a ripple effect for me and for the people in the region—marked by a no-longer-needed, still-standing signpost, now rusted over—was a guide and inspiration in conjunction with encouraging national policies from which we can trace the ensuing decades of community-determined projects.
(Full Story)
|
By Yossef Ben-Meir, Marrakech, Morocco
The six consecutive years of drought in Morocco have been excruciating. The impact on the price of basic food items, such as meat and olive oil, has been striking. In recent years, the rainy season’s onset has been unpredictable, making it difficult to know when to plant, whether rain will come at all, or whether we are in a new trend to which we must adjust.
(Full Story)
|
By Yossef Ben-Meir, Marrakech, Morocco
For many organizations and agencies around the world, the matter of scaling local successes of development remains a seemingly insurmountable challenge and obligation. When participating in conferences, strategic planning, open forums, and studies on this critical necessity, so much of the consideration is focused on technological matters. If only we can effectively enable farmers to adopt innovative systems of water management, for example, or renewable energy, or agriculture, or product processing, then families, communities, and countrysides will achieve the essential qualities of sustainable development: greater income, better health, improved access to education, and much greater opportunities.
(Full Story)
|
From May to August of 2012, filmaker Joseph Redwood-Martinez lived and worked with the Sadhana Forest community in Anse-a-Pitre, Haiti.
(Full Story)
|
“Why do you think Tibet matters when we discuss here in Durban on how to halt the negative impacts of Climate Change?” This question was raised by Woebum Tenzin, a Tibetan women representing the group Tibet 3rd Pole at a side event that was hosted by the NGOs Society for Threatened Peoples Int'l and ECOTERRA Int'l., to a full room of concerned people, experts, officials and media participating at the tiresome United Nations climate change negotiations at the 17th Conference off the Parties (COP17) in Durban.
(Full Story)
|
DURBAN, SOUTH AFRICA – The people demand that governments have to radically change their behavior at the UNFCCC negotiations, if the world is to have a chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.
(Full Story)
|
During the past six decades, precipitation has risen across Canada, with increases especially significant in the northern Arctic climatic regions.
(Full Story)
|