Vietnam reviews coal expansion in wake of Paris Agreement on climate change

In the wake of the Paris agreement, Vietnam has announced a review of all it's new coal plants in the planning pipeline and under construction. Vietnam is currently the third largest builder of coal plants in the world.

In a statement (vn) released on 19th January, Vietnam Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung stated the government’s intention to “review development plans of all new coal plants and halt any new coal power development”.

In addition, the Premier stated that Vietnam needs to “responsibly implement all international commitments in cutting down greenhouse gas emissions; and to accelerate investment in renewable energy.” an implied reference to the Paris Agreement from the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2015.

Storify: Climate security and health impacts for Australia and abroad #PopHlth2015

How do you write up a conference presentation which you did not attend and did not see livestreamed? Why through the magic of twitter #hashtag conversation of people live reporting the speakers important points. Add some relevant context and related articles and you have a report.

Rob Sturrock's conference presentation on Climate change and its health impacts at home and abroad at the Population Health Congress 2015 intrigued me, so I gathered all the live tweets from his keynote speech, selected a variety of comments and deleted any that were primarily duplicates and redundant.

In the process, I also read his study The Longest Conflict: Australia's Climate Security Challenge that was released in June 2015 by the Center for Policy Development. In fact before publishing this storify of his keynote speech I published an article on his study: Australian Defence Force poorly prepared for #Climate change. So I had a reasonable understanding of where he was coming from in his talk.

Sea level rise hidden impact on Biodiversity and Habitat loss

A new scientific study published in Global Change Biology raises alarm bells about global climate change and the secondary impact of sea level rise on habitat loss and species biodiversity, especially in the Asian and Pacific regions.

We already know that Climate change and habitat loss threaten biodiversity with the extinction rate underestimated and that Biodiversity is a crucial climate change buffer for ecosystem and cultural diversity. Scientists have warned that biodiversity is declining rapidly throughout the world, describing the loss of species as the 6th mass extinction event on the earth. Tropical insects may already be an extreme risk of extinction with just moderate increases in temperature. Now the secondary effects of sea level rise could also have a devastating impact on biodiversity.