Global Climate Change Exacerbates Worldwide Food Shortage - http://clapway.com/2015/08/09/global-climate-change-food-shortage-101/

It goes without saying that no one should suffer nonconsensual malnutrition, or–more bleakly–starve to death. But despite world governments’ working to reduce world hunger through the U.N. with the support of global philanthropic charities, there are many still suffering from food shortage, and global climate change is only exacerbating the effects of this worldwide tragedy.

SOME FAVORED LOCALES OF WORLD HUNGER

This May alone, 23 of Tanzania’s 25 regions had enough food to viably survive the summer, said Deputy Minister for Agriculture, Food Security and Cooperatives Godfrey Zambi. He goes on to make the case to local media; “[i]t is only a small part of the country which faces shortage of food and the food we have is enough for all of them.”

Zambi continues, saying that until May 7th of 2015, the National Food Reserve Agency had 463,180.42 tons of maize, 5,710.27 tons of sorghum and 4,342.7 tons of rice reserved across the country.

A LITTLE LATE FOR WARNING

But Zambi made this announcement and implicit plea for help long before this year’s harvest season began. The present climate and food production levels of the nation make it obvious that many people are going to suffer from food shortage. The merciless weather has caused unusually long periods of droughts and equally long rainfall and floods that have forced the nation into a period of chronically reduced crop production.

These impoverished conditions are not limited to Zambia. Tanzania was projected to begin its own period of dangerous food shortage this June, and, globally, a report by FAO hypothesized that world hunger is presently affecting 805 million people, despite existent international efforts to reduce this great plight to humanity.

FORMERLY IMPOVERISHED NATIONS’ RECOVERIES ARE SOON TO BE TRAVESTIES

According to the Global Hunger Index 2014, 26 developing countries reduced their score by 50%. This means that Angola, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chad, Ghana, Malawi, Niger, Rwanda, Thailand and Vietnam have all made incredibly significant progress reducing their respective populations’ food needs.

However, the threat of future food shortage is growing stronger and closer in time than we as a global community previously thought because of the accelerating progress of global climate change.

GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE EXACERBATES EXTREME WEATHER

In a recent report made by Grantham Mayo van Otterloo (GMO), humanity is coming precariously close to suffering a total breakdown of food systems linked to warming, drought, flooding and precipitation, which, if you haven’t kept track of extreme weather phenomena over the past twenty-five years (or even the past decade), are becoming more of a variable every single year.

The GMO report cites the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and goes on to say that global climate change doesn’t just cause short-term food shortages, but actually alters the way food is produced worldwide, pushing food prices even higher, which only exacerbates the social antagonism of world hunger.

The Global Sustainability Institute (GSI) of Angilia Ruskin University published a report in June predicting that by the year 2040 the price of food will be four times higher than they were in 2000. The GMO report noted that this is twice today’s price to eat.

“The results show that based on plausible climate trends, and a total failure to change course, the global food supply system would face catastrophic losses, and an unprecedented epidemic of food riots,” warned Aled Jones, the institute’s director, in an article recently published by Business Insider. “In this scenario, global society essentially collapses as food production falls permanently short of consumption,” Jones laments.

IT’S TIME TO WAKE UP

In case you’re wondering if this is simply leftist fear-mongering, or the result of uncritical, picayune reporting; food production is reduced by rising temperatures because global climate change forces farmers to change their most fundamental farming methods. This is because they are always planning for subsequent seasons, and not simply holding on to past traditions for kinship’s sake, or whatever. In fact, according to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report from 2014, every single decade of general warming that occurs decreases the total quantity of food the world is able to produce by 2%, which is roughly 4.86 million tons.

This is just the tip of the poverty-laden apocalyptic iceberg we’re facing as a global community. For more projected statistics of how global climate change will threaten our ability to eat, please consider the IPCC’s report linked here.

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Global Climate Change Exacerbates Worldwide Food Shortage

Another exciting kind of #space by #Moleskine. - http://clapway.com/2015/07/05/expo2015-in-milan-moleskine-is-the-future-of-human-space-123/

Artists, designers, futurists and even the eminent First Lady Michelle Obama assembled en masse to Milan this summer to experience EXPO2015, an exposition introducing the sublime dreams of how we will use space in the future, comprised of over 100 pavilions with a cultural acuity spanning the world. It debuts a future whose space reflects the progress of an increasingly globalized human identity, sans national and ethnic divides.

With a list of attendees whose reputation nearly renders Obama’s quotidian, those of us too busy to make it may have missed something spectacular. But fear not, for Milan-based Moleskine invited a dollop of architects, designers, illustrators and drawing enthusiasts to sketch the Expo pavilions in addition to Milan’s beautiful landmarks, for an architectural point of reference.

Designed with Adobe, the Moleskine Smart Notebook sketches were uploaded in real-time for the rest of us to fest in tense with this artistic vision, giving us a future lens of our own. Let’s have a look!

CRITIQUE OF PRAGMATISM

The Italian Pavilion is sketched by Misiadesi. Its entrance curves into space straight out of Kubrick’s vision of the future. Resembling a spacecraft visiting for the day, is at once an echo on the 1960’s drive to expand human perception, to grasp the world firmly, by the joints, snugly interfacing the best of humanity with nature’s uncanny wonders. But inside, we see a reflection of how this drive to interface with the world alters our own structure in the jagged walkways, layered pylons and redundant superstructures that come together perhaps to critique the aesthetic worth of pragmatism.

ÉLAN VITAL

Emilie Romano’s Moleskine drawings of the Nepal Pavilion screams vitality from the far reaches of time. Inverted square pyramids supporting more pyramids rising into the sky in shrinking succession to a singularity exclaimed by King Kong’s war cry. This part asian, part sub-continental expressionist rendering seems to limn a cryptobiologic–a logic of life from a time before history, before time was time and life was perhaps more vital, and un-quantifiable.

HUMAN COMMUNION

In Christiana Donzelli’s Moleskine depiction, Uraguay’s Pavilion gives us our first taste of human life. Long arching pergolas shade an amalgam of homonids collecting around what could be a town well. Massive pylons stretch into the sky at relaxed acute angles, bringing focus to the megalith which reads the name of the nation on wood in the midst of human bustle and excitement.

DESERT EXPEDITION

The Angola Pavilion feels perhaps erected in a desert, as if Burning Man were a cultivated architecture of its own. A long passageway, possibly 20 by 30 meters, and a city block deep, is shaded by alternating loose wire frame canopy, allowing the thin human forms below to walk over the group’s newest find: a wave rising out of the ground, giving explorers a better view of this spacious oasis. Christian Gerasolo just gave this writer a dream to look forward to.

GLOBALIZATION

The Belgium Pavilion, sketched to beautiful detail by Misia Design’s adept use of Moleskine, reflects something of a more self-conscious cosmopolitanism, bringing together disparate uses of space into one block; a restaurant is crammed behind a Belgian Fries fast food store. Canopies and giant umbrellas shade humans discussing themselves over coffee and snacks. The aqueduct of the future rises out of the far left in nine pipes which turn down back to the planet in discontinuous shifts, creating an arch. Behind glows a blue superstructure, rising up to support a massive canopy, a sail really, a sail pointed up at the sky, carrying this space up into the future. Behind, in the distance, is a silver skyscraper, reminiscent of the twin towers, watching things develop from afar, both behind and ahead of us all.

MEGALITHIC COMMERCE

Caffe Cluster, a massive space enclosed by wooden planks rising more than 30 feet to the ceiling. A single yellow stripe, one meter tall carries pertinent information across the space for people to study and note below, perhaps for coffee, perhaps for what one could hypothesize is happening here: the transiting material of human business; goods exchanged for projects transporting human interests and speculation into the creation of new spaces, into the future.

HUMAN SOCIETY

Andrea Battistoni renders the dualism inherent in architecture clear. On the left we see the hustle and bustle of transiting persons of varying professions, age and class. Some converse, others wait, while one baby carriage rests unattended in front of a man, perhaps homeless, rests equally unattended against the edge of the central structure, which appears constructed of thin, overlapping planks. Conscious of this sea-worthy effect, around the corner are three levels of red doors, all open to human activity. A single human face nearest our vantage is mid-double-take, turning back perhaps to view the space as its represented on the right of the image; sans humans, sans color; the central structure rests mysterious.

ARCHITECTURE AND CONSCIOUSNESS

Daniela Tediosi’s Caffe Cluster seems to limn something of human consciousness in view of new space. A short yet tall hallway is decorated with paintings. One features an exhausted boy resting against a wall with one leg out, clamping his eyes shut. At bottom, we see a man turning his attention to us in a multiplicity of overlapping outlines endemic of the paradox in generating space, that it flows forward, turning away and back at itself, its innate difference from itself folding outward into time.

GAZE OF CIVILIZATION

Arianna Franchi’s rendition of architecture shows us that Moleskine can also be endearingly modern. The same space displayed by Battistoni’s sketch is displayed again in black and white. The central wooden structure’s doors are not all ajar here, but the ones that are contain some stockpiled material. Pairs of legless human figures stand around in noir style, speculating below giant rectangular screens which hang from above. In the center of the ceiling hangs a globe, perhaps to show that this too is under the gaze of the Earth; a panopticon to human life.

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Moleskine is a classic for sure. Check their travel notebook out on Clapway Trends:

Expo2015 in Milan: Moleskine is The Future of Human Space