Climate change and bioenergy
This site contains the FAO Glossary on Climate Change and Bioenergy related to agriculture, forestry and fisheries in Arabic, Chinese, English, Spanish, French, Russian and Italian.
The project for this Glossary was launched in 2008 by the Meeting Programming and Documentation Service, KCCM (now CSGL), in cooperation with the Institute for Atmospheric Pollution (IIA) of the National Research Council of Italy (CNR), and it was continued under the framework of the Special Allocation on Implementation of the Language Policy 2008-2009, with the contribution of the Interdepartmental Working Group on Climate Change, IDWG-CLIMA. As a result, the collaboration with CNR-Italy enabled FAO to also integrate concepts in Italian. Although some of these concepts are contained in the official IPCC glossaries, they are included here in order to retain the Italian equivalents.
The concepts have been selected from FAO and international documents and publications on Climate Change, as well as from the proceedings of meetings of experts discussing Climate Change and Food Security issues, including the High-Level Conference on World Food Security: the Challenges of Climate Change and Bioenergy held in June 2008. As far as Bioenergy is concerned, the selection of concepts focusses on the main FAO publications in this domain, such as The Unified Bioenergy Terminology (UBET) (2005) and the Unified Wood Energy Terminology (UWET) (2001) by the Forestry Department.
FAO pays particular attention to enhance language use and to standardize technical terminology for its meetings, documentation and publications. It also promotes standard best practices for terminology management and storage, facilitating growth, interoperability and exchange.
The Glossary contains 212 concepts with synonyms, variants, definitions, remarks and context fields where appropriate.
It should be noted that the Glossaries of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), with its specific mandate as a major source of scientific information for negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC, and for the international community, should be regarded as the international standard bearer on the science and impacts of climate change. This FAO glossary focusses on core concepts within the multidisciplinary fields of its work, such as food security, agriculture, forestry, fisheries and bioenergy.
These concepts are accessible online through the Climate Change Web site at http://www.fao.org/climatechange/en/ and they include revisions and additions to concepts as they have evolved through time in FAO's work.
This Glossary will serve to facilitate multilingual communication and documentation in FAO's long-term objective of enhancing food security, sustainable livelihoods and environmental integrity through capacity building in Member Nations coping with climate change impacts.