FAO has launched a new website offering a wide range of data and information tools on agriculture in Myanmar.

As is now well-known, the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentrations, as well as other greenhouse gases, due to human activity, has produced concerns regarding the energy balance of the global atmosphere, and this shift in balance will cause global patterns of temperature to increase and precipitation to change — the broad outlines are that wet areas will get wetter and dry areas will get drier. What is less well known is just how daunting the task is of stabilizing climate change. Stabilizing emissions does not stabilize the concentration in the atmosphere, and even after achieving stabilization of CO2 in the atmosphere, climate will continue to change, with both ocean and land temperature continuing to rise for decades, and sea levels continuing to rise for centuries. The world has therefore already a future “pre-committed” to warming on account of carbon dioxide that humans have already added to the atmosphere. Human activities are also signifi cantly infl uencing Earth’s environment in many ways in addition to greenhouse gas emissions and climate change. For many parts of the planet, the challenging environmental concerns are “place-based”: shortages of clean and accessible freshwater, health threatening changes in the chemistry of the atmosphere, severe degradation of ...