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The Millennium Development Goals Report - 2013
(64 page .PDF report)

1 July 2013 – Thirteen years after the world set the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), countries have made big strides to meet the eight anti-poverty targets by their 2015 deadline, says a United Nations report released today, which stresses that the unmet goals are still within reach, but nations need to step up their efforts to achieve them.

“In more than a decade of experience in working towards the MDGs, we have learned that focused global development efforts can make a difference,” Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says in the report's foreword, in which he urges for accelerated action to close development gaps.

“Now is the time to step up our efforts to build a more just, secure and sustainable future for all.”

thinkprogress.org - by Joe Romm - June 30, 2013

(SEE LINKS BELOW FOR 2004 STUDY, 2005 STUDY, AND 2013 CRYOSAT ARTICLE)

Scientists predicted a decade ago that Arctic ice loss would bring on worse western droughts. Arctic ice loss has been much faster than the researchers — and indeed all climate modelers — expected (see “CryoSat-2 Confirms Sea Ice Volume Has Collapsed“).

It just so happens that the western U.S. is in the grip of a brutal, record-breaking drought. Is this just an amazing coincidence — or were the scientists right and what would that mean for the future? I ask the authors.

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A view of Dresden on the morning of 5 June, before the Elbe had crested. Flickr/tigion

sei-international.org - by Marion Davis - June 7, 2013

The floods now devastating Central Europe, and severe floods in Norway last month, are part of a pattern of increasingly frequent disasters that require new approaches to risk management. 

As of June 6, the floods in Austria, Germany, Slovakia and the Czech Republic had killed at least 16 people, and damages were so severe that some said they could exceed the more than €21.1 billion cost of the historic 2002 floods in the region.

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