Official Launch: In Hot Water

Welcome to International Rivers' climate blog! Our climate team (Barbara Haya, Patrick McCully, Payal Parekh, Ann-Kathrin Schneider and Katy Yan) will be covering a variety of hot dam and climate related issues.

• We'll cast a critical eye at carbon offsets, and in particular the efforts by the hydro lobby to make money out of the Kyoto Protocol's Clean Development Mechanism. And we'll look at what better ways may exist to transfer climate friendly financing and technology.

• We'll review emerging science on how dams contribute to global warming pollution.

• We'll comment on how we can best meet human needs for water and energy in a warming world. We'll look at how our existing water and energy infrastructure may be impacted by new patterns of droughts and floods. And we'll monitor attempts to use climate change to justify a new wave of dam building.

• We'll report on new studies on how river ecosystems may respond to a warming world.

• And we'll write up anything else with a climate, energy or water link that we find interesting, and we think you might find interesting too.

Hope we can provide some enlightment to our readers,

Barbara, Patrick, Payal, Ann Kathrin and Katy