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On Tuesday at COP21, the MIT Climate CoLab announced the launch of a series of online contests to help strengthen the resilience of vulnerable countries to respond to climate-related hazards. The suite of contests are part of the UN Secretary-General's Climate Resilience Initiative: Anticipate, Absorb, Reshape (A2R), a global, multi-stakeholder initiative aimed at accelerating action on the ground to enhance climate resilience of the most vulnerable countries and people by 2020. 

The report ranks 171 nations in terms of their risk. It has two components: the exposure they face from extreme events like typhoons, drought and earthquakes, and their ability to deal with those catastrophes, or their vulnerability. Sea-level rise is a key driver of the assessment. Many of the top 10 nations facing high risks are located along coastlines.

Two reports released this week examine the increasingly urgent risks to which major corporations around the world are vulnerable thanks to climate change, along with their own part in exacerbating those risks and how they could act to mitigate them.

Hyatt Hotels Corporation has announced a long-term seafood sustainability strategy in partnership with WWF - to increase its procurement of responsibly sourced seafood and eliminate the procurement of highly vulnerable seafood species. For the first phase of the partnership, Hyatt has set an initial goal of responsibly sourcing more than 50 percent of its inventory by 2018.

It has already been established that climate change-specifically atmospheric carbon dioxide emitted by fossil fuel burning-has been acidifying the oceans, damaging fragile coral reefs and disturbing vulnerable marine ecosystems. But the McGill scientists discovered that carbon dioxide also has begun to drift to the ocean bottom, dissolving the very materials that help put the brakes on acidification.

London, Jakarta, Shanghai and Houston and other global cities that are already sinking will become increasingly vulnerable to storms and flooding as a result of global warming, campaigners have warned ahead of a landmark new report on climate science.

Conservationists got a mixed bag of news following an international group overseeing the world's species protection initiatives meeting this weekend. On the positive side, officials decided to officially take the giant panda off of the endangered species list, citing steady successes in preserving the bears' natural habitats. But though this is certainly a small victory, pandas are far from out of the woods when it comes to their species' long-term survival.