Communicating climate change presents us with a fundamental challenge. Climate change threatens all countries on Earth, regardless of their degree of development. However, telling the story of climate change, its causes and effects, and the ways in which we can contribute in the fight against it, remains a difficult task for any party involved, including the scientific community, governments, the media or nongovernmental organizations.

Policymakers need better information about the regional impact of climate change on water supplies, and on ways of adapting to it. For centuries, food production — and thus social development — has depended heavily on access to the water needed to grow crops or rear livestock.

For nations to understand the effects that climate change will have on their locality, it is essential to gather local data into an internationally coordinated database, the meeting, organised by the UK's Meteorological Office, agreed.

Scientific cooperation between Islamic countries has a lacklustre record, marked by a shortage of resources and a lack of political will for investment. The few countries that have invested heavily in recent years — including Iran, Pakistan, Qatar and Saudi Arabia — have chosen to work instead with scientifically advanced countries in North–South collaborations that offer more obvious benefits than partnerships among themselves.

In the parallel world of UN climate talks, where time is measured in endless debates about commas and full stops, negotiations have been going on for three years. But with only six days' formal talk now possible before a crunch political meeting in Cancún, Mexico, in November, the only progress being made is backwards.

The alternative theory of ecological diplomacy, on the other hand, focuses on facilitating peace through environment initiatives. Still, one might argue that diplomatic mechanisms like the international climate change negotiation process, illustrated at last year’s COP15 meeting, have not accomplished anything more than the promotion of good will between countries.

Drip by drip, the full story is emerging of last December's global diplomatic debacle in Copenhagen, when instead of setting the world on a new low carbon path and tackling climate change, 130 world leaders ended up with a weak deal and no prospect of a binding agreement for another 18 months.

For the last 20 years, politicians, diplomats, and green activists alike have assumed that dealing with global warming would require a United Nations agreement on the transfer of clean energy technologies from rich countries to poor ones