The UN’s trade and development body has downgraded its global economic growth projection for 2022 to 2.6% from 3.6% due to the Ukraine war and to changes in macroeconomic policies made by countries in recent months. While Russia will experience a deep recession this year, significant slowdowns in growth are …
Cities are as old as settled human history. This is abundantly clear in South Asia, with Harappa and Mohenjodaro being early indigenous examples and Varanasi representing a living embodiment of this tradition. In contrast, however, pervasive, large-scale urbanisation is a very recent phenomenon. Estimates put the total urban population of …
After several years of robust growth, the world economy today faces some serious and unenviable challenges. The US housing bubble of 2007 and the unfolding credit crisis, the decline of dollar vis-a-vis other major currencies, the persistence of large global imbalances and high oil prices threaten the sustain-ability of global …
Japan has called for emerging economies to set mid-term targets to cut greenhouse gas emissions, aimed at bringing them into a structure of binding levels to combat global warming. "Emerging economies should be engaged to the middle level binding measures, clearly not the same as those of developed economies," a …
The race by food-importing countries to secure farmland overseas to improve their food security risks creating a "neo-colonial' system, the United Nations' top agriculture official has cautioned. The warning by Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, comes as countries from Saudi Arabia to China plan to lease …
Flooding and poor harvests have caused North Korea's worst food crisis since the late 1990s and have put millions at risk, the United Nations' food agency said Wednesday. The food shortage threatens widespread malnutrition, the World Food Program said. "Millions of vulnerable North Koreans are at risk of slipping toward …
Ministers from about 35 countries have failed to make a breakthrough in the World Trade Organisation's (WTO) Doha round to open up global trade. Talkd to broker a new global trade pact have collapsed because key powers are unable to bridge their differences on food tariffs, the head of the …
V. Jayanth Calls for global partnership to save the poor; "Act immediately to boost agricultural output' CHENNAI: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned that the "double jeopardy' of high food and fuel prices threatened to undermine much of the progress made in achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). Critical challenges …
MILLIONS of Zimbabweans face starvation after the widespread failure of the latest harvest brought on by the Government's mishandling of land redistribution, and shortages in the shops caused by hyperinflation. The United Nations said hundreds of thousands of people required food aid immediately because they had harvested little or nothing …
Hundreds of millions of people will still not have access to sanitation by 2015 as the UN's Millennium Development Goals are "badly off track' on this topic, the World Health Organisation warned Thursday. "We are badly off track' to meet the MDG on improvements in sanitation, WHO coordinator for water, …
The UN agencies and various NGOs are facing major shortfall in resources to respond to growing global food shortages and environmental disasters. According to an estimate, the United Nations, the International Organisation for Migration and 239 non-governmental organisations need an extra $3.4 billion to respond to the world's most severe …
THE Government's green paper on carbon trading uses adjectives like "smoother", "gradual", and "measured" to describe the scheme's implementation, because cutting Australia's emissions by 60% in four decades is going to produce profound structural change, and, inevitably, political repercussions. Like a dentist poised above you, drill in hand, the Government …
The United Nations yesterday launched a 33.5 million dollar appeal to aid relief efforts in southwest China where a magnitude-8.0 earthquake on May 12 left nearly 70,000 people dead. "It is the hope of the United Nations and the international community that China will quickly recover from this enormous tragedy," …
A global report card on nations doing the most, and least, to clean up the environment. Greens could learn a lot from Franklin Roosevelt about how to track imminent environmental disasters. It may seem hard to believe in this age of data overload, but on the eve of the Great …
Leaders from the Group of Eight industrial powers will agree to establish a task force at their summit next month to tackle the world food crisis, a report said on Monday. The group will aim to address the immediate problem of food shortages in poorer countries as well as address …
New data from Greenland shows that the UN's dire warnings on global warming may be vastly understated------- In 1990, when climatologist Konrad Steffen established Swiss Camp, one of the first automatic weather stations on Greenland's ice sheet, global warming wasn't high on his agenda. Steffen's aim was to begin filling …
Thousands of villagers armed with sticks and machetes beat to death a Royal Bengal tiger Saturday after it had killed three people at Shyamnagar upazila in Satkhira, the police said. The critically endangered animal, one of about 600 in Sundarban, the world's largest mangrove forest, was lassoed after entering a …
