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 …
Nicolas Sarkozy yesterday pledged more money and a new global partnership to bring down food prices - the latest ambitious but ill-defined plan to combat the worldwide crisis. The French president doubled to
The Stern report on climate change underestimated the risks of global warming, its author said on Wednesday, and should have presented a gloomier view of the future. "We underestimated the risks ... we underestimated the damage associated with temperature increases ... and we underestimated the probabilities of temperature increases,' Lord …
spoiling act: A group of activists has alleged that a few countries led by Canada are sabotagingun's Rotterdam Convention. The ten-year old convention aims to control global trade in hazardous chemicals. Environmental, gender, labour and health groups from India and abroad have, in a joint statement, said the countries, including …
From his Cessna a mile above the southern Amazon, John Carter looks down on the destruction of the world's greatest ecological jewel. He watches men converting rain forest into cattle pastures and soybean fields with bulldozers and chains. He sees fires wiping out such gigantic swaths of jungle that scientists …
Rising food prices across the world are generating a great deal of heat and dust. Some of that high-decibel debate about food versus fuel and end of an era when food prices were declining, has found its way into India as well. The worst hit here is, of course, the …
Italy will achieve its greenhouse gas-cutting targets under the Kyoto protocol by buying carbon credits from Russia, under a deal announced yesterday that could cost the government billions of euros. Italy is expected to miss its Kyoto targets by a total of about 400m to 500m tonnes of carbon dioxide, …
These are the best of times; these are the worst of times. Charles Dickens' famous words describe the present state of European Union-Russia relations perfectly. There has never been as much trade and business between Europe and Russia. Yet political tension has not been this intense since the days of …
Rising food prices could spread social unrest across Africa after triggering riots in Niger, Senegal, Cameroon and Burkina Faso, African ministers and senior agriculture diplomats have warned. Kanayo Nwanze, the vice-president of the United Nations' International Fund for Agriculture, told a conference in Ethiopia that food riots could become a …
The debate on the advantages and disadvantages of upgrading the United Nations Environment Programme to a 'world environment organisation' (WEO) has gained momentum in both academe and politics. This article contends that a WEO would further the interests especially of developing countries, because it would provide them, first, a high- …
Poor countries at the U.N. conference have said they will not sign a global warming pact unless industrialised nations guarantee them billions of dollars needed to adapt to the impact of climate change. Nations in the Caribbean and South Pacific recounted how they are being hit by worsening floods, rising …
The United Nations conference on climate change, now on in Bangkok, is expected to produce an agreement to cut global emissions drastically by 2050. Over the years, countries committed to cutting emissions have submitted their estimates to UNFCCC. In 2004, India estimated that it emits 1,228,540 Gigagram (Gg) or about …
It's not only our carbon footprint we should worry about. Experts are looking for solutions to our growing water foot-print, as urban populations explode and the demand for bio fuels adds stress on water for farmland. The threat to climate change has drawn attention to carbon footprints, the amount of …
Scientists and officials from across the world meet in Thailand this week for the first formal talks in the long process of drawing up a replacement for the Kyoto climate change pact by the end of 2009. Around 190 nations agreed in Bali last year to start the two-year negotiations …
A meeting of United Nations member states in Bangkok on Monday to discuss climate change is the first in a series this year at which the action plan adopted at the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia, in December 2007, will be translated into concrete steps on the road …
As UN efforts to save the forests grind on, a range of alternatives is on offer Next week the United Nations will convene yet another meeting to debate a successor to the Kyoto protocol, its treaty on climate change. As usual, there will be long discussions about how to preserve …
The number of people in Asia infected with HIV could jump by more than 150 per cent, or 8 million, by 2020 unless more is done to combat the spread of the virus that causes AIDS, a report presented to the UN secretary-general said on Wednesday. That increase could be …
Biofuels are not only hurting poor consumers in Asia by driving up crop prices, they are also failing to help the region's farmers who have not been able to adapt their production to cash in on the boom, a United Nations report said on Thursday.
Food scientists are meeting in Cusco, Peru, this week to find ways of boosting world potato production to ease the strain of surging cereal prices on the world's poorest countries. Potato production already reached a record high last year as cereal prices rose, partly as a consequence of grain producers …
A child clings to its mother's beads in this file picture of a famine-hit Ethiopian village. The road from Harar runs for more than 600 miles east towards the border with Somalia, penetrating deep into the desiccated badlands of the Ogaden desert, the dusty heart of Ethiopia's war-torn Somali regional …
CIWEM has backed this year's sanitation-themed World Water Day and issued a reminder that billions of people have no access to adequate sanitation. The UK-based Chartered Institution of Water and Environmental Management (CIWEM) said March 22 should highlight the plight of the 2.6bn people who do not have clean, reliable …
