Central to the achievement of the Agenda for Sustainable Development is an adequate, equitably distributed and fully supported health workforce. Nurses are the largest occupational group and represent an indispensable force with which to combat inequities in access to health services and progress towards health-related Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), while …
• 1992 was the year of environment. More than 100 heads of state and government gathered at Rio to discuss the health of the planet. But the conference refusea to look at underlying issues -lack of global democracy at one level and local democracy on the other -that favour exploitative …
THE TRADITIONALLY smoke-filled Paris bars face an identity crisis: Will the recent ban on indoor smoking clean up their air? The law requiring special sections to be set aside for smokers was enacted after official figures put the number of smoking-related deaths at 54,000 last year in France. However, restaurateurs …
Tighter environmental laws could cost the European oil refineries upto $ 80 billion by the end of the decade, said delegates at a recent petroleum and gas conference. This could mean higher prices for consumers and bankruptcies among refineries. Klaus Kohlhase of British Petroleum (BP) and chairman of Concawe, the …
IN EUROPE, a ban on toxic waste movement between countries has led to a hot debate on free trade. Concerned by a legal ruling stating European Community (EC) legislation which bars governments from imposing prohibitions on trans-border passage of merchandise, many states have announced bans specifically relating to wastes. These …
UN SECRETARY general Boutros Boutros-Ghali's suggestion that the North and South should share equally the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN Commission for Sustainable Development (UNCSD) leadership has failed to enthuse Europeans and Americans. Mustafa Tolba (?), enjoying the support of UNCSD secretary general Maurice Strong, is virtually …
EUROPEAN spacecraft Giotto created history mid-July when it swept past the comet, Grigg-Skjellerup, some 240 million km away in space. Giotto flew within 200 km of the comet's nucleus at 14 km a second and collected valuable data, despite being handicapped after its 1986 encounter with Halley's Comet. Fragments from …
WESTERN investors are slowly destroying Papua New Guinea's lush green rainforests with their utter disregard for environmental safeguards while raking in profits from the island's immense natural wealth, be it copper, gold, lumber or oil. And the PNG government, its hands bound by a foreign debt to the tune of …
USA: 66 per cent above the international environmental aid levels of 1990 (though nobody knows what this means in dollars). Japan: Will increase its aid support from about US $1 billion a year by 50 per cent to about US $1.4 to US $1.5 billion a year from 1992 to …
THE SOUTH had a two-point agenda in Rio: funds and technology. It failed to get both. The North continued to insist that technology is a private resource which states cannot give away, whereas the South continued to ask for technology on preferential and concessional terms. If there was any movement …
IF THERE was one thing that African leaders wanted out of Rio, it was a convention on desertification. And finally they got it. The 47th general assembly has now been asked to set up an intergovernmental negotiating committee for the convention. The jubilant Africans, however, had numerous tense moments with …
IF YOU cannot agree to something right away, the UN has a simple solution: call a conference later. That is precisely what the Rio conference did on the vexatious question of straddling fish stocks. These are stocks of fish that migrate into one country's exclusive economic zone (EEZ) from another's …
WEN LIAN TING, Malayasia's permanent representative to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), won the epithet of "dragon lady" during the Rio summit for her unwavering opposition to the forest convention. The tough UNCED prepcom meetings, spread over a period of two years, required enormous mental and physical stamina, which …
Faced with European proposals for higher taxes on oil, Saudi Arabia is signalling desperately that it wants higher prices. This makes a change from its earlier policy of restrained oil pricing. This fortnight's crucial mid-year meeting of OPEC saw the conspicuous absence of the Saudi oil minister. This shift in …
The Greens in the European Parliament have asked the European Community to cancel the debts of poor countries, to safeguard the planet's ecological balance, and generate sustainable forms of development. Holding the IMF and the World Bank responsible for creating a scenario in which, for over five years, the net …
IT'S BEEN a rat race to get the patent. But Harvard University's onco-mouse, a creature designed in a laboratory for cancer research, may still not make it. In mid-May, shortly after the European Patent Office published its patent for this mouse that has been given cancer-causing genes, European green activists …
EUROPE is getting increasingly worried about nuclear fallout from the erstwhile communist republics. The G-7 leaders are expected to endorse a multibillion-dollar plan to improve the safety of nuclear reactors at their economic summit meeting in early July. The plan, which aims to prevent another Chernobyl, could cost anything between …
THIS fortnight the European Commission unveiled a plan, which its environment comissioner, Carlo Ripa di Meana, called "revolutionary" to staise a carbon dioxide emissions at their 1990 levels by the year 2000. Half of this reduction is to be achieved through a tax on carbon fuels - of $3 on …
THAT America rules the waves became abundantly clear to me when I witnessed USA flex its muscles over the entire world at the last session of the Climate Change Convention. The UN was reduced to functioning as an extension of the US state department. And George Bush made a "neutered" …
USA, Japan and the European Community have together pledged a total of US $75 million to the establishment of an International Science and Technology Centre in Moscow which will provide stable employment to scientists in the erstwhile USSR. That this is primarily a bid to scotch the likelihood of these …
PRIME Minister P V Narasimha Rao"s government has taken dramatic steps in less than a year of its existence towards a liberalised regime for the industrial sector. If the new policies indeed lead to increased economic activity, there will be greater pressures operating on the natural environment. Given India"s people, …
