Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Futala Lake’s charm fades amid neglect and poor maintenance appearing in ‘The Times of India’ dated 25.05.2025". The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Futala Lake’s charm fades amid neglect …
The various mechanisms evolved through global negotiations to deal with shared environmental problems, such as climate change, fall short because they are not located within a larger debate on dealing with human well-being and instead focus only on limiting damage. The United Nations is best placed to support a common …
This new MoEF report documents India’s evolving framework for sustainable development since the 1992 Earth Summit and assesses the achievements and the challenges that the country faces. The year 2012 will mark twenty years since the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) or Earth Summit, held at Rio …
As the world gears up for the next round of United Nations climate-change negotiations in Durban, South Africa, in November, evidence has emerged that a cornerstone of the existing global climate agreement, the international greenhouse-gas emissions-trading system, is seriously flawed. Critics have long questioned the usefulness of the Clean Development …
This article examines the role of linkage politics in revitalizing the largely ineffective UN Convention to Combat Desertification(UNCCD). I argue that the UNCCD Secretariat has taken a leadership role in driving a regime linkage agenda that has focused disproportionately on linkages to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). …
As an intellectual contribution to the preparations for the 2012 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, a.k.a. Rio +20), Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future convened a task force of experts to discuss the role of institutions in the actualization of a …
The future of the world's biodiversity hangs in the balance as countries convene for crucial negotiations in Nagoya, Japan. The 193 signatory nations to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) pledged eight years ago to cut species loss "significantly" by this year. But studies show that the health of global …
This issue of Sustainable Development Insights argues that accountability-or lack thereof-is a fundamental challenge in confronting improved global environmental governance (GEG) and that success must be measured not simply by the vitality of the negotiation process but by the robustness of implementation. States as well as institutions must be judged …
VIEW FINDER NOT A USUAL EXERCISE Soldiers smell the ground to detect bodies of flash flood victims in Taiwan after Typhoon Morakot battered the island"s southern region in the second week of August. The typhoon, which Met officials call the deadliest in 50 years, also triggered mudslides; one such mudslide …
The problem of desertification sits at the interface of environmental and developmental concerns. In this article, we examine the institutional relationship between desertification science and policy through focus on the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) and its subsidiary body, the Committee on Science and Technology. We argue that …
At l’aquila in Italy, during a meeting of the world’s major boys and girls, India agreed to cap its carbon emissions. The agreement proclaimed the signatory countries would work together to limit global temperature rise to 2ºC from pre-industrial time. It was as if they were writing off bad debt. …
When nations made plans to save the ozone layer, they didn't factor in global warming. Quirin Schiermeier reports on how two environmental problems complicate each other.
In the run-up to the United Nations conference on climate change, scheduled to be held in Copenhagen, in December 2009 there is a great deal of discussion and speculation about what legal agreement should emerge from that conference. Given the current state of the negotiations, and the range of legal …
If policy-makers are to reach international agreement on greenhouse-gas emissions at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change conference in Copenhagen in December, they need to be optimistic that their decisions could have swift and overwhelmingly positive effects on climate change. The reality is less certain, but no less …
The north may renege again and again but the south must go on fuelling their growth scientists have rung the alarm bell again, this time in Copenhagen, predicting a climate change more severe than the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s fourth assessment report. Still, who will bell the fat cat? …
During the last few decades of the neoliberal-imperial globalisation process, social relations have been fundamentally transformed. Neoliberalism was never a purely market-driven process but also a shaping of other social relations and institutions, especially of the state. The state, private corporations, public discourses but also many aspects of everyday life …
