The global cost of disasters is growing: The economic burden of disasters is intensifying. While the direct costs of disasters averaged $70–80 billion a year between 1970 and 2000, between 2001 and 2020 these annual costs grew significantly to $180–200 billion. But the real cost is far higher. Disaster costs …
EL NINO, the reversal of ocean currents across the Pacific that periodically disrupts the world's weather, has won another round of its cat-and-mouse game with climate modellers by sneaking up largely unseen. In the past two months, waters in most of the tropical Pacific have warmed dramatically, by up to …
BIOLOGISTS firmly believe that parents cannot transmit to their children the traits they acquire during their lifetimes. Though a language can be learnt and passed on to the younger generation, when it comes to heritable traits, the Darwinian theory of evolution remains the cornerstone of existing knowledge of evolution of …
TRANSPORT policy is one of the biggest influences on the course of development and often determines how sustainable' that subsequent development will be. This is especially true wherever population densities are high. Yet it is subtle and is poorly understood. Each generation's lessons tend to be forgotten by the next …
Six years after the International Labour Organizatio6 (ILO) launched the International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC), reliabloata are still lacking. A recent ILO estimate places the number of child workers across the world at 73 million. With most nations not even recognising the problem - only 19 …
IN THE wake of the devastating energy crisis, energy- related issues were catapul- ted onto the geopolitical agenda as one of the main issues affecting the global economy. But as the spot price of oil stabilised in the volatile Rotterdam market, energy policy was again rele- gated to the background, …
Forests help maintain the environmental conditions that make life possible, from regional hydrologic cycles to global climate. Frontier forests, large, ecologically intact and relatively undisturbed natural forests, are particularly important as they store tremendous amounts of carbon. Without these forests, this carbon would go straight into the atmosphere as carbon …
The war of whales goes on. With the whaling season about to begin in the north Atlantic and the north Pacific, leading conservation groups recently urged US President Bill Clinton to take immediate action to protect the worlds endangered whales. The groups including Greenpeace and tW World Wide Fund for …
ALZHEIMER disease (AD) is now recognised as a serious public health problem. in a large number of people, AD develops at a rather late age of about 65 years. Alzheimer was hitherto considered to be a Western problem because of longer life span - the us for example has over …
SCIENTISTS are not saints. Neither are they modest, nor do they believe in the con cept of loving one's fellow-folk. That, unfortunately, is the impression that one is likely to get after reading The Third Culture. The title refers to C P Snovs book The Two Cultures written in the …
The UN has urged governments to promote sales of technology to control pollution, in a series of studies commissioned by the UN Development Programme (UNDP). One of the studies underlines the need to spread information about investment opportunities in the environmental field and better enforcement of environmental laws. Another of …
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ANDERS WIJKMAN the first World Water Forum was organised in Marrakesh, Morocco, on March 21-22, 1997, as one in a series of meetings preceding the un General Assembly Special Session (ungass) on a five-year follow-up to the unced. One of the objectives of the forum was to mobilise political support …
IN A development having far-reaching implications, dam critics and proponents from all over the world agreed to work together to set up an independent commission to review the world's dams at a workshop in Gland, Switzerland, on April 10- 11. The top-level commission will review the social, economic and environmental …
The global fish catch now appears to have reached the upper limits of sustainability. More than one billion people, mostly in developing countries, depend on fish as a primary source of animal protein. As human populations continue to grow, the demand for fish will rise further, reducing the average per …
Poverty, especially in rural areas, and illiteracy go hand in hand. The majority of the world's poor, about 1 billion of the world's 5.7 billion people, live in rural areas. Of those, 500 million are children. About 40,000 people die every day from hunger-related causes, most in rural areas. About …
THE proposals for a global forest treaty were strongly opposed by southern NGOs, including the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi, at the fourth meeting of the Inter-governmental Panel on Forests (IPF-4) comprising more than 70 nations, which ended in New York on February 21. The IPF was …
• Only one-fifth of the world's original forests still qualify as frontier forests (large, intact natural forests). • Three countries - Russia, Canada and Brazil - house more than 70 per cent of the world's remaining frontier forests and half of this lies in the far north where resource-extraction costs …
Public understanding of science and technology lags well behind public interest in these fields in most industrialised countries, according to two new studies disclosed at the recently held Symposium on Public Understanding of Science and Technology in Tokyo. It was agreed that the purpose of boosting public understanding is not …
the us has evolved a multi-pronged stra-tegy to tackle the problem of greenhouse gas emissions calling for the setting up of emission targets, reporting them and budgeting emissions by deve-loping and developed countries. According to the us state department, the guidelines will help both the developed and developing countries in …
in what may be regarded as the first nail in the coffin for persistent organic pollutants (pops), a regional pact negotiated in Geneva recently proposed to ban or restrict the use of some of them. Setting the ball rolling for a wider global negotiation, the pact, under the United Nations …
twin benefits: Researchers of Bharat Heavy Electricals Ltd, Hyderabad, have developed a solar thermal collector that produces power as well as hot water. The new device can provide 100 litres of hot water per day at 75-80
