Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Are missing palm trees causing more lighting deaths in Bihar appearing in ‘The Times of India’ dated 29.05.2025". The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Are missing palm trees causing …
PET, or polyethylene terephthalate, the plastic from which soft drink bottles are made, is about to become the pet obsession of high-profile fashion-conscious North Americans. Wellman Inc, a New Jersey-based textile company, has introduced an entire range of trendy jackets and sweaters made of recycled PET. Last year, it had …
Residents of Bhubaneswar were in for a hot shock when the temperature soared to 46.3 degrees Celsius on May 7. According to environmental scientists, the climatic disorder was caused by the large-scale construction of concrete houses and falling of the groundwater levels. Bhubaneswar has now earned the dubious distinction as …
ENVIRONMENTALISTS in Bangkok, Thailand, who are seriously worried about the high level of hydrocarbons that Thais breathe, can now heave a sigh of relief. The ubiquitous tuk-tuks -- nifty little three-wheelers with two-stroke engines -- held primarily responsible for the air pollution, are now being given a facelift by the …
THE Commission for Sustainable Development (CSD) will focus on strengthening the involvement of non-governmental organisations to ensure the implementation of Agenda 21. "We have to move beyond the classical notion of development -- of donor-recipient relationships -- into something where instead of compensations there are obligations arising from a joint …
ATTENTION was riveted to the proposed new world trade order at the recently concluded 9-day conference of the Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) in New Delhi. In an unusual display of solidarity, several Third World countries spoke out loud and clear on issues that the …
"TAKE the gold, but check the pollution": this is the new refrain, born of desperation, that the Brazilian government is directing at the thousands of gold-diggers who have reduced the Amazon basin to an expanse of infertile muck. The only way that the government can spare the Amazon river the …
DEVELOPING nations expect a new regime of trade barriers if the industrialised countries succeed in getting non-economic issues like human rights and the environment included in the international trade talks. The apprehensions were clearly evident at the recently concluded G 15 summit in New Delhi, where the industrialised countries were …
A GLOBAL ban on the export of toxic wastes now means that industrialised nations can no longer get ship them off to the Third World and sit pretty. The loopholes that had rendered the Basel Convention on the "control of trans-boundary movements of hazardous wastes and their disposal" a big …
CLIMATES and sea-level changes are intimately related. An increase in mean global temperature is directly proportionate to the sea level, the circulation patterns of ocean waters. This summarises the central theme of the book under review, an excellent synthesis of 26 published papers which address the complex phenomenon of climate …
THE WISDOM of public cautioning does work sometimes. Japan recently decided to gear down its controversial fast-breeder reactor programme, dogged by doomsayers both within the country and without. In its bid to make the country less dependent on oil imports, the Japanese government had come up with a plan to …
THE CORPORATE sector in Europe has been pinned wriggling under a microscope by an increasing and militant environmental awareness. Many more companies are drawing up elaborate plans to determine precisely how environmental friendly they can get without running themselves into the ground, reports the International Herald Tribune. At its commonest, …
IF A government wants to tilt opinion in its favour on an issue, all it has to do is sponsor a meeting of select "experts". That is what NGOs at Geneva accused some West European countries of doing when they organised meetings on Joint Implementation (JI) in Bermuda and New …
IN SPITE of awareness about greenhouse gases in the West, emissions there are on the increase. According to Marcus Rand of Greenpeace, national plans on greenhouse gas emissions for most European Community nations are in jeopardy because of commitments to build new fossil fuel power stations and new roads throughout …
WITH the European Community's carbon dioxide emissions rising and the developing countries reluctant to bail them out, industrialised countries found themselves jammed into a tight corner at the ninth meeting of the negotiations on the Climate Change Convention held in Geneva. Right at the start of the February 7-18 meeting, …
A 4.80 m long shallow water sediment core, collected from the inner shelf (at 22 m water depth) off Karwar, near Kali river mouth is studied for foraminiferal tracers of palaeomonsoons. The climate history of this core which represents the last 4,500 years approximately revealed the evidences of a significant …
TWO US oceanographers have used powerful supercomputers to perform the best-ever simulation of the world's ocean movements -- an important step towards forecasting how changes in ocean circulation will affect global climate over the next century. Albert Semtner of the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and Robert Chervin of the …
THOUGH retaining environmental issues high on their G-7 policy agenda, the leaders of the world's seven richest nations confirmed their determination to maintain the global Environmental Fund (GEF) as the sole funding agency for implementing the biodiversity and climate change conventions, adopted in Rio last year. In doing so, the …
THE FIFTH meeting of the members of the Global Environment Facility, held in Beijing in May, ended with the South getting some assurance on additional finance, and many conditions on how the money would be spent. Also under discussion were the governance structures of the GEF. With the "pilot" phase …
WERE IT not for the Moon, the climate on Earth would be dramatically different, say French geophysicists who have studied the effect on climate of the Earth's obliquity. The term refers to the angle through which Earth's spin axis leans away from the perpendicular to its orbital plane. The obliquity …
AN EXPLODING tank of radioactive waste at a secret weapons plant in western Siberia is reportedly contaminating much of the surrounding area. In what is billed as the worst nuclear accident in the region since the Chernobyl disaster, a radioactive cloud billowed northeastward from Tomsk-7. Officials said the exact amount …
