The World Meteorological Organization’s State of the Climate in Asia 2024 report warns that the region is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average, driving more extreme weather and posing serious threats to lives, ecosystems, and economies. In 2024, Asia experienced its warmest or second warmest year on …
Source: N Mattson 1998, GENIE: An energy systems model with uncertain learning, quoted in Anon 1999, A GENIE for Imperfect Foresight, IEA/OECD ETSAP News, June
It is introspection time. As the country's forest bureaucracy sits down to assess the progress of the joint forest management (JFM) programme, a decade after it was introduced in 1990, what comes out clearly is that its success has been limited to only some parts of the country. Even today, …
The United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) human development report for 2000 has for the first time linked human rights to human development, particularly in the poverty eradication sector. "Human rights is not, as has sometimes been argued, a reward of development. Rather they are critical to achieving it," says Mark …
At a recent session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (csd), scientists, non-governmental organisations (ngo), farmers and industrialists discussed various farming methods that can maximise agricultural production. The session was held at the un headquarters in New York. Scientists and ngo groups presented data in front of government …
Fuel cells have arrived. Or perhaps they haven't. From all appearances it seems these technologies have failed to deliver. Nothing could be further from the truth. Available evidence indicates that renewable and clean energy technologies like fuel cells have lived up to many significant expectations and public policy goals. Are …
India's Union minister for petroleum, Ram Naik, lives in the dinosaur age. Only Indian politics can throw up such archaic thinkers, given the pits it has reached. At the 16th World Petroleum Congress, held recent in Calgary, where some 2,000 people were demonstrating and asking for public policies to bring …
A White Paper for Sustainable Coastal Development was released by Valli Moosa, the environment minister of South Africa recently. The document emphasises the importance of considering all aspects of the coast together while taking decisions about them and aims to establish a balance between the developed, rural and wilderness coastal …
THE mythical clock has struck. A billion and ticking at the rate of 29 per minute, 1790 per hour... The rise in human numbers is accompanied by a host of problems. Knowledge of the carrying capacity of India's lands is extremely limited. There is no worthwhile study covering even the …
WITH his newborn in his arms, 30-year-old Pooranmal stands helplessly outside Jaipur's J K Loan Hospital. The doctors have refused to operate upon his son. "There is no hope. They say my child is not going to live for long,' he says. The child was born on February 25, 2000, …
India is fast becoming the land of superlatives. For all the wrong reasons, of course. Be it August 15, 1999 (UN prediction), or May 11, 2000 (government of India estimates), the nation has reached the inevitable mark. At the time of Independence, the country's population was as low as 350 …
several vital issues pertaining to the manufacture and marketing of non-timber forest products ( ntfp s) was thrown up at a national seminar on sustainable management of ntfp s organised in Thiruvananthapuram by the Kerala forests and wildlife department. Participants at the seminar discussed a paradigm shift from timber-oriented management …
Chief David Syankusule is one of the 57,000 Tonga people from Zambia and Zimabwe who had to make way for the construction of the Kariba Dam in the late 1950s. "The colonial government decided they were going to build a dam irrespective of whether we accepted it or not,' he …
some meetings are convened to arrive at definite conclusions. But there are those that follow a routine merely to carry forward a tradition. The latter seems to be quite true in the case of the Conference of Parties ( c o p ) to the Convention on Biological Diversity ( …
the good thing about the United Nation's Commission for Sustainable Development ( csd ) is that it is moving in circles while all the other un commissions do not move at all. This was the cynical, albeit probably apt observation of a seasoned diplomat attending this year's eighth session of …
In japan , "the land of paradoxes', as Masafumi Nagao, a professor at the Centre for the study of International Cooperation in Education at Hiroshima University, puts it, the third sector that constitutes the non-profit and the non-governmental sector "is not without history'. The first and the second sectors comprise …
About 400 years ago, there was a city in Japan called Edo. Most of its one million people got clean water supplied close to their houses. Human excreta was not dumped into the river. It was used as agricultural fertiliser. The common people had a say in water management, which …
Despite being more expensive than conventionally grown crops, there is a growing preference for organic farming products, especially in the West and China. The primary reason seems to be their potential to push back genetically modified (GM) products. There is little hard evidence as to whether food produced by organic …
the last 15 years have seen a virtual explosion of intergovernmental negotiations to formulate global environmental treaties. This ecological globalisation is the result of the ongoing process of economic growth and globalisation which has linked the world's economies and now threatens to overuse the world's ecological systems to fulfill national …
During one of the meetings of the World Water Commission, which recently submitted its report in The Hague to a bevy of water ministers, a member had strongly emphasised the need for educating politicians about the importance of water. I, however, found that argument incorrect because I have rarely met …
