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 …
Even as environmental groups in the USA maintain silence over the concerns of the southern countries, European groups have taken the lead to initiate debates over the present unsustainable consumption patterns and lifestyles of Europe. One of the pioneering attempts in this direction was made by Friends of Earth (FOE), …
Social Scientists in South Africa are now looking forward to the use of Indigenous Knowledge Systems (iks) to achieve sustainable development and to preserve the traditional ways of looking after the environment. A recent meeting of social scientists, traditional leaders, agriculturists and farmers who gathered in this resort town of …
The two volumes are the result of the combined effort of CUSO***, a Canadian NGO, and environmentalists from Asia. The contributors share their experiences on a wide range of issues ranging from Asian values, morals, perceptions about developmental strategies, success stories and failures of managing natural resources. Having described the …
Revitalisation was the catchword at the United Nations Environment Programme (unep) right from the outset of the recently concluded 18th session of its Governing Council. "It is now time to turn words into action. It is now time to approach environmental issues in an integrated manner, in a way that …
Nearly three years after the June 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, progress in implementing Agenda 21 is mixed at best.While the post-Rio period has been marked by unfulfilled promises on many fronts and continued conflict between developed and developing countries, the third …
The government and the NGOs of Bangladesh are engaged in a war of words over the relevance of their respective roles in the nation's development programmes. Finance minister Saifur Rehman's diatribe against local NGOs, occasioned by a World Bank study that praises NGO programmes as being more relevant than government-sponsored …
This book offers a collection of 39 papers on the various research activities of scientists of the Central Arid Zone Research Institute, (CAZRI), Jodhpur, working in Rajasthan's arid zone. The book first deals with the natural resources inventory, and later goes on to describe the various researches being carried out …
Green philosophy has suddenly come under strong criticism from those ruled by economic logic, so much so that in the first few months, books lambasting environmentalism and debunking their theories of doom are swaggering in the US market. Small is Beautiful: Blowing the Whistle on the Greens by Wilson Beckerman, …
On April 27, Elizateth Dowdeswell, UNEP's executive director, began the 3rd Session of the UN Commission on Sustainable - Development in New York on a strident note. "if we aspire to greater security, to peace, to a decent quality of life, we know it cannot be achieved and sustained unless …
WRITING about "sustainability" is like, well, debating ad infinitum about writing. You can condemn writing, but even that will, generally, be in writing. Which is why it is difficult to get your teeth into the quasi-religious, flagrantly universalist register of the essays in part-I of this 3-part book. These seek …
HOW far can "indicators" take us in evolving practical approaches to achieving that Holy Grail, sustainability? Indicators are rapidly becoming the most widely discussed mechanism for monitoring the progress -- if any -- towards sustainable development. They have the potential to quantify, simplify and communicate complex situations in the economy. …
SOME economists and planning pundits are foxed by a paradox. While their timetested tools for measuring economic development -- Gross and Net Domestic Product -- indicate that a country is growing rich, they still find themselves at a loss to explain the hidden reality behind the columns of their balance …
"ATTACKING Poverty, Building Solidarity, Creating Jobs" --these are the 3 central themes on which the United Nations-sponsored World Summit For Social Development, to be held from March 6-12 in Copenhagen, Denmark, rests. Various international communities are patching together a last-minute-bid to define their stands on these issues. For, despite the …
A RESTRUCTURING exercise at the World Wide Fund for Nature International (WWFI) in mid-January is neck deep in controversy. The official version: 31 staff positions have been made redundant in an attempt to cut costs and decentralise operations at the WWFI secretariat at Gland, Switzerland. Critics believe that the slashes …
AFTER spending 6 months in the Indian Himalayas, my pessimistic attitude towards the developing world has eased somewhat. My experience has also led me to believe that the current ideology needs to be changed in order to restore the environment to the people, alleviating some of the everyday drudgery in …
THE Cairo conference turned into yet another example of the governments of rich countries bullying the poor ones into accepting their self-centred perception of how the world's natural resources should be matched with people all over the world. Nobody argues for not keeping the world's population in check; nobody, also, …
OPPONENTS of market economies have written many elegies to the erosion by the greed of capitalism of nature's primeval beauty. Their laments are akin to the loss of the Old World that the landed gentry felt at the coming of commercial farming. None of that romanticism left a lasting impression, …
WHATEVER happened to the North-South wrangle on the consumption issue? Two grandiose international meets are around the corner: on population next fortnight, and on social development 6 months later. In terms of attendance and task, they will belong to the genre of global summits concerned with sustainable development. Yet their …
THE Cold War has ended and so has the bipolar superpower configuration. The universal acceptance of democracy as a preferred form of government has had its impact. In shifting decision-making to the people through their elected representatives, the prospect of the people themselves having the final word in shaping their …
