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 …
Pollution reached its highest recorded level in Hong Kong during the first week of the New Year as low winds and dirty air from the mainland left the area cloaked in smog. The air pollution index at Tung Chung in north Lantau was 161 at 1 pm
the Union ministry of environment and forests ( mef ) has recently circulated draft rules on industry siting, a decade - and-a-half after the guidelines were first formulated. Choice of industrial sites has caused more conflict, between project proponents and the local people who will be potentially affected, than any …
Briefing paper on climate change for members of Parliament by Anil Agarwal - Calling upon policy makers to recognise India's stake in the international climate change negotiations.
a country's national income is taken as a measure of its level of development. Development planners, economists and politicians frequently use components of national income like the Gross Domestic Product ( gdp ), Gross National Product ( gnp ), Net National Product ( nnp ) and so on for many …
After experiencing a 10-year low in economic growth, the cash-starved Sri Lanka government has decided to sell its valuable teak trees. This decision has sparked a major controversy with environmentalists criticising the move. A committee, appointed by president Chandrika Kumaratunge, said the government could earn US $35 million by selling …
This research report on India addresses an important policy issue faced by policy -makers in many developing countries: how to allocate public funds more efficiently in order to achieve both growth and poverty-reduction goals in rural areas. This research is particularly important at a time when many developing countries are …
for the first time in five years, global carbon emissions from combustion of fossil fuels declined in 1998, according to new estimates released by the us -based Worldwatch Institute. The emission rate fell by 0.5 per cent, which in real terms means around 6.32 billion tonnes. Interestingly, this decline took …
As the world gears up to face the challenges of the new millenium, India's growing population threatens to break all records and touch the one-billion mark. At this juncture one worrying question before us is whether we will be able to feed our masses. The answer lies in maintaining the …
it was only a few years ago, after Amartya Sen had moved to Harvard from Oxford, with highly regarded contributions in development economics, that the fraternity also had already begun to regard him as a potential Nobel Prize winner. Since then, he had moved from his earlier fields to the …
Yogendra Chaudhry nobody can deny that damage caused by pollution is greater than the investment needed for setting up adequate pollution control measures. The data on pollution being generated is alarming. In Delhi, the industrial effluent load is 320 million litres per day (mld). Over 16 drains discharge about 1,900 …
Air pollution in the congested Bangladeshi capital Dhaka is responsible for a large number of premature deaths and is affecting several million people a year, a World Bank official has said. "We estimate that air pollution in Dhaka causes some 15,000 premature deaths and several million cases of sickness every …
I read your piece on Amartya Sen with great interest. I, too, have some reservations on the stand taken by the Nobel laureate. As an economist schooled in the uk and the us , Sen is most likely to ignore poverty's ecological dimensions. But can the people working to alleviate …
"India has rich democratic and entrepreneurial traditions and has, in the face of emerging rural crisis, thrown up numerous outstanding examples of communities struggling to improve their environment, some of which have shown through the dint of their hard work and persistence that dealing with
It was only in the early 1970s that the Chipko Movement laid out before the country the need for an environmental agenda and emphasised the significance that the environment held for the poor people of India. It made Indians realise that deforestation was taking place at a rapid pace and …
In 1985, both Kalahandi in Orissa and Jhabua in Madhya Pradesh came into the limelight. This followed reports of children being sold in Kalahandi and food riots in Jhabua.Both these problems were related to the ecology. More than a decade later, Jhabua's ecology has regenerated through a government-sponsored but people-managed …
In 1978-79 , a third of the households were purchasing firewood logs. But in 1992-93, just about one-sixth were doing so. These are the findings of a nationwide survey, conducted by the New Delhi-based National Council of Applied Economic Researh. Undoubtedly, the survey has raised innumerable questions about the long …
The good news: India's forest coverhas more or less remained unchanged from the period 1991-93 to 1993-95. From 63.96 million hectares(mha), it is only marginally gone down to 63.34 mha,claims the ministry of environment and forest's (MEF) sixth State of Forest reports . But doubts persists as to how useful …
Environmental health, that is, health problems that result from changes in the environment, are nobody's business today. The ministry of health says that this is the business of the ministry of environment and forests. The latter is quick to pass the buck back to the former. But in the unending …
Every single chapter of the Fifth Citizens' Report that deals with the urban sector paints a distressing picture. The chapter on "Atmosphere' shows that it is not just metros like Delhi which are reeling under severe air pollution but also towns like Rajkot in Gujarat and Gajroula and Dehra Dun …
