IIED: The Vice-President of Nepal — His Excellency Parmanand Jha — hosted the launch of a new report that details how the country can benefit from bringing its environment and development policies into harmony. The report, by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the Kathmandu-based Asian Centre for Environment Management and Sustainable [...]
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Gadling: The Himalayan Stove Project is a non-profit organization that has a very clearly defined message and goal. The group looks to improve the lives of those living in the Himalaya Mountains while simultaneously preserving the environment there as well. To accomplish this lofty goal, the HSP intends to deliver 10,000 clean cooking stoves to [...]
International Affairs review: The energy partnership between China and India could become a leading example of progress on climate change. China and India have positioned themselves as defenders of the global South in the international climate change arena. The climate change debate, meanwhile, is firmly centred on whose responsibility it is to clean up the [...]
Times of India: The government has taken exception to the `biases’ in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Asia Pacific Human Development report, titled, One Planet, which was released on Thursday. UNDP, required to play a neutral role in international governance, has recommended that India and other countries in the Asia Pacific region take greater [...]
Zee News: Possibly the least urbanized country in South Asia, Nepal is also the fastest urbanizing nation in the region — and unless the government seriously manages urbanization better, the country could fail to attain economic efficiency from the process, a new World Bank study has warned. The findings of the study — Urban Growth [...]
Devex: Global demand for food will double in coming decades, through population growth and rising levels of consumption. Ensuring the planet produces enough food for all in a sustainable way will be a real challenge, and climate change will hamper our efforts if it is not tackled. Food security is crucial to helping the poorest [...]
UN-Habitat: has developed a checklist for mainstreaming gender under the second phase of Cities and Climate Change Initiatives (CCCI) initiated by UN-Habitat in 20 cities of 13 countries. The check list is being tested in different countries and Nepal (Kathmandu Valley) is one of those few countries chosen by UN-Habitat. The purpose of testing the [...]
The Hindu: The former Chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation G. Madhavan Nair said here on Thursday that human intervention was not the only reason for climate change, but that solar radiation also had a major role in global warming and climate change. Interacting with students at the ‘Science-mathematics-environment awareness camp’ organised by the [...]
IRIN News: The needs of millions of indigenous mountain people across Nepal are overlooked, imperilling their food security and hindering their economic progress, activists and experts say. “People in the mountains of Nepal are worse off in terms of total poverty – food and non-food poverty,” said Jean-Yves Gerlitz, co-author of a recent study on [...]
Vancouversun: Experts seek ways to boost production; World will need 70 per cent more food by 2050 In flood-damaged fields in the Philippines, farmers are testing a hardy new variety of rice that can survive completely submerged for more than two weeks. In Kenya’s Kibera slum, poor urban families are turning around their diets and [...]
Hill Post: Ignorance is not always bliss; not when the climate and pristine ecology is at stake. A change in the climate that has served millions of life forms from the beginning of time does not just affect our surroundings. It ropes in our future generations too. 2 years ago, I crossed the Rohtang Pass [...]
Sudan Vision: The timely, thought-provoking essays of this book provide valuable evidence of the impact of different gender and faith perspectives on practical development issues while also highlighting the complexities and ambiguities of religious influences. Development workers, researchers and social activists will gain from these studies a greater awareness and more critical understanding of how [...]
RAYAGADA, India, Apr 27, 2012 (IPS) – Tribal farmer Harish Saraka has rediscovered the key to sustainable farming in this rain-dependent hinterland of eastern Odisha state – mixed cropping. Saraka, 38, is careful not to take credit for helping to turn around farming in this area, in the news just a decade ago for starvation [...]
The News: Siachen is the only Glacier of Karakorum range melting with unprecedented rate, the cause of which is the military presence in the area and not global warming. The high-resolution images of the Siachen glacier show deep cracks every 10 feet (crevasses), both in longitudinal and transverse directions. The retreat of the glacier is [...]
Forestry Nepal: Climate change is contemporary global threat to the animal world. Green house gases are resulting global warming which is creating different impacts in the world. Because of human activities green house gases are increasing. Nepal’s temperature is increasing at an alarming rate. Increasing temperature is creating different impacts on biodiversity, health the environment [...]
Scientific American: The two-stroke rickshaw, although convenient in traffic-snarled cities, is a toxic nuisance–but new engines could clean up their act. Banned in Delhi for a decade, smog-spewing combustion engine–powered rickshaws are fading away in India and in many other countries, thanks not only to inroads by minivans, but also to improved rickshaw motor designs [...]
DowntoEarth: 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 their lives while preserving [...]
CO2 Science: Bali et al. (2011) introduce their review of what we know about Himalayan glaciers by noting that a “glacial inventory carried out by the Geological Survey of India reveals the existence of over 9,000 valley glaciers in India and at least about 2,000 glaciers in Nepal and Bhutan,” citing Raina (2006). And they [...]
National Geographic: “REDD is the new beast in the forest,” said Patrick Anderson of the Forest Peoples Programme in Indonesia here at Climate Change Mitigation with Local Communities and Indigenous peoples workshop in Cairns, Australia. Deforestation gobbles up an area the size of Greece (13 million hectares) every year. As if that loss wasn’t bad [...]
PTI, London: The world’s surging population is a big driver of environmental woes but the issue is complex and solutions are few, experts at a major conference here say. Answers lie with educating women in poorer countries and widening access to contraception but also with reforming consumption patterns in rich economies, they say. The four-day [...]
By Suzanne York, HowMany.org,: A study just released by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) is warning that climate change could exacerbate environmental disasters in Asia and result in a surge of migration by people fleeing crises. In its report, Addressing Climate Change and Migration in Asia and the Pacific, the ADB observed that more than [...]
Urban air pollution is set to become the top environmental cause of mortality worldwide by 2050, says a new report by France’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The worst countries affected will be China and India. The report released March 15 was issued with a strong warning, “Act now or face costly consequences.” [...]
OECD report says pollution will become biggest cause of premature death, killing an estimated 3.6 million people a year by 2050. Urban air pollution is set to become the biggest environmental cause of premature death in the coming decades, overtaking even such mass killers as poor sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water, according [...]
Innovative measures by women farmers across India are helping several poor families adapt better to climate change and keep hunger at bay. As Sursati from village Janakpur, district Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh, explains, “Earlier, we could not produce enough food for a year because our village would get water-logged by the flood waters. Now, using [...]
As the world celebrated International Women’s Day, my thinking goes back to the time of my childhood I spent in my remote village — a beautiful green and mountainous land in the north of Pakistan. I remember women and little children getting up before sunrise and help their families in fields during the sowing and [...]
A Sustainable World Will Advance the Rights and Welfare of Women International Women’s Day celebrates the vital roles of women in society and the global progress made toward gender parity. Thus far development programs in health and education have directly addressed and improved the particularly vulnerable plight of women. But detrimental disparities between women and [...]
Climate change challenges us to rethink the entire narrative of human progress and a range of unsustainable political and social practices. This process will be deeply disturbing yet potentially transformative, says Professor David Schlosberg, who will deliver the inaugural 2012 Insights lecture tonight at the University of Sydney. In his talk “Politics in a climate [...]
What are the gender dimensions of climate change? As a starting point, we know that women and men do not experience climate change equally. Pre-existing gender inequalities mean that neither their contributions to the carbon emissions responsible for climate change, nor the way that they experience its effects, are the same. In many developing countries [...]
In January, the U.S. Agency for International Development released its long-awaited climate change strategy. Climate Change & Development: Clean Resilient Growth provides a blueprint for addressing climate change through development assistance programs and operations. In addition to objectives around mitigation and adaptation, the strategy also outlines a third objective: improving overall operational integration. The five-year [...]
This year’s unusually rainy season in Peru is having a negative effect on the wellbeing and health of women in rural areas who are forced, for example, to spend three times as much time walking to collect firewood and water. But the authorities continue to turn a blind eye to the problems they face. “It’s [...]
Climate change has major social implications. Many of the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people already feel the effects of climate change, and adverse impacts are unavoidable for millions more. The negative impacts of climate change push those living on the margin closer to the edge and can hamper the development pathways of entire regions [...]
Mr. Cyril R Raphael: In this article Mr. Raphael writes the agony of mountains in general by taking an example of overall development in one of the Indian mountain states called Uttarakhand. His discourse covers the social and economic development, governance, leadership, availability of basic amenities, health, education, livelihood, effectiveness of information and communication, role [...]
When it comes to improving global air quality and reversing anthropogenic changes to the climate, we don’t exactly have much room for error: Experimentation with ultimately unhelpful management techniques could waste precious time and resources, and might even do further damage. Luckily, climatologists and meteorologists have developed increasingly precise mathematical models that allow researchers to [...]
Rising temperatures, reduced rainfall and excessive numbers of grazing animals are worsening desertification and drying up grasslands in western Tibet, says a Chinese geologist who has explored one of the region’s uncharted rivers. Yang Yong said he had observed desertification in parts of the upper reaches of the Yarlung Zangbo River, and believes this could [...]
Population is ‘our biggest challenge’ says government chief scientist Sir John Beddington. The next world population milestone of 8 billion will come sooner than we think – perhaps as early as 2025 – yet we remain reluctant to debate the issue. A forthcoming Royal Society report may force us to While many commentators look ahead [...]
The government in support with the World Conservation Union is working to formulate a gender and climate change strategy to stress the need of gender-responsive policies and strategies in combating the climate change impact. A three-day workshop titled ‘Linking gender and climate change’ is being organised from Tuesday by the Ministry of Environment (MoE) in [...]
National Geographic: We have the knowledge that can contribute to finding solutions to the crisis of climate change. But if you’re not prepared to listen, how can we communicate this to you? — Marcos Terena, Xané leader, Brazil. The precipitous rise in the world’s human population and humankind’s ever-increasing dependence on fossil fuel-based ways of living [...]
Through Climate Change community of UN Solution Exchange India the Earth Day Network has floated query on Women and the Green Economy for its Campaign (http://www.earthday.org/wage) to increase the opportunities for women’s leadership in designing and advancing the new Green Economy. It finds that there is limited participation of women in the discussions, planning, and leadership of the newly [...]
Scientific American: Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, says the government’s latest assessment of climate change, projecting big shifts in how the nation feeds itself. Global warming threatens China’s march to prosperity by cutting crops, shrinking rivers and unleashing more droughts and floods, [...]
An extensively peer-reviewed study published last December in the Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics indicates that observed climate changes since 1850 are linked to cyclical, predictable, naturally occurring events in Earth’s solar system with little or no help from us. The research was conducted by Nicola Scafetta, a scientist at Duke University and at [...]
NDRC: Climate change promises to have a very big impact on water supplies in the United States as well as around the world. A recent study commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a leading environmental group, and carried out by the consulting firm Tetra Tech found that one out of three counties across [...]
Gender and Sustainable Mountain Development in a Changing World Conference Vision In 2002, ICIMOD organised the international conference ‘Celebrating Mountain Women’, as the only global event during the International Year of Mountains to focus on mountain women in the context of sustainable mountain development. It brought together 250 participants from 35 countries around the world. [...]
BioOne: Despite the growing number of studies and research projects on climate change adaptation, only a few have examined the gender and cultural dynamics of the adaptation process. Inequality has been identified as a major indicator of the vulnerability of individuals and groups; nevertheless, the gender and cultural aspects of inequality have not received much [...]
K N Vajpai: This UN conference on climate change (COP) remained a place where the people from around the world discuss, debate and come to a conclusion on various confronting issues our communities face around the world on climate change. In this note I am trying to discuss three important aspects of this conference on [...]
Durban Post by Dr.C. S. Silori*: This note is on the major happening during COP 17 at Durban in South Africa during UN Climate Change Conference on December 4-5, and how the ‘equity’ issues has emerged as major challenge for the world leaders in context to future development and climate change. December 4, Sunday, was [...]
UNEP: Investment in Green Technologies Can Improve Women’s Climate Adaptation Capacity & Livelihood Opportunities. There is increase in Human Trafficking Associated with Climate-related Disasters. Women, particularly those living in mountain regions in developing countries, are facing disproportionately high risks to their livelihoods and health from climate change, as well as associated risks such as human [...]
Nature: Independent study quantifies human influence on global warming. Natural climate variability is extremely unlikely to have contributed more than about one-quarter of the temperature rise observed in the past 60 years, reports a pair of Swiss climate modellers in a paper published online today. Most of the observed warming — at least 74 % [...]
IPS (Durban): Negotiators at the 17th Conference of Parties owe it to the world’s more than seven billion people to deliver a deal with a work plan for agriculture, a sector that is expected to be the worst affected by climate change. Lindiwe Majele Sibanda, CEO of Food Agriculture Natural Resources Policy Advocacy Network told [...]
It’s intrinsically scary: 7 billion people, growing to 9 billion. Can we feed them all? Already, obviously, we don’t. But climate change could make global food insecurity much, much worse. This week, coinciding with the opening of the United Nations’ climate talks in Durban, we’ve seen Oxfam warn that extreme weather threatens food security – [...]
Reuters: Sammad Sheikh of Tangchekh village in north Kashmir cannot understand why the rice fields that his family cultivated for generations are drying up. “It is a mystery as to why water is getting scarcer in summers,” he says. “This has been happening for the past few years though there have been one or two [...]
IPS: South Africa, Nov 30, 2011: Managing the impact of increased disasters due to climate change will only be possible if such efforts are led by local communities, say non-governmental organisations working in climate change. “We cannot use the excuse of money – or the lack of it – not to do anything. Yes, developed [...]
Daily Times: Since 2006, the food insecure population in Pakistan has increased by 12 million while the number of the severely food insecure population (consuming less than 1,700 kcal per day) has risen by 9.6 million to 45.3 million people – 28 percent of the population. Two thirds of these new severely food insecure people [...]
From the Atkins to the Dukan, protein-based diets are big news in the celebrity world. But what effect is our love affair with meat, fish and cheese having on the environment? Barely a week goes by without news of another ‘wonder diet’ hitting the headlines. Along with the bedroom antics of the Premier League’s finest [...]
IWMI: As the negotiators, activists and journalists gather in South Africa for the UN Climate Change Conference, once again the crucial role of water in mitigation and adaptation strategies needs to be addressed. No doubt much of the discussion in Durban will focus, quite rightly, on a political solution to the thorny issue of curbing [...]
Bhutan is a small fragile mountainous country situated in the southern slopes of the eastern Himalayas. Its total land covers 38,394 sq km. The climate is strongly influenced by its topography with elevations ranging from about 100m in the foothills to over 7,500m to the north covering three distinct climatic zones: 1) the southern plains [...]
The Hindu Kush-Himalayan (HKH) region is highly dynamic as there are many socioeconomic and environmental drivers of change at play, including climate change. The impacts of these changes challenge the resilience of natural and human capacities and environments in the region. Climate change is believed to contribute to extreme weather events and possibly to increase [...]
Times of India: Isolating the human imprint on global warming amid natural climate fluctuations requires long-term analysis and not short term studies, satellite data reveals. The data indicates that the lower troposphere (up to eight km above the earth’s surface) has warmed roughly by 17 degrees Celsius since the beginning of satellite temperature records in [...]
Noreen Haider: Writes from her visit to the beautiful Naran valley of Khyber Pakhtunkwa province in Pakistan, where she observes various dimensions of social and environment development. Noreen came across various developmental projects and activities in the region and finds that poor education and poorly planned social and environmental projects lead to acute poverty natural [...]
Eurasia Review: Time has come to become serious about the future of the river. There is a growing perception that the Ganga might completely dry in next fifty years if no effective action is taken to purify the river, keep the flow of its water intact and control the global warming. There cannot be a [...]
