It is a commonly held view that future wars in the world will be fought over that most basic of necessities, which is fast becoming scarce: Water. Only 2.75 percent of the world’s water is fresh – and soon to be the most sought after (and fought after) commodity in the world. The last century [...]

The climate change is no more a myth as scientific evidences as well as occurrence of frequent floods, cyclones and droughts around the world have proved beyond doubt that it is real. The fluctuations that occur from year to year, and the statistics of extreme conditions such as severe storms or unusually hot seasons, are [...]

Global warming and climate change are the biggest threats the world has ever faced and they need to be tackled on emergency basis by forming and implementing policies to counter the adverse effects of our everyday activities on the climate. This was observed at a seminar on “Climate Change-Consequences and Mitigation Measure” organised by the [...]

Climate Change Study Center in Islamabad: Pakistan is situated in one of the most vulnerable regions to the impacts of climate change. Better governance system with sufficient policy interventions coupled with support from the international community can help minimize the adverse impacts of climate change. In Pakistan the policy responses to climate change in some [...]

Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani Thursday called for a global approach to respond to climate risks in view of vulnerability and inability of developing nation to cope with the challenge. Participating in an interactive Session on “Adapting to Climate Risk” that focused on how the communities, companies and countries were adapting to the risks posed [...]

It is official: India has the world’s most toxic air. In a study by Yale and Columbia Universities, India holds the very last rank among 132 nations in terms of air quality with regard to its effect on human health. India scored a miniscule 3.73 out of a possible 100 points in the analysis, lagging [...]

The best reassurance that Pakistan can have is full Indian compliance with the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty. This article is not about the complex political or strategic reasons that the water establishment in the government and/or the army in Pakistan may have for projecting water as a new core issue between that country [...]

DAVOS: Pointing out that Pakistan has “excellent” relationship with India, Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani on Thursday said cooperation between the two to tackle climate change was “doable”. He said Islamabad wants to work with New Delhi on this front. “Yes, certainly there can be cooperation. We have excellent relationship with India and we want [...]

Sudhirendar Sharma Tagged as fragile, remote and marginal, these three aspects have featured prominently in discussions and deliberations concerning development in the mountains in our part of the world. Retired but active academician N S Jodha, a former senior staff with the Kathmandu-based Integrated Center for International Mountain Development, has been credited for using these [...]

Noreen Haider: It has been more than six years when the Northern areas of Pakistan were hit by one of the most devastating earthquake in the history of the region. The earthquake measured 7.6 on the Richter scale and within the very few first seconds created an unimaginable devastation in an area of more than [...]

CDKN: Disasters and Climate Change Disasters can be sudden, such as earthquakes or floods, or may build up gradually, such as a drought.  An important consequence of climate change will be the increase in the frequency and magnitude of extreme events such as floods, droughts, windstorms and heat waves. Whether hazards become disasters depends on [...]

DAWN: In Pakistan, 3.57 billion dollars need to be spent in the coming 18 years to deal with the affects of climate change Pakistan, Guatemala and Russia have been the countries worst hit by climate change in the recent past, with thousands of lives lost to extreme weather events. In addition to being the worst-affected, [...]

Business Recorder: Pakistan is losing cumulatively $1 billion per day due to the environmental degradation while the successive governments have never given serious attention to the issue. This was the crux of the seminar on “Strategic Environmental Assessment – in the context of Framework for Economic Growth – Taking the bull by the horns” organised [...]

Dawn: PAKISTAN’S climate change policy whose draft took more than a year to be readied is now under print and may be presented to the federal cabinet for approval in a few weeks. The draft will unveil an action plan to mitigate adverse effects of extreme weather events as witnessed in 2010 and again in [...]

Pakistani and Indian experts have urged their respective governments to declare all Himalayan glaciers as “protected areas”, and demanded immediate demilitarisation of Siachen to preserve the world’s second longest glacier.  ”Glaciers are important and a major source of the Indus Rivers System. To preserve these glaciers; there is an immediate need to declare all Himalayan [...]

Throughout 2011 we have seen  some of the extreme weather effects of climate change stinging. Global warming means killer storms more worse than Katrina and Gustav, unexpected flooding in Asia, drought in Eastern Europe, unseasonal heavy rains in western Africa. These events  have also reduced crop yields, further hampering the chances of relief. 2012 will [...]

The Nation: Climate change is one thing and the lack of cooperation between affected countries quite another. Pakistan points the finger of blame at India, while others in the region are also suffering on account of no clear-cut policy on how Himalayan waters are to be shared and conserved. Accords and treaties may have been [...]

DAWN: Pakistan has decided to challenge in the international court of arbitration a decision of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to grant carbon credits to India on a controversial hydropower project without mandatory clearance of its trans-boundary environmental impact assessment. Simultaneously, the water and power ministry has sought the opinion from the [...]

Dawn: This month’s prospective meeting of the Abu Dhabi Dialogue Group comprising seven states sharing the rivers rising in the Greater Himalayas would be a watershed event as the group is expected to adopt a joint initiative to minimise the impact of glacial melt. The group comprises Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India and Nepal. [...]

Dawn: Development projects in the country are often executed without considering their human and environmental impact and sustainable development can only be achieved by putting people and environment at the heart of development process. This was stated by experts and social scientists belonging to Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), here Wednesday in a meeting with [...]

The Dawn: The Abu Dhabi Dialogue Group comprising seven states sharing the rivers rising in the Greater Himalayas is expected to meet early next month to adopt a joint initiative to minimise the impact of melting of glaciers. The group comprising Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India and Nepal was set up in 2006 in [...]

Since Pakistan Weather Portal (PWP)’s creation on March 6, 2011, our aim is to help and create awareness among the Pakistani public and we have been successful in doing so. PWP has created an independent weather community in Pakistan that was never seen before in the country. Our next aim is ‘climate change’, a controversy [...]

Pakistan Today: The need of the hour is to ensure policy planning and proper implementation to mitigate the adverse effects of climate change while pursuing an ambitious agenda to tackle climate change impacts on the country. This was observed at a day-long Climate Change Conference held on Thursday at the Makli Gymkhana in the coastal [...]

Pakistan has been warned of frequent floods of disastrous nature like the ones that battered the country in 2010 and 2011 in the Indus river owing to rapid glacier retreat and shifting of monsoonal zones by about 100 kilometres towards northwest regions. In a recent communication it sent to the government, the Asian Development Bank [...]

Book: Because of the importance of mountains and the many services they provide, sustainable mountain development does not only regard mountain communities, but is a global concern.. Climate change, increasing natural disasters, food and energy crises, population growth, water scarcity and desertification, loss of biodiversity, degradation of ecosystems, migration, and growth of cities – the [...]

The Friday Times: As Pakistan and its citizens reel under the impact of two devastating floods within two consecutive years, the realization that climate change is upon us has begun to sink in – what with over 20 million people displaced from the northern tip of the country to the southernmost in 2010, and another [...]

Daily Times: Millions of people are affected in the Himalayan Indian-Tibetan border country because of reduced rainfall and crops. Combining surface and satellite data, and high resolution computer climate models, it is clear that these trends will become progressively more serious The main aim of the UN Climate Summit at Durban, which concluded unsuccessfully, was [...]

CBS News: A half-century record of history has melted away from the Naimona’nyi glacier in southwestern Tibet, highlighting the changes coming to glaciers across the Himalayas. Ice cores from glaciers capture a detailed history of the atmosphere and climate from the time when the snow and ice fell. They record dust, ash and even minute [...]

Pakistan Journal of Meteorology: The Himalayas, Karakoram and Hindukush lofty mountain ranges meet each other in Pakistan hosting more than 5000 glaciers in Pakistani geographical limits which feed snow/ice melt water to the Indus River System together with summer monsoon. Due to global warming, frozen water resources have been losing their reserves at an unprecedented [...]

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 [...]

Tribune Pak: Pakistan won the ‘Robin Hood’ award at the UN climate talks for proposing financial transaction tax (FTT) as an innovative source of financing the Green Climate Fund (GCF), on Saturday. The award was given to Pakistan by the youth constituency of the UNFCCC, known as YOUNGO. “The Green Climate Fund is very important [...]

Durban Post by Dr. C. S. Silori direct from United Nations Climate Change Conference at Durban 2011. “We don’t’ understand the message God has sent us…..”, this is how the mountain communities of Peru react to the recent signs of climate change they observe in their day to day life. There is enough to indicate [...]

Soham Baba, leader of the Soham Baba Mission Foundation, says more efforts are needed to preserve nature than to destroy it. Speaking at the Inkosi Luthuli International Convention Centre, he stressed that climate change effects have drastically changed the livelihoods of the Himalayas. He vows to continue fighting on behalf of the indigenous people, saying [...]

Good Environment: This graph from the  Energy Information Administration communicates the reality of renewable energy in America better than any other single source. Renewable energy covers only a small slice, 8 percent, of the country’s needs. And despite the focus on biofuels and solar power, the chart shows that more than a third of that slice [...]

Durban Post: Dr. C. S. Silori* writing from Durban on Day-II & III, 29-30 November 2011 I had promised to come back, and here I am again with a short report of what happened on day 3 of the ongoing conference of the parties (COP 17) in Durban. It was a hectic day, as I [...]

National Geographic: Google Earth Shows How Dams Could Worsen Climate Change. A project of two NGOs highlights far-ranging effects of damming rivers which is a new interactive Google Earth video tour aims to teach people how damming rivers around the world can exacerbate climate change. The video, created by the nonprofit conservation groups International Rivers [...]

K N Vajpai: Writes on the expected outcomes from Durban Climate Change Conference (CoP 17)in terms of growing momentum of action and alarm bells from new researches. His discourse is about the meager role played by the leaders from most vulnerable regions like Himalayas and Andes during this important global conference.   With the representation [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The SERVIR Web Mapper allows you to access and display data or functionality from several external sources to create a new service. Using the Web Mapper interface, you can choose specific data sets and information products by type and date, display them on a base map, and further manipulate them for analysis. If a layer [...]

Oxfam: Review of Climate Change Adaptation Practices in South Asia. Climate change is predicted to have severe consequences for South Asia, particularly in agriculture, which employs more than 60 per cent of the region’s labor force. Some of the predicted impacts of climate change include: increased variability in both monsoon and winter rainfall patterns; increases [...]

Knight Science:  We’ll get more of them soonish.. Not so sure, but pretty sure, they’re already here. A tip of the hat to Andrew C. Revkin, at the NY Times blog Dot Earth, for calling attention to a remarkable piece, an appreciation that I’d like to second. At the BBC its environmental reporter Richard Black [...]

MRD Journal: The Indus River Basin is characterized by downstream areas with the world’s largest irrigation system, providing food and energy security to more than 215 million people. The arid to semiarid basin is classified as a net water deficit area, but it also suffers from devastating floods. Among the four basin countries, Pakistan is [...]

Pak Observer: The International Energy Agency (IEA) in its annual World Energy Outlook Report has warned that the world has just five years to avoid being trapped in a scenario of perilous climate change and extreme weather events. It warned that the current trends of rising fossil energy use will lead to irreversible and potentially [...]

Daily Star: 17th Saarc Summit ends in Maldives with 20-point Addu Declaration; South Asian leaders also agree to forge effective cooperation for full implementation of Safta, better connectivity and steps towards Saarc Market for Electricity. The 17th Saarc summit ended at Addu in the Maldives yesterday with the adoption of a 20-point Addu Declaration to [...]

The News: The federal government would help provinces achieve Millennium Development Goals’ targets by bringing one million hector of new land under tree cover by 2015, a senior official said here on Thursday. He said devolution of the environment ministry would not affect the targets set by the federal government and introduction of National Forest [...]

CLIMATE 2011: Relatively little scholarly work has focused on comparative evaluation of South Asian countries’ environmental performance (EP) in addressing issues of vulnerability to climate change. It is an accepted fact that climate change induced problems in South Asia have been increasing over many years, but their effects largely have been blamed on extreme poverty [...]

Business Recorder: The humanitarian emergency caused by the few last months’ devastating floods in Asia is a warning that the situation could get worse, The people affected by this crisis have lost everything, and their difficulties are only just beginning. Two countries Pakistan and Thailand have been badly hit by the disaster. Hundreds of thousands [...]

Coinciding with Bhutan’s ‘Climate Summit for a Living Himalayas’, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development and the Ministry of Agriculture and Forests, Royal Government of Bhutan, will hold a series of events to draw the attention of policy makers, government agencies, development agencies, community workers, youth and children to the potential for using remote [...]

This has been an eventful year for natural calamities – drought in the Horn of Africa, floods yet again in Pakistan, and now also in Thailand. NGOs, think-tanks and scientific organizations eager to share their insights or shed some light on what could be causing these events have tried to keep pace with nature by [...]

WorldWatch: Scientists, policymakers, and community representatives from across South Asia met earlier this month to discuss the many threats that climate change poses to the continent’s Greater Himalayan region. Across Nepal and Tibet, average temperatures have been up to six times warmer in the mountains than in the plains, triggering changes in regional weather patterns. [...]

Dr. R. S. Tolia: Writes this article as his ‘Third Inning’,  days those have been happily spent on reflecting over and about mountains and mountain people. This has taken him to various mountainous parts of India, neighbouring Nepal and recently to the beautiful city and canton of Switzerland, Luzern, in the northern Alps.  Besides learning [...]

DAWN: A safe environment is prerequisite for healthy life. Major environmental issues currently confronting Pakistan include water, energy, pollution and waste management, salinity and water logging, irrigated agriculture, biodiversity and climate change. Pakistan being one of the most urbanized countries of the region is facing overall deterioration in all these areas. Environmental hazards have become [...]

Mega dams have the multipurpose applications and considered as the greener energy source than most alternatives. But as compensation to this development it may result a wide range of environmental degradation. This study aims to search the fact of environmental impacts due to the existing and proposed mega dams of the Himalayas and also to [...]

Alertnet: In Pakistan, environmental degradation is both a cause and consequence of different socio-economic problems including deepening poverty, declining performance of different crops and worsening problems with human and crop diseases. Environmentalists say that a fragile and damaged resource base is a key cause of rising poverty. Degraded land affects agricultural yields and forest resources [...]

Noreen Haider: On the night of eighth September 2011 unusual amount rain started lashing the districts of southern Sindh including Badin, Mithi, Mirpur Khas and Saanghar and continued unrelentingly for the next two days before it took a break. Its immediate effect was that large areas became inundated and communication was broken down.  The rain [...]

Sudhirendar Sharma: Writes about the potential of mountain states in India in terms of their natural wealth and kind of benchmark for the services provided by them. By taking examples from developed countries his doubts are about insignificant valuation of tangible ecosystem services, therefore the unlikely transaction of such payments in near future. His discourse [...]

AlertNet: Wearing colourful traditional dresses with silver jewellery and bangles on their arms, the women of Tharparkar district look festive. But the empty earthen pots they carry tell a different story. “Walking for three miles and (hoisting) a … bucket filled with water through a wooden pulley from a 130-feet-deep well twice a day is [...]

HIMAL South Asia: The loss of their nomadic lifestyles is pushing the Van Gujjars, traditional herders of the Himalaya, into poverty and cultural alienation. For centuries the Van Gujjar community has been practising ‘transhumance’, moving between two distinct ecozones of the Himalaya. Every summer, the Van Gujjars move from the forests of the Shivalik range [...]