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 [...]

PakObserver: WHILE Pakistan was still grappling with last year’s devastating floods that marooned one-fifth of the country, it has again been hit by the natural calamity causing devastation of enormous magnitude. According to National Disaster Management Authority, 5.3 million people have been affected by this summer’s heavy rains in 23 districts of Sindh. Of these, [...]

The Nations: A total lack of seriousness when it comes down to the necessary nitty-gritty of dealing with both the existing and potential catastrophic effects of climate change has pushed Pakistan into a fast descending spiral of utter hopelessness right across the board: A situation exacerbated by political shenanigans, human greed and a dangerously escalating [...]

MSNBC: The high peaks of the Himalayas may soon be a beacon for adventurous solar power entrepreneurs, suggests a new study that identified the lofty region as having some of the world’s greatest potential to capture energy from the sun. Other regions not traditionally considered hotbeds of solar power potential include the Andes of South [...]

Reuters: It is more than a year since the devastating July and August 2010 floods in Pakistan that affected about 20 million people and killed an estimated 2,000. Many believe that the disaster was partially fuelled by global warming, and that there is a real danger that Pakistan, and the Indian subcontinent in general, could [...]

Maha Mussadaq , The Express Tribune : ISLAMABAD:  In the list of countries most vulnerable to disasters due to climate change, Pakistan’s ranking has been downgraded to 16 in 2010-2011 from its previous position at 29 a year earlier, according to the Climate Change Vulnerability Index by Maple Croft, an organisation which maps over 100 [...]

Noreen Haider: Nature strikes with mind blowing force at the most pristine of places and with no compassion for people or property. The Hunza Valley of Gilgit Batlistan, a paradise on earth, turned into a chaos with a catastrophic land slide. Noreen makes a personal connection in this passionate essay with suffering of her childhood [...]

Daily Times: President says devastation caused by climatic changes is a wake-up call to search permanent solutions to natural disasters ISLAMABAD: President Asif Ali Zardari, on Friday, called upon the international community, especially the countries advanced in disaster management, to assist Pakistan in capacity building so that it could meet eventualities caused by natural calamities [...]

UNNC: The head of the United Nations disaster risk reduction agency arrives tomorrow (6 Oct) in Pakistan to discuss possible measures to reduce the impact and recurrence of major floods, which have inundated much of the Asian country in the past two years. Margareta Wahlström, the Secretary-General’s Special Representative for Disaster Risk Reduction, is scheduled [...]

Syed Iqbal Hasnain:Climate change and black carbon are causing the glaciers in the Hindu Kush-Karakorum, Himalaya, and Tibetan plateau to melt.  Their waters feed the river systems throughout South Asia and Southeast Asia, and are essential for drinking water and for irrigating wheat, rice, and other crops throughout the region on which the local populations [...]

DAWN: More than climate change, more than the depletion of fresh water supply, a fast population growth rate is the key element which will determine the survival of humankind. Of these three, population growth requires the least complex planning in a way but the most challenging strategy. On the one hand, its success does not [...]

FutureChallanges: Unstable climatic patterns, natural disasters, water scarcity, agricultural destruction and other evidence of environmental degradation is widespread today in most countries of the world. But the high impact of the deadly side of climate change has become much too common in the countries of the deprived. Among the countries worst affected by Climate Change, [...]

IDSA: Institutions are often assessed on the basis of their response to crises. The unfolding flood crisis in Sindh draws attention to the state of institutional response to disasters in Pakistan. Ms. Maurvi Memon, a former PML-Q legislator, has alleged that the flood crisis in Sindh was manmade and that the Meteorological Department and Climate [...]

Friday Times: What role has climate change played in this year’s flooding? Climate change is the multiplier only – it is bad for everyone, especially the poor but it is even worse for the poor under bad governance. The present flooding in Sindh has affected all 23 districts, almost the entire province. The damage is [...]

Friday Times: With several inherent flaws, the draft National Climate Change Policy is likely to suffer the same fate as its predecessors A man asked a neighbourhood grocer for 25 kilogrammes of grain and said he would pay later. The grocer agreed and started weighing five portions of five kilos each. Each time he weighed, [...]

Vimal Khawas: Mountains form one of the most important bio-geographical resource zones of the world. They are remote areas covering 52 per cent of Asia, 36 percent of North America, 25 per cent of Europe, 22 per cent of South America, 17 per cent of Australia, and 3 per cent of Africa making up, in [...]

IPS News: At least 200 million people in the world are in danger of being left without water, because they depend for their supply on glaciers that are melting, although paradoxically the process creates the illusion of plentiful water resources. While the average global temperature has risen by 0.6 degrees Celsius in the last 100 [...]

Environment News Services: Environmentalists are blaming climate change for the unprecedented massive monsoon rains in Pakistan, which so far this year have affected eight million people, claiming 350 lives and damaging 1.3 million homes. Over the past month, the country’s southern region has received the highest monsoon rains ever recorded, local metrological experts confirm. In [...]

The News: With Pakistan and India preparing to have next round of talks on Siachen area, the experts opined that both countries need United Nations’ mediation to at least find ways and means to cope with growing environmental challenges in the highest battlefield that have started posing grave threats to people living in this region. [...]

Pabitra Mukhopadhyay:Water as a resource from management perspective needs to be managed in the mountains very differently as compared to plains. This requires handling few uneasy questions. This essay attempts to see water management of the HKH debunked from global culture] If you live in Hindu Kush Himalayas, most likely you have grown stoic to [...]

International Rivers: When the World Commission on Dams reviewed the development effectiveness of dams, multipurpose projects with large dams, power plants and irrigation schemes had the worst social, environmental and economic track record. As the world is grappling for appropriate answers to climate change, influential actors such as the World Bank want to give these [...]

Dawn: Speakers at a seminar on flood relief measures have said that in the wake of climate change reports, it has become crucial for Pakistan to make special efforts to meet the challenges posed by natural disasters whose frequency has increased over the past few years. They added that this could be done by identifying [...]

Tribune Pakistan: The government is waking up to the need for permanent solutions to tackle malaria, dengue and flooding given that the country “may have to learn to live with heavy rains and floods due to global climate change”. According to President Asif Ali Zardari’s spokesperson Farhatullah Babar, this was the outcome after a slew [...]

UPI: The United Nations appealed for $357 million for flood-ravaged southern Pakistan. An estimated 5.4 million people have been affected by the floods stemming from heavy monsoon rains. Nearly 1 million homes have been destroyed and 72 percent of crops lost in the worst affected areas in Sindh and Balochistan. In launching its Rapid Response [...]

The Global Adaptation Index (GaIn) summarizes a country’s Vulnerability to climate change and other global challenges on the one hand and its Readiness to improve resilience on the other hand. It aims to help businesses and the public sector better prioritize investments for a more efficient response to the immediate global challenges ahead. Countries of [...]

Alertnet: Pakistan is expanding its network of glacier monitoring stations in the Himalayas, in an effort to improve understanding of glacier melt and provide better warning of floods. But some experts say it’s not happening fast enough, as the country continues to be hit by disasters. Massive flooding in mid-2010 affected some 20 million people [...]

Tribune Pakistan: One would most certainly make mockery of themselves if they were to discuss climate change and global warming with Pakistani politicians. Some might deem it as a spurious theory and a waste of their time, while others — with some insight — would hesitate, as solutions to these issues take more years to [...]

BoiOne: 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 most [...]

BioOne: Mountains occupy 24% of the global land surface area and are home to 12% of the world’s population. About 10% of the world’s population depends directly on the use of mountain resources for their livelihoods and wellbeing, and an estimated 40% depends indirectly on them for water, hydroelectricity, timber, biodiversity and niche products, mineral [...]

Green Left Au: Last year’s floods were the worst in Pakistan’s history. Twenty million people were affected and about 2000 lost their lives. Now there is record flooding for the second year in a row. “This is not a natural disaster”, Farooq Tariq , the national spokesperson for the Labour Party Pakistan, told Green Left [...]

Pakistan Observer: Unusual and unexpected rains have rendered five million people homeless in 22 out of 23 districts of Sindh. The lack of response from home and abroad to the plight of the people is somewhat that needs a lot of soul searching. It is for sure that the flood victims of Sindh are little [...]

Syed Iqbal Hasnain: China’s high-stake poker game in Gilgit-Baltistan, a mountainous area that is part of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan, will have disastrous environmental consequences for the entire South Asia region and beyond. Reports in the local and international media indicate that, over the past few years, Beijing has been steadily undertaking [...]

DAWN: Atmospheric scientists on Friday blamed climate change for the unprecedented torrential monsoon rains in Sindh that have caused severe flooding in the 16 districts of Sindh province. “If we look at the frequency and the trend of the extreme weather events impacting Pakistan then it is easy to find its linkage with climate change,” [...]

Chinadilogue: Water has always been a flash point between India and Pakistan. The two neighbours compete over use of the waters of the Indus River, the backbone of agriculture and industry in both states. As the Indian subcontinent was partied in 1947 to create the new state of Pakistan, the rivers were partitioned in 1960 [...]

Tribune Paskistan: The government knew the floods would be back. It had at least eight months to prepare for it. But its focus lay elsewhere — cutting deals, juggling power, privatising public assets. No greater callousness could have been exhibited than that towards the fate of the abandoned four million flood victims who never received [...]