SciDevNet: Pakistan’s outdated crop yield forecasting system needs a revamp, says Ibrar ul Hassan Akhtar. Like most developing countries, Pakistan is staring at the spectre of food insecurity, with its food production out of sync with population growth. The food availability scenario is further complicated by changing weather patterns with recurring severe droughts and floods [...]
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New Scientist: Could Christiana Figueres have the world’s toughest job: getting all nations to agree how to tackle climate change? We talk to the UN’s climate chief. You are in charge of the United Nations climate negotiations – a notoriously tricky process. What would be considered a successful outcome?The governments need to put in place [...]
Press Information Bureau: Planning Commission has approved ‘Climate Change Action Programme’ to be implemented by the Ministry of Environment & Forests during the 12th Five Year Plan. The Minister of State (I/C) for Environment and Forests Smt. Jayanthi Natarajan further disclosed in Rajya Sabha that the programme aims inter alia at advancing scientific research into [...]
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 EU has shifted its goalpost for climate change again, unilaterally seeking talks on a new global protocol from this year that puts India and other developing nations at par with developed world. Ironically, the new condition, if implemented, will exempt Europe from divulging its targets for emission reduction in violation of [...]
The Tibet Post: His Holiness the 17th Gyalwa Karmapa Ugyen Trinley Dorjee addressed the “Bodh Dharama-Vishva Shanti” summit, a large gathering of Indian and Tibetan Buddhists at Dharamshala on Wednesday. His Holiness thanked the Government of Himachal Pradesh and its people for their assistance and hospitality to the Tibetan people. “I think, Himalaya is an [...]
RTCC: Seasoned climate change activists will know that the annual UNFCCC Bonn Climate Change conference starts this coming Monday morning. It’s an important summit that will provide an idea of whether the ambitions of the Durban Platform can be achieved. You’ll recall that the agreement set the ball rolling towards a comprehensive global emissions limit [...]
The Bhutanese: Weather forecast is a piece of information that can be used by anyone, from a farmer to a tourist, or for construction projects, or to simply planning a picnic! Have you ever wondered where and how the country gets its weather forecast? The Department of Hydro-Met Services (DHMS) under the Ministry of Economic [...]
Financial Express: Fight climate change with green energy. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has emphasised on the need for incorporating renewables in the energy matrix for climate change mitigation and for reducing greenhouse gasses. India’s national agenda on climate change is to reduce carbon emissions by 25% by 2020 in tune with its Copenhagen [...]
CDKN: On February 15-17, the UNFCCC Technology Executive Committee (TEC) held its second meeting. On May 28-29, it will meet again. The TEC is informally called the “policy arm” of the UNFCCC Technology Mechanism, which aims to enhance climate technology development and transfer for mitigation and adaptation. Despite its importance, the TEC has not been [...]
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 [...]
The Hindu: Countries in Asia and the Pacific must strike a balance between rising prosperity and rising emission as their success or failure will have repercussions worldwide, a latest report of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) has said. “The Asia-Pacific region must continue to grow economically to lift millions out of poverty, but it [...]
The Gisborne Herald: SORRY Mr Hughes, I did indeed mislead readers. The concession by the IPCC that there is unlikely to be any warming wasn’t in the draft of the fifth report that was released to reviewers in late 2011. It was actually in the draft of the report mentioned by you. This, however, does [...]
Zee News: Climate change will be an additional stress on Indian forests, especially in Upper Himalayan stretches, which are already subjected to multiple challenges including over-extraction, livestock grazing and human impact, a government report said here today. India’s second National Communication to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, released by Environment Minister [...]
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 [...]
Environment News Service: India is considering integrating Israeli water technologies into a national initiative to clean up the polluted Ganges River, which provides water for 40 percent of India’s population in 11 states through which it flows. Indian engineers, scientists and officials from water technology companies visited Israel late last month to explore the possibilities. [...]
The News Pakistan: A Bangladeshi disaster management expert, Khurshid Alam, on Friday emphasised the need for training the local community in playing an effective role in recovering from natural calamities and minimising the adverse effects of an emergency. Local knowledge should be incorporated in designing a disaster management plan. It is very important to learn [...]
Hill Post: Himachal Green Court imposes Rs 100 Cr damages on Jaypee Cement Plant Getting tough on blatant violations of environment laws, a green bench of Himachal Pradesh High Court (India) on Friday not only imposed Rs 100 crore damages on Jaiprakash Associates Ltd. (JAL, a Indian industry) for having set up a whole cement [...]
Daily Mail: When it comes to conservation of river Ganga, the government seems to be moving at snail’s pace. Even 10 months after issuing a notification to declare 135 km stretch of the river from its origin at Gaumukh as eco-sensitive zone (ESZ), the ministry of environment and forests has failed to finalise it. The [...]
AFP: Experiments that try to simulate global warming’s impact on plants badly underestimate what happens in the real world, according to a study published on Wednesday in the journal Nature. The investigation backs anecdotal evidence from farmers and gardeners, especially in the northern hemisphere, who say seasonal plants are stirring into life far earlier than [...]
CDKN: Thousands of researchers and sustainable development practitioners gathered in London for the conference ‘Planet under Pressure: Knowledge towards solutions’, (26-29 March, 2012). The conference aimed to bring together the latest scientific knowledge and practical thinking on sustainability to feed in to the Rio+20 Summit in June. The focus of participant discussions and subsequent ‘calls [...]
WRI: This working paper provides regular updates of the Readiness Preparation Proposal (R-PPs) and National Programme Documents (NPDs) submitted by REDD+ Country Participants to the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) and to the United Nations’ Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD). The World Bank administered [...]
Albright Stonbridge Group: In the energy and environment sector, India currently faces a clear inflection point with the potential to become an innovative leader in the use and development of clean energy and renewable products. While the scale of the energy and environmental challenges is tremendous, it also represents a significant opportunity. The Government of [...]
Kashmir Life: After Sichaen Glacier devoured more than 130 men in a single avalanche early this month, Islamabad is again seeking a way out from the inhuman, refrigerated battleground it is sharing with India for the last 28 years. In the apparent spring of relations, if the two countries warm up to undo their glaciated [...]
Alertnet: At present, close to one billion people suffer from hunger. Experts agree that there is a high risk of climate change affecting food security at the global level, with the most negative impacts in the poorest and most vulnerable countries. The additional risk of climate change could put several hundred million at risk of [...]
WRI Publication: This report introduces the National Adaptive Capacity (NAC) framework, a tool to help governments bring institutional capacity development into their adaptation planning processes. The NAC framework enables its users to systematically assess institutional strengths and weaknesses that may help or hinder adaptation. National adaptation plans may then be better designed to make best [...]
ICTSD: In this article, Ulrich Hoffmann calls into question the notion of “green growth,” asserting that economic growth cannot be decoupled from a related rise in greenhouse gas emissions. Many economists and policymakers advocate a fundamental shift towards “green growth” as the new, qualitatively-different growth paradigm, based on enhanced material/resource/energy (MRE) efficiency and drastic changes [...]
Forbs: The island of Hispaniola is split between two countries – Haiti and the Dominican Republic – each with more than its share of problems. Haiti’s are worse, and for myriad reasons, but one thing is clear: over its tumultuous history, Haiti has lost more of the living ecosystems that support its economy than its [...]
Times of India: The fight against climate change will take a strategic jump in the 12th Five-Year Plan (2012-2017) with the government intending to plough in almost Rs 2 lakh crore through the various missions, the working group on climate of the 12th Five-Year Plan has said. The report seeks setting up of a dedicated [...]
Times of India: When biologist Kamal Bawa talks of global well-being on a sunny April morning in Bangalore, he draws attention to how every human, animal and tree in the ecosystem is enmeshed in the rhythm of life. The recent Gunnerus Sustainability Award from the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (DKNVS) and election [...]
Business Bhutan: A shared vision and collaborative efforts at public and the private sector level can mitigate the impact of climate change. Climate change affects everyone and while countries around the world are failing to reach a global agreement on the issue, it is at the local levels that global action must begin. This is [...]
Financial Express: The green climate fund (GCF), established as a result of the Durban talks last year for easy access to funds for developing countries tackling climate change, has found interest from six countries—Germany, Switzerland, Namibia, Mexico, Korea and Poland. The six countries have expressed interest to host the fund referring to the ability to [...]
SciDevnet: Climate researchers pay too little attention to social sciences, delegates at the International Conference of Mountain Countries on Climate Change have heard. The meeting in Nepal (5–6 April) was attended by around 30 country representatives, and concluded with a ‘Kathmandu Call for Action’, with a view to highlighting the specific needs of mountain countries [...]
IRIN: The governance of natural resources like land, the oceans, rivers and the atmosphere, can affect the impact of some of the world’s biggest crises caused by natural events like droughts and floods. How best to manage those resources has been at the heart of the work by Nobel Prize winner (economics) Elinor Ostrom. She [...]
BBC News: Leading energy ministers have been told the world is on track for a long-term temperature increase of 6C unless they change their priorities. The International Energy Agency (IEA) said on current trends, emissions would double from 2009 to 2050. The deputy director of the IEA, Richard Jones, urged ministers: “Please take our warning [...]
New Scientist: [Michael Marshall ]Europe is doing it, Brazil is doing it, and now Mexico is doing it too. The country has passed a package of laws committing it to act on climate change. It is only the second developing nation to set greenhouse gas emissions cuts in the letter of the law. The package [...]
UNECE: The Third workshop on water and climate change in transboundary basins: Making adaptation work will bring together more than 140 participants from all over the world on 25 and 26 April 2012 in Geneva to discuss how to prevent conflict in transboundary basins over dwindling water resources by cooperating at the transboundary level in [...]
Sciencecodex: Recognizing the knowledge gap between the existing evidence of climate change and adaptation on the ground, researchers in Asia launched a novel learning platform to improve agricultural resilience to changing weather patterns, and to reduce emissions footprint. The Climate Smart Agriculture Learning Platform for South Asia, established by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate [...]
Environmental and Civil News: Climate change impacts are likely to affect societies in complex and broad-ranging ways as technological, economic, social and ecological changes take place across regions, groups and sectors. Climate Change impacts have cascading effects on social and health concerns. Adaptation, Mitigation and Sustainable development are often developed separately at the local as [...]
UNDP (India): To ensure that national climate change policies are modified/adapted to meet needs of states, in partnership with the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India this project aims to strengthen the capacities of state governments and other stakeholders both nationally, and across states address climate change challenges. The project will support national [...]
The American: A new scientific study of the Himalayan glaciers is raising fresh doubts about the troubled theory of manmade climate change, and could renew interest in a debacle that shook the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) several years ago. When the “Climategate” scandal erupted in 2009, the global warming theory faced widespread ridicule. [...]
IISD: The UNFCCC Secretariat has released the report on progress made in implementing activities under the Nairobi work programme on impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change (FCCC/SBSTA/2012/INF.1). The overall objective of the Nairobi work programme is to assist all Parties, in particular developing countries, including the least developed countries (LDCs) and small island developing States (SIDS), [...]
Planet Save: Information regarding the health and fate of glaciers across the planet is rare and often misunderstood, causing some experts to make claims that bear no weight in fact. Now, an international team of scientists is planning a long-term campaign to monitor 25 glaciers in Tibet. The region contains some 46,000 glaciers and has [...]
PNAS: All human–environment systems adapt to climate and its natural variation. Adaptation to human-induced change in climate has largely been envisioned as increments of these adaptations intended to avoid disruptions of systems at their current locations. In some places, for some systems, however, vulnerabilities and risks may be so sizeable that they require transformational rather [...]
Himalayan Times: The government of Nepal recently hosted a high level international conference of mountain countries on climate change. Nepal extended invitation to 55 countries, however, only nine ministers attended and less than 30 countries sent their representatives. Regardless of the attendance, one must praise the courage shown by the government in hosting such a [...]
Time: India’s Wular Lake, a popular picnic and tourist spot nestled in the Kashmir Valley, is an unlikely site for conflict. But India’s plan to build a structure on the Jhelum River at the mouth of the lake that will allow it to release water during the river’s lean winter months has outraged neighboring Pakistan, [...]
IHDP: Prof. Partha Dasgupta of Cambridge University on the challenges of measuring the true costs and benefits of economic development. DIMENSIONS: Professor Dasgupta, how would you define the Green Economy in your own words? Prof. Partha Dasgupta [PD]: By a “Green Economy” we mean an economy where Nature’s worth is included in the reckoning when [...]
Guardian UK: Environment policies under attack include the green deal incentive that offers insulation to homeowners The green deal, the government’s big policy initiative for fighting climate change, is supposed to plug one of Britain’s biggest sources of carbon emissions – draughty, fuel-poor homes. Far from being a Liberal Democrat invention, it bore the imprimatur [...]
Washington Post [YOKOSUKA, Japan] — To the world’s military leaders, the debate over climate change is long over. They are preparing for a new kind of Cold War in the Arctic, anticipating that rising temperatures there will open up a treasure trove of resources, long-dreamed-of sea lanes and a slew of potential conflicts. By Arctic [...]
The Economic Times: (R K Pachauri) Tackling climate change: Adapt to changes at local levels but mitigate release of greenhouse gases Much has been written and discussed recently on the subject of climate change in response to growing scientific evidence that has been assessed and disseminated in recent years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate [...]
MND: Will a load-of-nonsense IPCC press release be corrected? A little more than two years ago the UK’s Sunday Times ran a headline that read: UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters. (A screenshot may be seen here. The full text of the article is backed up here.) The very next day, the UN’s [...]
GHT: The impact of climate change could fall disproportionately on women and children, more so in the remote mountains of Nepal. Participants of the Climate Smart Celebrity Trek met with media and local authorities at a press conference in Jumla today and discussed how the changed climate impacts the livelihood of the families, which in [...]
Kashmir Life (Srinagar, India): Tonnes of trash dumped in Indian Kashmir during an annual religious pilgrimage pose a serious threat to the region’s water supplies and flora, environmental groups warn. The trash is dumped during an annual trek to a shrine in the Amarnath cave, 3,800 meters (12,800 feet) up in the Himalayas, which is [...]
Press Information Bureau (GoI): The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh addressed the inaugural ceremony of India Water Week today in New Delhi. Following is the text of Prime Minister’s address on the occasion: “I am very happy to have this opportunity to inaugurate the India Water Week that is focussing this year on the important [...]
IHDP (GEC): Shades of Green Global Perspectives on the Green Economy The capitalist system has since its emergence as a dominant economic model faced scrutiny and scepticism, which has in many parts of the world reached a zenith in the wake of a global economic crisis and after decades of environmental degradation. Some would consider [...]
CAN South Asia: South Asian countries, particularly the poorest people, are most at risk from the changing climate. The impacts of higher temperatures, more variable precipitation, extreme weather events, glacier melting and sea level rise are felt in South Asia and will continue to intensify. These changes are already having major impacts on the economic [...]
Telegraph Nepal: The Nepalese Ministry of Environment launched the Nepal Climate Change Support Programme at the International Conference of Mountain Countries on Climate Change in Kathmandu, April 5, 2012. The first phase of this Euro 16.5 m (NRs 1,800,000,000) programme aims to reduce the vulnerability of 2 million women and men in the Mid and [...]
Prevention Web (Brussels): The European Climate Adaptation Platform (CLIMATE-ADAPT), an interactive web-based tool on adaptation to climate change, goes online today at the European Environment Agency (EEA) in Copenhagen. Connie Hedegaard, European Commissioner for Climate Action, joined Ida Auken, Denmark’s Minister for the Environment, and the EEA’s Executive Director Jacqueline McGlade for the launch. The [...]
Heinrich B0LL Stiftung Foundation: Publication (Aditi Kapoor): What are India’s climate change adaptation policies and what do they mean for its people – women and men? The public discussion on climate change in India tends to focus more on mitigation initiatives. Adaptation is far less in the public eye despite the emerging scientific research on [...]
