Kuenselonline: News editors from 18 Asian countries deliberated media’s role in fighting climate change in a two-day conference “Himalayan system in a changing climate future and media’s role” which ended yesterday in Kathmandu, Nepal.The receding Himalayan glaciers, rising temperatures, glacial lake outburst flood, and rapid urbanisations were some of the critical issues the 21 editors [...]

April 22, 1970 marked the first Earth Day. The Day activated 20 million people from all walks of life to do something to save their common heritage – Earth. Today, more than one billion people worldwide participate in Earth Day activities each year, making it the largest civic observance anywhere in the world. Earth Day [...]

Climate stakeholders of SDPI-HBS Pak-India Track II Dialogue adopt unanimous resolution. Deliberating on water, energy, adaptation, gender equity and livelihoods, the climate stakeholders adopted a resolution on the concluding day of ‘Track-II Dialogue on (Climate) Change for peace’ which was jointly organized by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and Heinrich Boll Stiftung (HBS). They stressed [...]

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 [...]

Yojana Sharma describes various proposals for a new panel to monitor progress towards sustainable development after Rio+20.[LONDON] One of the most likely outcomes of the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) taking place in Brazil in June will be a high-level intergovernmental panel charged with monitoring the planet’s progress towards sustainability. A key function of [...]

Rio de Janeiro in Brazil will have a different kind of carnival this year. From June 20 to 22, the city will host the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, which is expected to bring together heads of states, ministers, senior officials, representatives from international organisations, civil society leaders and environmentalists. Since the conference is [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The mountain ecosystems of the Hindu Kush–Himalayas have a pivotal role in protecting the environment and in providing goods and services essential for human wellbeing and prosperity. Yet while government, research and development institutions, and civil society groups have frequently convened to discuss approaches to sustainable development in mountains, the private sector has not often [...]

IISD: The World Economic Forum (WEF) held its annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, from 25-29 January 2012, gathering industry, business, government and other world leaders to discuss current issues. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon participated in two panels, on ending energy poverty and on the perspectives for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD, or Rio+20), warning “we [...]

Himachal Pradesh will be the first state in the country to become carbon neutral by 2020 by undertaking “carbon smart growth”, Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal said here Thursday. “The government has inventorised greenhouse gas emission for assessing the carbon footprints. The carbon footprint per capita in the state has been assessed at 1.4 tonne [...]

New Delhi: Farmers in the South-Indian state of Tamil Nadu are switching from paddy cultivation to panning for salt. On the other extreme of the sub-continent, hundreds of thousands of people live in harm’s way in the event of a glacial lake outburst-triggered flood, or GLOFs as they are called.   Something sinister connects the [...]

Sustainable. That word is everywhere these days. So is Rajendra Pachauri, the discredited chairman of the discredited Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This week he’s in India for the 12th Delhi Sustainable Development Summit, which begins on Thursday. The summit is organized by TERI, an institute led by Pachauri. In other words, he isn’t [...]

Yesterday I wrote about the 3-day sustainability summit being held at an opulent 5-star hotel, over which Rajendra Pachauri will preside later this week. Since then Hilary Ostrov has dug a bit deeper into the program for that event. You can read about her findings here. The website for this annual summit tells us a [...]

Participating in a session on Adapting to Climate Risk, held at the annual World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, Lord Nicholas Stern, Chair, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, UK, noted that the world is heading towards a 3°C increase in global average temperature, and warned that this situation “will bring temperatures not seen [...]

APN: The adverse effects of climate change and natural climate variability pose a significant threat to humanity, with the poorest communities being the most vulnerable. Scientific understanding of our climate is advancing at a significant rate, with new information emerging about the likely impacts of climate change, the options to adapt to these changes, and [...]

The National Atmospheric Research Laboratory (NARL) attached to the Department of Space, government of India, is planning to set up a network of LIDAR (Laser Radar System) with the help of indigenously developed sensor tools in ten locations across the country in the first phase to study the aerosol distribution over India. This was disclosed [...]

EurekaAlert: Modest advances for agriculture in Durban signal need for scientific input While last month’s climate negotiations in Durban made incremental progress toward helping farmers adapt to climate change and reduce agriculture’s climate footprint, a group of international agriculture experts, writing in the January 20 issue of Science magazine, urges scientists to lay the groundwork [...]

RECOFTC: At Durban’s Forest Day 5, the resounding message was that REDD+ will not work if people are hungry. How can we expect the poor to conserve forest resources if their food security – their very survival – rests on the use or consumption of those resources? Part of the problem is a perceived trade-off [...]

DowntoEarth: IPRs are blocking access to mitigation and adaptation technologies. India offers a way out. Debate on the rights and wrongs of intellectual property rights (IPRs) always gets stuck on a fundamental question. Would there be any incentive to invent and create without the incentive of IPRs such as patents and copyright? The conventional view [...]

Guardian: Nations will be asked to sign up for 10 goals and promise to build green economies at this summer’s earth summit Countries will be asked this summer to sign up for 10 new sustainable development goals for the planet and promise to build green economies at the first earth summit in 20 years. Photo [...]

Canberratimes: Canada’s announcement before Christmas that it will formally withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol could not have been better timed to puncture the sense of progress generated by the UN climate change conference in Durban just two days earlier. There, delegates had celebrated a dramatic and unexpected conclusion that saw all 194 countries (including Canada) [...]

BBC News: Tropical forests in Africa may be more resilient to future climate change than the Amazon and other regions, a gathering of scientists has said. An international conference agreed that the region’s surviving tree species had endured a number of climatic catastrophes over the past 4,000 years. As a result, they are better suited [...]

Economic Times: The Durban conference in December 2011 marked a breakthrough in international efforts to combat climate change. The EU and India played a key role in final negotiations that unlocked the pact on the last morning of the conference. Together, we found the compromise that provided the basis to launch negotiations on a new [...]

IIED: Of all the baffling goings-on at the recent climate change conference in Durban, what bewildered me most was the position of India. As traditional alliances appeared to fade and new emerge, India appeared allied to the blockers rather than the movers. During the weeks preceding Durban, it was clear that Brazil, South Africa, India [...]

Renewable Energy Magazine: The Himalayan nation of Nepal has found it has become an expert in using cow dung to produce biogas, and is now sharing its knowledge with other countries around the world. It has installed over 200,000 biogas plants serving close to 300,000 homes across the country. Nepal is a poor country which, [...]

Guardian: Efforts by developed countries to redistribute promised funds to help poorer parts of the world avoid environmental disasters have been described as “dismal” by the foreign minister of Bangladesh. Dipu Moni said wealthier nations must begin immediately delivering the billions of pounds’ worth of aid they have earmarked for climate change projects. “Our achievements [...]

Himalayan Times: The Cabinet today approved the Ministry of Environment proposal to host the meeting of mountain countries in Kathmandu on April 5-6, and formed a 13-member committee under Environment Minister to make preparations for the same. Last July, the Cabinet had given the ministry a go-ahead to hold such a conference in Kathmandu on [...]

Sudhirendar Sharma: By strange coincidence two unrelated developments had surfaced at the time when environment ministers from several countries were mulling over reams of text to resolve the climate conundrum at the port city of Durban in early December  - one, that the branded chocolates were getting costly and two, diapers sales were plummeting across [...]

Huffingtonpost: And not by eastern windows only,When daylight comes, comes in the light,In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly,But westward, look, the land is bright.  –Arthur Hugh Clough You might be surprised to learn that I think climate protection may have posted its best quarterly results ever in the last three months of 2011. [...]

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. [...]

Business Green: Earlier this month, the world’s heads of state, government, industry and NGOs met in Durban, South Africa, to discuss our common future. These climate negotiations were more successful than many people had feared. A new international climate agreement will enter into force in 2020. This agreement makes life more predictable for industry and [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

I am pleased to inform you that the Forum for Policy Dialogue on Water Conflicts in India (Forum to be brief), in collaboration with  Aaranyak(Guwahati);  Centre for the Environment, IIT ( Guwahati); Arghyam (Bangalore); SaciWATERs-CapNet Network (SCaN) and Cap-Net, is organizing a Training Programme on Understanding and Resolving Water Conflicts  in the North East India’ [...]

Climate Ethics: I. Introduction: What Is Missing In Reporting About The Durban Outcome? It has now been two weeks since negotiations at the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) were completed in the early morning of Sunday, December 11, 2011 in Durban, South Africa. We [...]

It’s the end of another year, a time to look back and take stock, maybe even make a resolution or two for the future. And there’s no bigger future to contend with than that of the planet. Unfortunately, after two weeks of intense negotiations at the 17th United Nations conference on climate change earlier this [...]

IndepthNews: Somebody must be mistaken: leaders of rich, industrialised countries congratulate themselves on reaching an agreement to tackle climate change, but civil society calls the ‘Durban Package’ a disaster for the planet and the world’s poor. After two weeks of intense negotiations over the future of the climate regime, who was right? What do we [...]

IDSA: Was the 17th Meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP 17) of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) a success or a failure? Shorn of rhetoric, there was no urgent action to ensure that the global mean temperature does not rise beyond the critical 2 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. There was [...]

Hindustan Times: Nepal is known for its beautiful and challenging treks like the one to the Everest Base Camp and attracts thousands of adventure seekers from across the globe every year. But a new one hopes to test both skill and endurance limits of even the most diehard trekkers. Nepal’s prominent mountaineers will embark on [...]

Green Conduct: The last COP in Durban ended in a success for the UNFCCC process, but has more nebulous implications for the climate itself, with Kyoto put on artificial respirator and a more comprehensive agreement being pushed back to a later date. The most significant progress at Durban for climate change adaptation came in the [...]

GIZ: As we prepare the last edition of the newsletter for this year, COP 17 in Durban and its protracted finale are still very fresh in our minds. All of us who witnessed the summit were quite relieved when it did – two days after the scheduled end – finally yield the agreement of a [...]

Industrialized countries are still against the idea of bearing their share of burden in tackling climate change. The 17th Conference of Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was convened in Durban when the membership of this multilateral body faced two exceptional challenges. First, a critical component of the convention, [...]

Dawn: There is now near consensus in the international climate community that Asia will be the most severely affected continent because of the changes associated with global warming. And Bangladesh, the Maldives, parts of India and almost all of Pakistan are likely to suffer the most. Bangladesh and the Maldives will be hurt because of [...]

The Glob and Mail: So what that Canada withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol. Kyoto died long ago. Most of the countries that ratified Kyoto, starting with Canada, failed to meet their greenhouse-gas reduction targets. Big polluters – the U.S., China and India – didn’t accept targets. At the Durban climate-change conference, Canada got paddled by [...]

The Himalayan Times: The Ministry of Environment is preparing to organise a meeting of mountain countries — that has been postponed twice — to discuss climate change in mountainous areas in March. “We are working hard to organise the climate change meeting in March,” said Environment Secretary Krishna Gyawali. At the high-level meeting held in [...]

NDTV: At the recently concluded UN climate change talk in Durban, the world agreed to a new global climate change regime by 2020 to bring down emissions to save the planet. But cutting carbon emissions will be a tough task for India in the years to come as the country needs to balance its development [...]

Bhutan Times: The formation of a group of mountain countries, as proposed by Ecuador, would have helped the group easily represent a common interest at the negotiation of the Convention of Parties (CoP) 17 meeting at Durban, South Africa, but it has left numerous such countries in a lurch following back off by some member [...]

Go-Green: The series of agreements reached on Sunday by nearly 200 countries in Durban lays a foundation for the global community to tackle climate change.   Governments meeting at the annual climate conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) decided to adopt a universal legal agreement on climate change as soon [...]

IISD Reporting: The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban, South Africa, was held from 28 November – 11 December 2011. The conference involved a series of events, including the seventeenth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 17) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the seventh meeting of the [...]

Business Green: Support for $100bn Green Climate Fund will help overhaul the UN’s carbon market and financing for forestry projects While reactions have been mixed as to the overall success of the Durban climate summit, some progress has been made in terms of agreeing a fund to help poor countries combat climate change, reform of [...]

SciDevNet: The UN Climate Change Conference (COP 17) in Durban, South Africa, ended yesterday (11 December) with an agreement that all major polluting countries would work towards legally binding targets for reducing carbon emissions. But the bitter showdowns and high drama which preceded the last-minute agreement sidelined two key issues for developing countries — the [...]

Guardian: The Durban climate conference may have agreed a deal – or at least a deal to agree a deal – but the scale of the work that still needs to be done became plain today. Although talks are supposed to start immediately, America’s special envoy for climate change, Todd Stern, infuriated the EU by [...]

Huffingtonpost: The 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) adjourned on Sunday, a day and a half after its scheduled close, and in the process once again pulled a rabbit out of the hat by saving the talks from complete collapse (which appeared possible just a [...]

New York Times: Canada said on Monday that it would withdraw from the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 treaty to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Under that accord, major industrialized nations agreed to meet targets for reducing emissions, but mandates were not imposed on developing countries like Brazil, China, India and South Africa. The United States never [...]

Reuters: Countries from around the globe agreed on Sunday to forge a new deal forcing all the biggest polluters for the first time to limit greenhouse gas emissions, but critics said the plan was too timid to slow global warming. A package of accords agreed after marathon U.N. talks in South Africa extended the 1997 [...]

Washington Post: Even as representatives from nearly 200 countries celebrated the last-minute compromise they fashioned at U.N. climate talks Sunday in Durban, South Africa, it became clear that its real-world outcome will be largely determined in Asia, rather than in Africa or the West. Broad in scope but short on details, the Durban Platform aims [...]

The Economic Times: The UN climate change talks in Durban Sunday arrived at a four-pronged Durban Package to save the planet by controlling emission of greenhouse gases. The main outcome of the Durban talks: To extend the Kyoto Protocol: To extend for another five years the Kyoto Protocol – the only regime to combat climate [...]

The Independent: 194 nations talk into the small hours – but pressure on the planet continues to grow. Some sort of binding deal on climate change looked set to emerge from the Durban climate conference amid signs in the early hours of this morning that a new agreement could be reached by the 194 countries [...]

Wall Street Journal: Major industrial and emerging economies set a course to reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade and beyond, even as poorer nations warned it wasn’t enough to shield them from the worst potential impacts of climate change. Following marathon negotiations that stretched past dawn on Sunday, two days after the conference’s [...]