CNN: While Brazil’s Government tends to favour a one-size-fits-all approach to energy provision, an indigenous group in the far north has come up with its own more sustainable solution, as our São Paulo correspondent reports. A few years ago I lay in a hammock in a mud and wattle hut in a Makuxi village, shining

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Science Daily: A team of researchers led by Associate Professor Edward L. Webb of the National University of Singapore (NUS) is calling for the global adoption of a method to identify areas that are vulnerable to sea-level rise. The method, which utilises a simple, low-cost tool, is financially and technically accessible to every country with

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The Hindu: Development of a large-scale software model to examine the impact of climate change in Kerala is part of a forthcoming scientific study that will formulate an integrated climate change database and information system for the State. The proposal, estimated at Rs.80 crore, will map the impact of climate change on agriculture, fisheries, industries,

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CNN: Environmentally-friendly biofuel may have come a step closer with the news that scientists in the UK think they have found how a genetically-modified bacterium can produce diesel oil – on a very small scale so far.  British scientists may have found a new way to pump high quality diesel into the tractors, trucks and

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Scientific American: Most of my day job involves simulating the behavior of molecules like drugs and proteins using computer models. The field is more an art than a science, partially because the systems that are being modeled are too complex and ill-understood to succumb to exact solutions. Success often depends on experience and intuition gained

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CNN: Attempts to tackle climate change by altering the atmosphere – geo-engineering – may have unpredictable effects. They could even trigger disaster in a drought-prone region of Africa, a study suggests. Less than three weeks after two US researchers called for global agreement on the governance of geo-engineering research, British meteorologists have provided a case

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Huffingtonpost: As the realities of global climate change become ever more alarming, advocates of technological approaches to “geoengineer” the planet’s climate are gaining a following. But the technologies that are promoted — from spraying sulphate particles into the stratosphere, to dumping iron particles into the ocean, to stimulate carbon absorbing plankton, to burning millions of

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GIGAOM: Fjord IT opens its first data center space in Oslo and is banking on a air cooling technology and cheap hydropower to attract European customers who want low-carbon cloud services. Norway, known for breathtaking glacier-carved valleys, fjords and abundant hydropower, is also increasingly the home to green data centers that can use the cold

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Alertnet: Wooden water wheels have long captured energy from mountain streams. New versions work even better, helping provide a local, sustainable source of energy to Indian villages high in the Himalayas. Living in an isolated Himalayan hamlet, 2,500 meters (5,600 feet) above sea level, Govind Singh Rana seems an unlikely candidate for wealth. But by

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CNN: The world may need to turn to geo-engineering in order to tackle climate change effectively, scientists think – and that would raise a whole lot of tricky questions. Geo-engineering of the climate is fraught with all manner of technical, ethical and governance issues but needs to be taken into consideration if targets for limiting

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Alertnet: No-till farming is a response to climate change that fits well with the needs of the Caribbean: it increases the ability to capture water, while withstanding both drought and excessive rains, says expert Theodor Friedrich, representative of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Cuba. The Caribbean islands are in dire need

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Project Syndication: Of all major world regions, Europe has worked the hardest to implement policies aimed at countering human-caused climate change. Yet the cornerstone of Europe’s approach – a continent-wide emissions trading system for the greenhouse gases that cause climate change – is in trouble. That experience suggests a better strategy for both Europe and

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New Scientist: When many countries are choosing their next generation of power stations, they will be tempted to pick wind turbines. Thanks to better design, building wind farms can now be cheaper than building new coal or gas power stations. Figures from Bloomberg New Energy Finance show that this is already the case in Australia.

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Climate Central: If the weather holds, NASA will launch its newest Earth-observing satellite from Vandenberg Air Force Base in southern California late Monday morning. An Atlas V rocket is scheduled to carry Landsat 8 into space just after 2 p.m. Eastern time. Once in orbit, the $855 million probe will begin capturing detailed images of

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Go Green’ web portal was launched in July 2008 to remind people to be mindful of and sensitive to the natural environment in our daily life The main objective of the site is to increase the awareness of environmental issues that affect the future of the planet. Go-Green.ae features ‘Green Stories’ that demonstrate the steps

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The Ecologist: Luke Dale-Harris questions whether our concern over climate change is actually driving us to invest in renewable technologies that negatively impact the very natural wonders we are aiming to preserve. Even if the naysayers are right and they produce little else, wind farms most certainly generate debate. Ever since they started to become

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EEA: New technologies have sometimes had very harmful effects, but in many cases the early warning signs have been suppressed or ignored. The second volume of Late Lessons from Early Warnings investigates specific cases where danger signals have gone unheeded, in some cases leading to deaths, illness and environmental destruction. The first volume of Late

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Sevensisterspost: A new study has confirmed the worst fears of Assam’s anti-dam activists who are opposed to building mega hydel projects in the highly-seismic Northeast, known for its rich biodiversity. Unprecedented dam building in the Indian Himalayas holds serious consequences for biodiversity and could pose a threat to human lives and livelihoods, a team of

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Scientific American: The world must spend an extra $700 billion a year to curb its addiction to fossil fuels blamed for worsening floods and heat waves and rising sea levels, a study issued by the World Economic Forum (WEF) showed on Monday. The world must spend an extra $700 billion a year to curb its

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SciDev.net: To engage people in early action we must understand their experience, behaviour and constraints, says disaster policy expert Andrew Collins. Disaster predictions have significant uncertainty that tends to undermine efforts to act on early warnings. In Bangladesh, for example, where there are extensive climatic hazards, people risk their lives by not taking refuge in

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Alertnet: Muhammad Mushtaq moved his family and several neighbours to safety last September when their homes in Muzaffarabad, the capital of Pakistani-administered Kashmir, were flooded by an overflowing stream during heavy monsoon rains. Mushtaq, who lives in a three-room tin-roofed house perched on a steep river bank at risk of landslides and floods, put into

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Alertnet: Palestinian olive growers make a living from trees that are, in some cases, 2,000 to 3,000 years old – proof that these farmers have been working in harmony with the environment for centuries, according to Nasser Abufarha, a representative of Fairtrade producers in the Middle East. Now the time may finally have come for

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Science journalists in the developing world are more confident than their counterparts in Europe and North America that science journalism has a buoyant future, according to a global report. The study into the status of global science journalism was published by SciDev.Net in collaboration with the London School of Economics and Museo da Vida, in

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Yahoo News: Soot, the black carbon that triggers smog and bouts of coughing, is also the biggest contributor to global warming after carbon dioxide, says a four-year assessment by US researchers. The new study concludes that black carbon, the soot particles in smoke and smog, contributes about twice as much to global warming as previously

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CSE: Study quantifies the impact of hydel projects on the ecology of the mountain range. THE Himalayas are virtually under bombardment—of dams. They would have the highest dam density in the world, with over a thousand water reservoirs dotting the mountain range in India, Bhutan, Nepal and Pakistan, over the next few years. These projects

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World Bank: A project that has reforested 3,000 hectares of previously barren land in China’s southwest Guangxi is issuing its first carbon credits under the Clean Development Mechanism. The Facilitating Reforestation for Guangxi Watershed Management in Pearl River Basin Project was the first reforestation project to be registered in the world under the United Nations

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Toward Resilience: A Guide to Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) is an introductory resource for staff of development and humanitarian organizations working with people whose live and rights are threatened by disasters and climate change. The guide provides essential introductory information, principals of effective practice, guidelines for action in a range

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PHYS.org: Changes in solar radiation, known as solar forcing, have had only a very small effect on climate change, a member of the UN’s top panel of climate scientists said today. The comment, made by a member of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), followed the leak of a draft IPCC report late

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ABC: What effect will climate change have on agriculture and food production? This is the second of a five-part series in which environment reporter Sarah Clarke sets out to provide answers. Australia’s farmers will need to adapt to cope with a potentially hotter and drier continent as the effects of climate change take hold, scientists

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ADB: Empowering the poor through access to energy — ADB promotes new approaches for scaling up access to energy for the poor. Access to modern, cleaner energy is essential to human development. Yet the majority of the world’s energy poor are living in Asia and the Pacific: more than 700 million people still have no

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SciDev.net: Algal biofuels, like crops, demand land, water, fertilisers, pesticides and inputs that are costly for India, says Hoysall Chanakya Of late, there is heady euphoria over ‘green’ algal biofuels that are dangled as a panacea for developing countries such as India. While it is true that algal biofuels can contribute to a fossil fuel-free

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SciDev.Net: Potato batteries, wind-powered mine detectors, smart waterpumps… SciDev.Net revisits some of the best inventions of 2012. Fascinating innovations come from around the world, and aim to tackle a range of development issues, from cutting the risk of disasters and disease, to helping people with disabilities access information and bringing energy to remote areas. Phase-changing

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SciDev.net: This policy brief, published by the Overseas Development Institute, explores how different types of knowledge feed into policymaking processes — based on case-studies in three South-East Asian countries — and suggests that classifying knowledge can be a useful way of promoting evidence-based decisions. The complexity of policy processes means there is no simple way

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SDC: Improving market access for small Andean farmers and making more out of the biodiversity of their crops – that is the basic challenge underlying the Papa Andina regional project, launched in 1998 by the SDC and the International Potato Center (CIP). This innovative and sustainable solution won a prize announced on the occasion of

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The Conversation: Acclimatising to heat is a tough gig. Since 1970, central Australian regions have warmed 1.2ᵒC and as the world continues to get warmer, increasingly common and increasingly intense heat waves will make acclimatising even tougher. Our physiology is fantastically clever. Humans have managed to successfully inhabit most of the earth’s land surface, from

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Think Progress: A new report by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives highlights twenty local government across the country that are taking the initiative to combat global warming. The report follows up an earlier survey ICLEI did of 298 American cities, which found that 74 percent had perceived changes in the climate — including

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Varad Pande, Officer on Special Duty to Jairam Ramesh, the rural development minister and former environment minister says more work is needed to break through the deadlocks. “We need to make negotiations an ongoing, rather than an episodic, process, with at least 120 to 150 days of active negotiations every year,” Pande wrote in India’s

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BBC: The UK Met Office has revised one of its forecasts for how much the world may warm in the next few years. It says the average temperature is likely to be 0.43 C above the long-term average by 2017, as opposed to an earlier forecast suggesting a difference of 0.54C. The explanation is that

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Reuters: Green schemes to fight climate change by producing more bio-fuels could actually worsen a little-known type of air pollution and cause almost 1,400 premature deaths a year in Europe by 2020, a study showed on Sunday. The report said trees grown to produce wood fuel – seen as a cleaner alternative to oil and

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Guardian: Techniques aimed at averting global warming could lead to an unpredictable international crisis, a report has warned. The world’s climate could be hijacked by a rogue country or wealthy individual firing small particles into the stratosphere, claims a warning that comes not from a new Hollywood movie trailer but a sober report from the

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CGAIR: West Africa is one of the most affected regions by climate change due to its dependency on rain-fed agriculture. Agriculture is a mainstay for most countries and a potential way out of poverty for millions of small-scale farmers. Policies and strategies therefore need to effectively address climate change adaptation within the agriculture sector, so

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SciDev.net: Africa is often blamed for having scarce and unreliable weather records that hold back predictions of how climate change will affect the continent. This has led to calls over the years for better climate-change science and record-keeping, with the most recent coming from African science academies last November. In a statement entitled ‘Climate change

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IISD: During the Doha Climate Change Conference, Costa Rica, with assistance from the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), presented seven examples of how agriculture can both mitigate and adapt to climate change. The presentations were made by Costa Rica’s Environment and Agriculture Ministers at a side event to COP 18. Agriculture Minister Gloria Abraham Peralta

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Business Bhutan: Considered one of the biggest hydropower projects in the country, the 2,560 megawatt Sankosh hydropower project, is all set to get a green signal from the Indian government, but the commencement of the joint venture project will mean serious implications on the environment. According to the Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) report for Sankosh

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SciDevNet: Climate Innovation Centers can promote clean technologies but need backing with a coordinated effort, says policy specialist Ambuj Sagar. Technologies that reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help people to adapt to climate change will be a key part of how developing countries respond to the climate challenge. But the relatively limited capabilities of these

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Extent of climate change over India and its projected impact on Indian agriculture – A presentation by Dr Raj – The Kerala Environment Congress – Organised by the Centre for Environment and Development (2012)

Fastcoexist: A Safer Stove For The Developing World, Created By Indian Student Entrepreneurs.. Having an open fire in your house is dangerous, and it’s not good to inhale the smoke. But it’s how billions of people cook and heat their houses. The Greenway Smart Stove aims to change that–with no moving parts and at a

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Renewable Energy World: We’ve been down so long almost anything starts to look like up. Be prepared for another few down years as the solar industry rationalizes production and figures out how to make money downstream; we’ve lost this profit-making capability upstream. Since I don’t have to worry about offending any customers, suppliers, competitors or

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Greenpeace: Every day, more people around the world rely on laptops, phones and tablets to make their lives more productive and fun. Electronic gadgets can make our lives better, but the rate at which we purchase and discard these devices is having a serious impact on our planet. Consumers have expressed their desire for greener

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Impact of snow and glacier melt on the water security of users of the Ganges, India Ewout Zwolsman, an MSc student from Wageningen University, assessed for the HighNoon project the contribution of snow- and ice melt to the water demand in the Ganges basin as part of his final Masters thesis. The first challenge was

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Forbes India: The richer world is no longer in charge, says Richard Muller. And the issue is not blame; it is to find a practical solution In the US Presidential debates, zero minutes were spent discussing climate change and global warming. The issue is no longer a high concern among the US population; perhaps not

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Climate change is expected to have significant impacts on Europe that will affect its economic sectors and the distribution of  economic activity. While some of those climate-change impacts can be alleviated by mitigation action, some degree of climate change cannot be avoided anymore. This makes adaptation an essential component in addressing the impacts from climate

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The Telegraph: The creator of the four billion pixel interactive image of Everest has warned that more must be done to tackle climate change in order to save world’s highest mountain. Since the image, made up of 477 individual photographs taken during the climbing season in spring 2012, went viral, David Breashears says he has

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A changing climate places great pressure on society, and creates many new challenges. To make city planning easier, a planning tool has been developed to support climate adaptation of cities and regions in Europe. The European research project SUDPLAN, co-ordinated by SMHI, has developed a planning tool for climate adaptation of European cities and regions

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Suman K Apparusu: The warmth and the hospitality of Doha are truly unforgettable! A wonderful combination of the old and new, tradition and modernity, ambition and receptivity struck me in all that I experienced during my one week sojourn of COP18 at Doha. But as the plane touched the tarmac in India, I was left

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Practical Action: This short video was taken during a visit to the Ochola family, a poor family living on the outskirts of Kisumu in Kenya. The head of this family of 8 is Betty, a widow for the past two years.  The family make their living from farming a small plot of land they own and

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Scidev.net: Journalists can help the developed world take responsibility for climate change by making it relevant to readers’ lives, says David Dickson. A little more than 30 years ago, a major UN conference on science and technology for development held in Vienna, Austria, ended on an upbeat note with an agreement in principle to set

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CIC: New business hub for Kenyan climate technology entrepreneurs was launched in Nairobi on 26th September to boost locally sourced green technologies in the East Africa region. The Kenya Climate Innovation Centre (CIC), a cutting-edge facility, will offer financing and other services to a growing network of climate innovators and entrepreneurs. The first of its

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SciDev.Net: Forestry experts are calling for an increase in the use of native tree species in reforestation projects, arguing that they are better for biodiversity and can slow the pace of global warming. The recommendation appears in a report published by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO) that was presented during the UN

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While we hear of the effect climate change is having around the world, it is refreshing to hear of innovative ways that EU countries are helping to reduce the damage. In a pan-European contest organised by the European Commission, more than 70 organisations from across Europe have taken part in a campaign called ‘A world

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