PLOS-One: Climate change in the Himalayas, a biodiversity hotspot, home of many sacred landscapes, and the source of eight largest rivers of Asia, is likely to impact the well-being of ~20% of humanity. However, despite the extraordinary environmental, cultural, and socio-economic importance of the Himalayas, and despite their rapidly increasing ecological degradation, not much is [...]

Assam Tribune: Ignoring the crucial linkages of a river’s upstream, midstream, and downstream flows can endanger not just the river, but human communities and ecology sustained by it. A disregard of ‘environmental flows,’ by construction of dams, has already harmed many rivers in the Western Ghats, giving rise to political as well as environmental issues. [...]

Click Green: A new study from the University of California, Davis, provides a deeper understanding of the complex global impacts of deforestation on greenhouse gas emissions. The study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, reports that the volume of greenhouse gas released when a forest is cleared depends on how the trees [...]

Gadling: The Himalayan Stove Project is a non-profit organization that has a very clearly defined message and goal. The group looks to improve the lives of those living in the Himalaya Mountains while simultaneously preserving the environment there as well. To accomplish this lofty goal, the HSP intends to deliver 10,000 clean cooking stoves to [...]

FIBL: Climate change mitigation is urgent, and adaptation to climate change is crucial, particularly in agriculture, where food security is at stake. Agriculture, currently responsible for 20-30% of global greenhouse gas emissions (counting direct and indirect agricultural emissions), can however contribute to both climate change mitigation and adaptation. The main mitigation potential lies in the [...]

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 [...]

Scientific American (blog): One day after new test results showed that only 32 percent of U.S. 8th graders are proficient in science, a group of 26 states has helped draft a document that may bring about a major overhaul of science education in this country.  Known as the Next Generation Science Standards, the draft sets ambitious [...]

The Independent: Waste milk creates a carbon footprint equivalent to thousands of car exhausts, according to a study that highlights the environmental costs of inefficient farming and the aggressive marketing of supermarket food. Scientists have calculated that the 360,000 tonnes of waste milk that is poured down British drains each year creates greenhouse gases equivalent [...]

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 [...]

National Geographic: Giant sauropods produced huge amounts of greenhouse gases, study suggests. Dinosaurs may have helped warm ancient Earth via their own natural gaseous emissions, a new study says. Like modern-day ruminants, giant plant-eating dinosaurs likely had microbes in their guts that gave off large amounts of methane—a potent greenhouse gas even more effective at [...]

Environmental Research Web: University of California, Berkeley, scientists are drilling into ancient sediments at the bottom of Northern California’s Clear Lake for clues that could help them better predict how today’s plants and animals will adapt to climate change and increasing population. The lake sediments are among the world’s oldest, containing records of biological change [...]

PHYS.ORG: For algae to power our cars and planes, production needs to be low carbon and cost effective, which means working with natural processes, not against them, say scientists. Algae could become an important source of sustainable biofuel, as production doesn’t compete with food crops for land. But we may need to change the way [...]

Devex: Global demand for food will double in coming decades, through population growth and rising levels of consumption. Ensuring the planet produces enough food for all in a sustainable way will be a real challenge, and climate change will hamper our efforts if it is not tackled. Food security is crucial to helping the poorest [...]

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 [...]

“Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”- Neil Postman One of the perks of my job is the opportunity to interact with, and influence, the future generation. I recently enjoyed such an opportunity at The Energy and Resources Institute’s (TERI) University, where I addressed a gathering of students [...]

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 [...]

Nature: Some countries could save money by switching from solar to wind. Generating wind energy is more than twice as cheap as solar photovoltaic (PV) energy production, a study of alternative energy in six developing countries has found. The findings, published in Nature Climate Change last week1, could help inform global debates on financing initiatives [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The News: Siachen is the only Glacier of Karakorum range melting with unprecedented rate, the cause of which is the military presence in the area and not global warming. The high-resolution images of the Siachen glacier show deep cracks every 10 feet (crevasses), both in longitudinal and transverse directions. The retreat of the glacier is [...]

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 [...]

Yale 360: With soaring human populations and rapid climate change putting unprecedented pressure on species, conservationists must look to innovative strategies — from creating migratory corridors to preserving biodiversity hotspots — if we are to prevent countless animals and plants from heading to extinction. By Lee Hannah Throughout much of the Pleistocene era, which began [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

Reuters: To figure out what is likely to happen to Earth’s climate this century, scientists are looking 3 million years into the past. They have concluded that the most revealing slice of time is the Pliocene Epoch, a warm, wet period between 3.15 million and 2.85 million years ago, when the world probably looked and [...]

SNV Nepal: Given the high potential for renewable energy technologies (RETs) to contribute to both climate mitigation and adaptation, it is increasingly important to address climate change issues when planning for RET dissemination. However, sustainable utilisation of Nepal’s available energy resources will only be possible if planning is carried out at the local level with [...]

Scientific American: The two-stroke rickshaw, although convenient in traffic-snarled cities, is a toxic nuisance–but new engines could clean up their act. Banned in Delhi for a decade, smog-spewing combustion engine–powered rickshaws are fading away in India and in many other countries, thanks not only to inroads by minivans, but also to  improved rickshaw motor designs [...]

PHYS.ORG: Kimberly Casey is a glaciologist who spends a fair amount of time in the office analyzing satellite data. But when she talks about her fieldwork on remote glaciers, one suspects she could do pretty well in a triathlon, too. Casey has carried 70-pound backpacks up mountain crossings in the Himalayas and waded ice-cold streams [...]

IPS News-By Catherine Wilson: In Papua New Guinea (PNG), which has no national power grid but large river systems and abundant sunshine, renewable energy has tremendous potential to transform remote rural lives with clean and sustainable electricity. Ten years ago Nick Nait, who lives in a small village near Mount Sion in the Eastern Highlands [...]

SciDevNet: Decisions on whether and how to use massive technical solutions known as ‘geoengineering’ to mitigate or reverse climate change must involve developing countries, a session on geoengineering governance at the Planet Under Pressure conference agreed yesterday (28 March).   Geoengineering proposals have included reflecting sunlight away from the Earth by spraying ocean water into [...]

Manjeet’s Blog (Negotiating Everyday): In principle Nepal’s hydropower potential is impressive due to rugged mountain terrain from which snow and rain fed rivers produce significant amount of seasonal water flow. Owing to this natural hydrological processes, Nepal projected an image since 1970s that this country has one of the richest hydropower potential in the world [...]

The world’s poorest countries can jump directly from the pre-electricity era into a new industrial revolution through an “energy Internet” — the uptake of renewable energy shared through communication technologies, argues economist Jeremy Rifkin. “The great economic revolutions in history occur when new communication technologies converge with new energy systems”, writes Rifkin. And now — [...]

Efforts to stem global warming have nurtured a strong urge worldwide to deploy renewable energy. As a result, the use of wind turbines has increased 10-fold over the past decade, with wind power often touted as the most cost-effective green opportunity. According to Connie Hedegaard, the European Union’s commissioner for climate action, “People should believe [...]

Many of the world’s rarest and richest forests, located in high-altitudes, could be all but wiped out by the combined impact of man-made climate change and habitat destruction. An international scientific team has warned of the near-total loss of one of the world’s most delicate ecosystems, the Mexican cloud forest, along with 70 percent of [...]

Low-tech experiment produces accurate data on threat to plant biodiversity and may also help with carbon capture. The fresh snow covers the Aubonne valley overlooking Lake Geneva. Clumps of beech, maple and juniper trees cling to the slopes of the Jura highlands. Scientists from Lausanne Polytechnic (EPFL) and Switzerland‘s Forest, Snow and Landscape Research Institute [...]

As I approach my 90th birthday next week I thought I would provide a more personal newsletter which summarized the state of play on Global Warming/Climate Change or whatever is the current euphemism to cover up the failure of the theory that the climate is exclusively controlled by human emissions of “greenhouse gases” The pressure [...]

The idea of pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere is a beguiling one. Could it ever become real? THOSE who worry about global warming have a simple answer to the problem. Simple in theory, that is: stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. In practice that is rather hard to do. But there is [...]

Researchers have posted carbon stock data for the world’s tropical forests on ArcGIS Online, a web-based mapping platform developed by ESRI. The data, based on satellite measurements from NASA including LiDAR and MoDIS data as well as on-the-ground field measurements, reveals the biomass of tropical forests at a 500-meter resolution, the highest resolution ever published [...]

Squatting in a dusty field in the village of Rataul, two hours north of Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a young woman, like uncounted generations of women before her, is shaping a small mountain of cow dung into Frisbee-size cakes that will fire the family’s cookstove. Perhaps she will make a couple of [...]

Livestock production systems in Nepal are experiencing a significant downturn as critical resources such as water, soil, forests, agricultural productivity and farm labor are affected by rapid land use changes and climate change impacts. To ensure livestock climate change adaptation and strengthen livestock production systems, it is critical to understand and enhance feed, nutrition, and [...]

The financial budget — in the world’s largest democracy — will always be studied closely. A budget that meets the expectations of one billion people — with conflicting priorities — is a herculean, and perhaps impossible, task. However, and I am certain you will agree — the one need no one can deny is the [...]

In a series of articles over the last several decades, I have reported on the major first-order role of land use change as a regional and global climate forcing. A sample of the papers we have authored on this subject include: Pielke, R.A. and R. Avissar, 1990: Influence of landscape structure on  local and regional [...]

Preening over plantations and weeds, green statistics conceal the alarming loss of natural, old-growth forests. One of the many miracles of India is that it has maintained one-fifth of its area under forest cover since Independence. The population has jumped three-and-a-half times since 1947 and with it the demand for agricultural land. During 1951-80, India [...]

Himalayan Times: Nepal’s 40,000 biogas plants have been registered with the Clean Development Mechanism of the United Nations Climate Change Convention (UNFCC) for carbon trading. According to the Alternative Energy Promotion Centre (AEPC) under the Ministry of Environment, the executive board of UNFCCC has approved 40,602 biogas plants so far. “Now, biogas use helps us [...]

Climate change and the accompanying threat of ocean acidification from anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) are among the most daunting environmental problems in the world, posing major socioeconomic, technical and environmental challenges. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), average global temperatures should not rise by more than 2oC above pre-industrialized levels [...]

Researchers from Burkina Faso and France have developed a low-cost construction material made of clay and sand mixed with fibres from the kenaf plant. Kenaf is member of the cotton family, and its fibres are already widely used in Burkina Faso to make bags and ropes, as well as other products typically made from wood, [...]

Since there’s nothing that can be done about climate change, because there’s no scalable alternative to fossil fuels, I’ve always wondered why politicians and other leaders, who clearly know better, feel compelled to deny it. I think it’s for exactly the same reasons you don’t hear them talking about preparing for Peak Oil. 1) Our [...]

From Soil Carbon to Decommissioning Nuclear Reactors, UNEP Year Book Highlights Key Emerging Issues: Dramatic improvements in the way the world manages its precious soils will be key to food, water and climate security in the 21st century. Dramatic improvements in the way the world manages its precious soils will be key to food, water [...]

It is no secret that developing countries like India are finding it difficult to balance economic growth and its development and environment agendas. But at the same time, they have also begun to realise that the impact of unsustainable growth will be a costly affair. For example, to tackle the impact of climate change on [...]

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 [...]

The use of electric cars in China produces more particulate matter pollution than gasoline-fueled vehicles, according to a new study. In an analysis of five vehicle technologies, in 34 major Chinese cities. U.S. researchers found that the power generated to run electric cars produces significantly greater particulate matter emissions because 80 percent of China’s electricity [...]

TIME: In 2009, when policymakers in New Delhi set a goal to produce 20,000 megawatts of solar energy by 2020, few gave India more than a slim chance. The world’s solar-savvy countries put together were generating that much solar power at the time, and India was contributing virtually nothing. But today, with acres of land [...]

A new knowledge product; Decentralized Energy Access and the Millennium Development Goals was launched jointly by the Minister of Environment Hem Raj Tated, Vice Chairman of the National Planning Commission Deependra Kshetri and UNDP Country Director Shoko Noda, during the ‘Knowledge Sharing Event for Energy, Environment and Climate Change Knowledge Products,’ organized by the Government [...]

Solar power has always had a reputation for being expensive, but not for much longer. In India, electricity from solar is now cheaper than that from diesel generators. The news – which will boost India’s “Solar Mission” to install 20,000 megawatts of solar power by 2022 – could have implications for other developing nations too. [...]

Meat and cheese top the list of foodstuffs that have a negative impact on the environment, according to research If everyone in the UK went vegetarian or vegan it would have the same environmental benefit as talking half of all cars off the road, according to new research. Scientists have calculated the impact of 61 [...]

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 [...]

A cold war has been going on among government departments over control of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) cell for the last four months. The devolved Ministry of Environment became the National Designated Authority (NDA) of the United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change after it established the cell and placed it under Enercon back [...]

Suman K A : Close to a billion population on this planet lack access to safe drinking water, modern energy services and food to lead healthy and productive lives; a great majority of them residing in the SSA and South Asian regions. The problem is likely to be exacerbated with ever growing population, climate change, [...]

The Himalayan Stove Project is dedicated to preserving the Himalayan environment and improving the health of the people living in the trans-Himalayan region.  We provide clean cookstoves to individuals and  families living in the Himalayas who now cook with traditional, rudimentary cookstoves or over open fire pits inside their homes, consuming excessive amounts of precious [...]