Shalini Dhyani: Writes about hill agriculture, agro-forest and such ecosystem practices from Indian Himalayan region. She emphasizes on improving the socio-economic condition of mountain people by adopting a range of animal husbandry, agro-forestry and traditional agriculture practices through better scientific and technical inputs. Entire Himalayan ecosystem is undergoing rapid land-use and climatic changes in last

[continue reading...]

Dr. Madhav Karki discusses about sustainable mountain development- SMD agenda that was adopted during 1992 Rio Earth summit, and how the socio-economic and environmental issues were taken by countries in the Hindu Kush Himalayan- HKH region during last 20 years in terms of achieving the goals as envisioned in SMD document. He argues that mountain

[continue reading...]

The book is the first to provide a complete overview of international climate finance. In the Copenhagen Accord of 2009, developed countries jointly committed to mobilize US$100 billion per year to address climate change in developing countries. The book presents the best information available on this subject: an overview of current international climate finance, estimates

[continue reading...]

Dr. Madhav Karki writes about the commitments made by the member countries during Rio+20 summit on various sustainable development goals (SDGs) on low carbon green economy principles and good governance practices, in socio-economic and environmental perspectives. He argues that post Rio+20 actions should be more cohesive, participatory, multi-disciplinary and simple in approach, so that they

[continue reading...]

Times of India: Popular for its sweetness, apples produced in the Himalayan state of Arunachal Pradesh are now gradually losing their taste and even turning sour as a result of climate change. With the weather becoming erratic and a clear variation in temperature, snowfall and rainfall pattern being recorded, apple crops are no more getting

[continue reading...]

Nepal Times: Eastern Nepal’s model township is on its way to becoming the country’s first Green City. Nepal’s easternmost district of Ilam is known for its diligent citizens and scenic tea gardens, but it is also showing the way about how towns can be cleaner and greener with community participation and competent leadership. The main

[continue reading...]

Science Daily: The insurance industry, the world’s largest business with $4.6 trillion in revenues, is making larger efforts to manage climate change-related risks, according to a new study published December 13 in the journal Science. “Weather- and climate-related insurance losses today average $50 billion a year. These losses have more than doubled each decade since

[continue reading...]

Dr. Sudhirendar Sharma: I’m indeed grateful to all the members who made written submissions to the discussions on ‘rewriting mountain perspective‘. At bilateral level, many others have contributed their unwritten thoughts and reflections. While many have gone public with their inputs, others have restricted themselves to drawing-room conversations such that they remain ‘unidentified’ in the

[continue reading...]

Suman K A: The UNFCCC Secretariat in partnership with Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will create a series of platforms to encourage adaptation and mitigation projects that have promise to deliver high resilience and low carbon growth. This will be done through the Momentum for Change Initiative to be launched in Durban at CoP17. The

[continue reading...]

Guardian: While government leadership is unlikely to be strong, companies are taking the lead and there is a serious business agenda. A dim light is shining on Durban: what does this mean for the climate talks? After a hectic year of meetings in three continents and soon in Africa, the annual climate platform is attracting

[continue reading...]

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

[continue reading...]

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

[continue reading...]

Book: Climate Change: IPCC, Water Crisis, and Policy Riddles With Reference to India and Her Surroundings  Author: Binayak Ray    Lexington Books, Maryland    234 pages, $45 book review `Concerned about effects’ by: Dr. Sudhirendar Sharma For anyone struggling to comprehend what climate change might mean to life-support systems and policy arena in the sub-continent, Binayak Ray

[continue reading...]

TIME: The Kingdom of Bhutan, tucked between India and China in the foothills of the Himalaya mountain range, is paying the price for global industrialization. Climate change is causing many Himalayan glaciers to melt in increasingly unstable ways, and there are concerns about the long term viability of the ice in a warmer world. Water

[continue reading...]

IPS: CUZCO, Peru- “This year the freeze killed my crops, our small livestock died, and now I can’t even sleep because I’m worried sick thinking about how to put food on my family’s table, since I’m a widow,” said Rosaura Huatay, an indigenous farmer in Peru’s northern Andes highlands. Huatay and four other campesinas or

[continue reading...]

Climate Change and Himalayan Cold Deserts: Mapping vulnerability and threat to ecology and indigenous livelihoods The remote cold desert stretches of high altitude Himalayas, having a fragile ecosystem are characterized by complex interplay of climatic and geo-morphological processes, availability of limited natural resources and economic  conditions leading to accelerated resource degradation and associated environmental consequences

[continue reading...]

Guardian: Time is almost up. It is critical we secure a legally binding approach on climate change in Durban. The lesson the world is learning the hard way from the financial crisis is that there is only one boat and we are all in it. To stay afloat, we need rules tough enough to stop

[continue reading...]

Deccan Herald: A team of US and Korean scientists blame high levels of air pollution in South Asia for a sharp rise in the intensity of tropical cyclones over the Arabian Sea during and before the monsoon, writes Kalyan Ray . Increased air pollution in South Asia including India is pushing up cyclone intensity in

[continue reading...]

IndiaChinaInstitute: Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments in the Himalayas is a multiyear initiative that endeavors to uncover new dimensions to the current discourse on global environmental policy. The project aims to create an enabling environment for knowledge-sharing and production on the complex role of religion with particular emphasis on sustainable environmental issues. Given the diversity

[continue reading...]

Kuenselonline: The Wangchu river that runs through Thimphu city, Bhutan’s biggest and fastest growing urban centre, is more polluted as it passes through the main town and flows downstream, a report prepared by the National Environment Commission concludes. The report collected data between March last year and April this year, from monitoring sites set up

[continue reading...]

Kuenselonline: Lack of equipment and trained personnel impedes analysis of available met data Climate Change A major part of the Eastern Himalayas, where  Bhutan is located, is undergoing a warming trend of about one-degree Celsius per year. The director of department of hydro meteorology services, Karma Tshering, yesterday in his presentation  “climate change over Bhutan from

[continue reading...]

Science Dev Net: Sceptical views on man-made climate change have received far less newspaper coverage in major developing countries than in the United Kingdom or the United States, according to a survey. In the United States, over a third of climate articles published during the study period in selected newspapers reported sceptical standpoints while less

[continue reading...]

Practical Action: This briefing focuses on the impact of climate change on Nepal’s rural poor. A great deal has been written  on the challenges of providing clean energy and the risks to urban populations but, as this paper outlines, climate change also has many other consequences. Rural communities, whose livelihoods are intimately tied to the

[continue reading...]

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

[continue reading...]

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

[continue reading...]

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

[continue reading...]

Times of India: The Chairperson of the Nobel Price winning International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), Rajendra Kumar Pachauri on Friday offered his services to Bihar. In response to Bihar’s Deputy CM Sushil Kumar Modi’s request at a workshop, Pachauri said: “I will be glad to offer my services for the formulation of Bihar State Action

[continue reading...]

World Climate Report: There is word circulating that a paper soon to appear in Science magazine concludes that the climate sensitivity—how much the earth’s average temperature will rise as a result of a doubling of the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide—likely (that is, with a 66% probability) lies in the range 1.7°C to 2.6°C, with

[continue reading...]

SEI: Publication- Climate Economics the State of the Art by Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton Stockholm Environment Institute-U.S. Center November 2011 Climate science paints a bleak picture: The continued growth of greenhouse gas emissions is increasingly likely to cause irreversible and catastrophic effects. Urgent action is needed to prepare for the initial rounds of

[continue reading...]

Down to Earth: His field-based scientific thrust and the fearlessness with which he put forth uncomfortable truths made him stand out. These are sad times for Nepal’s nature conservationists: five years ago, on  September 23, 2006, the country lost its crème de la crème in a tragic helicopter accident in the Kanchenjunga Conservation Area. While

[continue reading...]

World Crunch: Melting glaciers in the Himalayas put the small Kingdom of Bhutan at risk. Not only are the “frozen reservoirs” a fundamental water source, but the melting can also cause GLOFS – aka: ‘mountain tsunamis’ – killer flash floods that occur when glacial lakes suddenly burst. The Kingdom of Bhutan, tucked between India and

[continue reading...]

Times Science: There’s one absolutely foolproof way to cut carbon emissions: economic collapse. After the fall of communism in the early 1990s led to economic depression in much of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, carbon output in those countries fell like a stone. In fact, greenhouse-gas emissions in Russia didn’t return to 1990

[continue reading...]

Business Bhutan: As the global summit for climate talks approaches, vulnerable countries make a point to form a united voice. A group of 32 vulnerable countries, which created the Climate Change Vulnerable Forum, including Bhutan is set to meet in Dhaka, two weeks ahead of UN climate talks (the 17th Conference of Parties) in Durban,

[continue reading...]

Mongabay: Global carbon emissions last year exceeded worst-case scenario predictions from just four years before, according to the US Department of Energy (DOE). A rise of 6 percent (564 million additional tons) over 2009 levels was largely driven by three nations: the US, India, and China. Emissions from burning coal jumped 8 percent overall. The

[continue reading...]

WRI: East Coast snowstorms in October. The suburbs of Bangkok under water. Extreme droughts in the Horn of Africa. Such “freak” weather events have dominated headlines for over a year, and with good reason. Now, a new report from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is making the connections between these extreme weather events

[continue reading...]

Guardian: Action cannot be put off until the economic storm has passed. The poor countries most vulnerable to the extreme weather associated with climate change need help now. Critics often accuse world leaders of being able to focus on no more than one problem at once. So with the economic crisis, and the eurozone’s problems

[continue reading...]

Asian Age: Wetlands consist of marshes, swamps, bogs and similar areas. The functions of wetlands are filtering out of sediments and nutrients from the surface water and support all life forms through extensive food webs and bio-diversity. Wetlands contribute to a number of important processes including movement of water into streams and rivers, decay of

[continue reading...]

Hindustan Times: India will engage 100,000 educated youths to execute an ambitious Green India Mission (GIM) which seeks to increase the country’s forest cover to 33% from 20% within 10 years. According to top forest official, PJ Dilip Kumar, director general of India’s forest department, in order to copewith climate change threats, the central and

[continue reading...]

Himalayan Times: Nepal’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Gyan Chandra Acharya has stressed on the strong need for providing continued support for strengthened and effective voice and participation of Least Developed Countries (LDCs) in decision- and rule-making and standard- and norm-setting areas in all relevant international forums. Delivering a speech on behalf of LDCs

[continue reading...]

IUCN: Businesses around the world are adjusting to a rapidly-shifting economic landscape but should we expect them to lead the way to a green global economy? Olivia Pasini asks the question for our latest World Conservation Debate. The concept of a green economy has been around for a while now. For many years there have

[continue reading...]

Manila Bulletin Publishing Corporation: MANILA, Philippines — The Philippines and Bangladesh joined forces for an initiative in the United Nations Human Rights Council to urge the international community to address the adverse effects of climate change on human rights. Philippine Permanent Representative to the United Nations and other International Organizations in Geneva, Ambassador Evan P.

[continue reading...]

Expectations are high that the newly evolving mechanism of Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions (NAMAs) will enable large-scale emission reductions in developing countries. Even though modalities and procedures for NAMAs are still evolving, a number of developing countries and consultants are developing concrete actions and policies with the aim of gaining financial, technological and capacity-building support

[continue reading...]

Collective thinking and engagement around Community-Based Adaptation: Creating a shared global community Over the last several years there has been a growing interest in Community-Based Adaptation (CBA) to climate change in the developing countries, which has led to a significant and growing number of actions on the ground by NGOs and research organizations. Many of

[continue reading...]

HimalayanTimes: There is un-contestable evidence that human induced climate change is inevitably leading the world to ecological disaster with grave human implications. With steady but sure irreversible impacts on human life and livelihood, the disaster is particularly threatening the most vulnerable developing countries of the world.The question often raised is about the role that the

[continue reading...]