-PTI   Unsustainable growth, population, urbanisation & consumption increase impact region's environment Emissions in India and China is set to rise as the Asia-Pacific region faces mounting challenges in tackling climate change, water scarcity, species extinction and hazardous waste and their economies forge ahead, a UN report has warned. The region needs to improve governance structures and accountability and scale up successful policy initiatives to achieve sustainable development, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said...

The lesson for India after Durban is that it needs to formulate an approach that combines attention to industrialised countries’ historical responsibility for the problem with an embrace of its own responsibility to explore low carbon development trajectories. This is both ethically defensible and strategically wise. Ironically, India’s own domestic national approach of actively exploring “co-benefits” – policies that promote development while also yielding climate gains – suggests that it...

  -PTI Experts from the University of Oxford and Indian researchers are looking into the impact of climate change policies on India's informal economy, and to diagnose ways of reducing CO2 emissions and improving jobs.  By and large the global response to climate change has ignored informal economies and yet the larger part of India's economy and almost all its jobs are informal and not directly affected by government policy, a university release...

-The Telegraph   The main points agreed upon in the Durban talks: Kyoto protocol extension After the failure of Copenhagen in 2009 to come up with a new, internationally-binding deal and only incremental progress a year later in Cancun, a partial legal vacuum had loomed as drafting a new UN treaty is extremely time-consuming. Sunday’s deal extends Kyoto, whose first phase of emissions cuts run from 2008 to the end of 2012. The second commitment...

The 17th Conference of Parties (COP) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) is being held in Durban, South Africa, from November 28 to December 9, 2011.   Urgent action is required to arrest the inexorable rise in global CO2 emissions. What are the issues before this important international meeting on Climate Change?   The last meeting of the COP was held in Cancun, Mexico, in December 2010. The 17th COP will...