An open collision of ideas about global warming at the release of the UNFPA report, “The State of World Population 2009” has generated enough heat to raise the tempers. (See the report’s URL below) While the Minister of Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh, who released the report in New Delhi, agreed that the women of the world would be forced to bear the disproportionate burden of climate change, he questioned...

It does seem that Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh chose an inopportune time — the eve of the crucial UN climate negotiations — to endorse the findings by a retired scientist that Himalayan glaciers have not been ‘retreating’ any faster than they have been for the past century. The study by V.K. Raina, a former Deputy Director General of the Geological Survey of India, has apparently not been peer-reviewed. No less...

“THE world’s attention is back on your cause.” That was Bill Gates talking to agricultural scientists gathered recently to honour the late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution. The tycoon-turned-philanthropist was right. This week, the world—in the guise of 60-odd heads of state including the pope—held the first United Nations food summit since 2002. As the world’s attention turns from the receding financial crisis, it is switching to one...

But will have to move on a low carbon trajectory to minimise impact of climate change A month before the heads of state meeting in Copenhagen on climate change, Union Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh said on Thursday that India was willing to be isolated but would not accept legally binding emission cuts. In the same breath, he said domestically India would have to be relentless...

Without urgent progress which will stimulate funding for renewables, nations could be locked into high-carbon energy and transport technologies for decades, inflating another unsustainable economic bubble, say experts. Achim Steiner, the head of the U.N. environment programme, said: “Far more worrying [than formally ratifying a treaty] is that every month we delay we send a ambiguous signal into the world economy, the markets, investors and R&D.” The markets had not...