While India could play a “constructive part” at the Copenhagen negotiations on climate change that will take place in December, it cannot accept mandatory emission limits, according to Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In an opinion piece that is appearing this week in the journal Nature, the head of the international body that assesses the scientific evidence on climate change said that India expected...

Government policies in many developing countries which promote the planting of a narrow base of agricultural crops may hurt farmers in the long run, a United Nations human rights expert warned today. As a result of the global food crisis, developing countries “have massively reinvested in agriculture and have sought to provide farmers with the means of production they need to produce food,” Olivier de Schutter, the Special Rapporteur on...

The agricultural sector is both an emitter of greenhouse gases and a victim of global warming. Technological change, water utilisation and cropping pattern in agriculture have implications both for emission reduction and adaptation. While hydrocarbons and raw material-based industries contribute to global warming, their productivity is not necessarily affected by the phenomenon, as is the case in agriculture. Agricultural production impacts climate change and, in turn, is impacted by it....

There is a real fear that the Kyoto Protocol will be killed soon Two years ago, amidst much fanfare, a United Nations ministerial meeting in the fabled island of Bali adopted a “roadmap” for tackling climate change. The roadmap laid down two tracks for progress, corresponding to the two international agreements on climate change — the Kyoto Protocol and the Framework Convention on Climate Change. With regard to the first...

A new international report slams the Indian government for not doing enough to end hunger. It says hunger exists in India because of a lack of purchasing capacity of the poor rather due to insufficiency of food production. Titled “Who’s Really Fighting Hunger”?, (see the link below) the Action Aid report which was released on 16 October, 2009 reveals that in India 30 million people have been added to the...