Despite growing threat to food security from global warming, India is busy acq-uiring fertile lands for industries and infrastructure. Something terrible is happening to the weather. And it is happening right across our home. From the cold desert of Ladakh to the plains of Bihar and Jharkhand, extreme weather conditions have played havoc. In neighbouring Pakistan, unprecedented floods, and that too in the arid region of Sindh, have hit more than...

Complexity and unsolved problems are at the very heart of the sustainability challenge, and at the very heart of M.S. Swaminathan's thinking and essays. In 1798, Thomas Robert Malthus offered the piercing insight that geometric population growth would inevitably outstrip food production, leaving society destitute and hungry. Since that time, our optimism of beating the “Malthusian curse” has waxed and waned. Few people in modern history have done more to help...

Indian Ocean sea levels are rising unevenly and threatening the residents in some densely populated coastal areas of India and Bangladesh, besides the island nations of Maldives and Sri Lanka, a new study has said. Sea-level rise is particularly high along the coastlines of the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea, as well as the islands of Sri Lanka, Sumatra and Java, says the study carried out jointly by the...

A leading Dutch environment agency reported on Monday that the seminal 2007 UN scientific report on climate change is too generalized and has even more errors than discovered so far -- including one contributed by the agency itself. But the review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency claimed the errors had no effect on the fundamental conclusion by UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is...

Says India will be one of the biggest beneficiaries ‘I am trying to bridge gap between academic work and policy making' ‘Need for honest attempt for interflow of ideas from think tanks and use them in policy making' Union Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh on Monday said that India cannot accept any international agreement without equity and insisted on equitable access to global atmospheric space. “This is a matter of survival,” he told a press...