It came as no big surprise to anyone at all that US President Barack Obama made a speech filled with noble intentions, but very little concrete action, on the issue of climate change at the climate change Summit, which just concluded in New York. Environment activist had great hopes that the US President would think "out of the box" and take the lead in ensuring that the US, one of...

As we approach the global summit on climate change in December 2009 in Copenhagen, critical concerns are likely to emerge. Both the United Nations conference last week and the subsequent G-20 meeting in Pittsburgh left several issues somewhat ambiguous. While the United States spoke of reduction in its emissions, these remain insignificant. At the G-20 meet, leaders stated that they would "intensify efforts to reach an agreement at Copenhagen and...

Farmers advised to revert to traditional practices in farming to make it sustainable in future ANANTAPUR: Experts at a workshop on climate change and sustainable agriculture have opined that the Green Revolution has done more harm than good to the agriculture sector in the country from a long term perspective. They suggested the farmers to return to traditional practices in farming in order to make the vocation sustainable in future....

A commission set up to look into alternative ways of measuring economic and social progress has added to the existing debate but not made any real advances.  FOR some time now it has been clear that standard measurements of growth and development are inadequate and possibly even misleading. The problem of looking at only the aggregate gross domestic product (GDP) has been widely noted: its blindness to distributional issues and...

Did we just miss a major opportunity? For short while, it seemed that the global financial crisis would focus minds on what is wrong with the current economic growth model and how we can go about changing it. Unfortunately, that moment seems to have passed, at least until the next crisis comes along (which, in current trends, will not be long, since all the major forces that led to the...