-The Economic Times NEW DELHI: Monsoon rainfall, crucial for food production in India, is expected to intensify in the future and the rainy season is likely to be longer, according to the draft report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. A leaked draft of the first of three reports comprising the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Fifth Assessment Report states while monsoon circulation is likely to weaken, monsoon precipitation is likely...

-FAO Direct economic costs of $750 billion annually - Better policies required, and "success stories" need to be scaled up and replicated Rome: The waste of a staggering 1.3 billion tonnes of food per year is not only causing major economic losses but also wreaking significant harm on the natural resources that humanity relies upon to feed itself, says a new FAO report. Food Wastage Footprint: Impacts on Natural Resources is the first...

-The Hindu Biomass cookstoves and solar lighting improve the health of women and are creating business models that empower them Around the world three billion people have no access to modern cooking fuels. They depend mostly on direct burning of solid biomass for cooking and heating. The smoke from these rudimentary stoves causes some four million deaths annually, destroys millions of tonnes of crops and leads to global warming and large-scale regional...

-Frontline A World Bank report on climate change warns that a warmer world will trap millions in poverty. "Much of the advance of European capitalists and other members of the European ruling class was at the cost of the colonised and enslaved peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America," says Amiya Kumar Bagchi in his book "Perilous Passage: Mankind and the Global Ascendancy of Capital." Capitalist expansion following the Industrial Revolution involved...

-IANS WASHINGTON: Human-caused outdoor air pollution may be responsible for over two million deaths worldwide - a large number of them in South Asia and East Asia - each year, US researchers have said. A study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, has estimated that around 470,000 people die each year because of human-caused increase in ozone, Xinhua reported. It also estimated that around 2.1 million deaths are caused each year by...