The latest Human Development Report, or HDR, (2010), marking its 20th anniversary, is both remarkable and useful. Remarkable because it brims with intellectual confidence, born out of a sense of vindication over the “conceptual brilliance and continued relevance” of Mahbub ul-Huq’s original human development paradigm set out in the first sentence of the 1990 report — “People are the real wealth of nations.” The idea of human development, which, through...

OC's expenditure overshot its budget by Rs. 638 crore The OC has taken Rs. 2,307.82 crore in loan, well above the originally approved amount M.S. Gill admits that there were no earnings from advertisements as such The Commonwealth Games Organising Committee (OC) has fallen more than 80 per cent short of its revenue target, according to Union Sports Minister M.S. Gill. While the OC was expected to generate Rs. 1,708 crore, it only managed...

The agreement that was recently concluded at the 10th Conference of the Parties (COP-10) to the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at Nagoya in Japan will go down in history as the second most important global initiative, after the CBD itself, in protecting the Earth’s fast-depleting biodiversity. This is vital for sustaining life on the planet. The ball was set rolling way back in 1992 with the adoption of the...

Taxes on international flights, shipping and financial transactions, as well as a global carbon price of $20 to $25 may be key to annually mobilising $100 billion in climate funding by 2020, according to the United Nations high-level advisory group on climate change financing, which submitted its report in New York on Friday. At the U.N. climate summit held in Copenhagen last year, developed countries committed to a Goal of jointly...

The ‘Aichi Target' adopted by the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) at its Nagoya conference could not have come at a more appropriate time. The journal Science recently published a study by Michael Hoffmann and his colleagues titled “The Impact of Conservation on the Status of the World's Vertebrates.” This presents depressing data on threatened species. The scientists conclude that four important factors — agricultural expansion, logging, over-exploitation, and invasive...