Chinese officials have welcomed this week's scheduled meeting between the Prime Ministers of India and China in Rio de Janeiro as an opportunity to strike common ground with India, with both countries facing “similar pressure” on a host of contentious global issues. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is scheduled to hold bilateral talks with Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the sidelines of Wednesday's Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, where India,...

-The Hindu The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) is set to take place on June 20 at Rio de Janeiro, 20 years after the 1992 Earth Summit on Environment & Development. World leaders, experts, and U.N. agencies are expected to take stock and reaffirm global commitment to sustainable development. The summit is taking place against the backdrop of threats of catastrophic climate change, unprecedented environmental degradation and widespread market...

There are major issues at stake in the Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development to be held on 20-22 June. Yet governments of developing countries have not given adequate importance to the run-up to the conference. As has happened in the climate change negotiations, the outcome draft now under negotiation shows a concerted move to rewrite the terms of global environmental governance. There is an attempt to push through the decidedly...

You know your negotiating strategy is in trouble when countries ranging as far as Norway in the developed world to partners like South Africa and neighbours like Bangladesh start quoting Gandhi and Nehru back to you. Two months ago, this was the unfortunate situation Environment Minister Jayanthi Natarajan had to face at the Durban conference on climate change. That she managed, through a passionate last-minute speech, to ensure that all was...

-EPW   A paradigm shift on global strategy, but will it make a difference to climate change or only pass the buck? The United Nations Conference on Climate Change in Durban ended dramatically with a last minute agreement of sorts, which only talks about more talks to arrive at some kind of legally binding instrument that will impose emission curbs on all countries from 2020. The agreement is simply not enough in...