-The Times of India  Karnataka BJP president K S Eshwarappa on Sunday stirred up a hornet's nest, advising education minister Visvesvara Hegde Kageri to saffronise schools. Eshwarappa was speaking at a programme involving the education department's greening programme in Shimoga.  Appreciating the education minister's efforts for taking up planting of saplings in government schools, Eshwarappa said: "Children's books have a lot of thoughts on religion and culture. It is essential to preserve...

-AFP JOHANNESBURG: Foreign farms are spreading across Africa to grow food and biofuels for global markets, bringing much-needed investments but also new troubles for a continent struggling to feed itself.  China, Malaysia, Singapore and Bangladesh are just some of the countries spending billions of dollars in what critics have dubbed a new "scramble for Africa", a reference to Europe's 19th century colonisation drive.  But Africa holds an estimated 60 percent of the world's...

A scientific and public scrutiny of the methodology used by the expert panel will only add to the efforts to save the Western Ghats. On May 23, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) posted the report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) on its website honouring a landmark judgment of the Central Information Commission triggered by an activist seeking access to the material. In this judgment, the CIC...

If the environment ministry's draft proposal for 'inviolate forest areas' is accepted, large swathes of healthy forests, including national parks, wildlife sanctuaries, tiger reserves and wildlife corridors, would be out of bounds for all mining activities, and not just coal excavation. The ministry's draft lists criteria for identifying forest patches where mining should be banned following the GoM on coal's decision to junk the no-go policy of the environment ministry. The...

-The Times of India Asia and the Pacific is consuming more resources than its ecosystems can sustain, threatening the future of the region's beleaguered forests, Rivers, and oceans as well as the livelihoods of those who depend on them, says a new joint report by the Asian Development Bank ( ADB) and WWF. The joint ADB-WWF study, Ecological Footprint and Investment in Natural Capital in Asia and the Pacific, focuses on ways...