Green Editorials
The hydropower industry's Protocol is an inside job - developed by the industry, to be administered by its consultants, who will work closely with project promoters, writes Shripad Dharmadhikary.
On 16 November 2000, almost exactly ten years ago, Nelson Mandela released the report of the World Commission on Dams (WCD) in London. The WCD, it may be recollected, was a 12-member Commission representing dam builders, engineering companies, NGOs, affected peoples movements etc. set up in 1998 at the initiative of the World Bank and the International Union for Conservation of Nature to assess the development effectiveness of large dams worldwide. Even with the diversity of its members, it delivered a unanimous report, vindicated many of the serious criticisms of large dams, and come out with a set of criteria and guidelines under which large dams should be built.
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Saturday,11 December, 2010 | Hits: 724
With the formation of the Green Tribunal, its predecessor, the NEAA has ceased to exist. But the NGT is not fully ready to hear cases, and this has put the regulatory environment off-course. Kanchi Kohli reports.
On 19 October, the Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) issued a press release officially notifying the National Green Tribunal (NGT), with the appointment of Lokeshwar Singh Panta as the Chairperson of the body. The NGT Bill had cleared the parliament decks in April this year, after signficant debate and questioning, some of which continues to be unresolved.
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Saturday,11 December, 2010 | Hits: 125
While much of the negotiations at the UN climate change meet in Bonn (28 March to 8 April) centred around targets for reducing carbon dioxide emissions - mainly, but by no means exclusively by industrial countries, and funding developing countries to follow suit - the transfer of energy-efficient technologies was also hotly debated.
This follows in the wake of the negotiations in Bali in 2007, where developing countries, among some 190 present, agreed to take "nationally appropriate" mitigation actions in the context of sustainable development, supported and enabled by technology, financing and capacity-building, in a "measurable, reportable and verifiable" manner. The proviso was that such actions would take into account "differences in their national circumstances".
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Saturday,11 December, 2010 | Hits: 137
The best-selling environmental authors in the UK over the last decade are James Lovelock, Al Gore and Christopher Booker, plus in top spot the Eden project's Tim Smit
Tim Smit's account of the Eden Project was the best-selling environment book of the decade, according to Nielsen BookScan. Photograph: Eden Project
What do James Lovelock, Tim Smit, Christopher Booker and Al Gore have in common? They are the best-selling environmental authors in the UK over the last decade, according to Nielsen BookScan data published recently by The Bookseller.
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Saturday,04 December, 2010 | Hits: 144
For millions of people, the law does not explicitly direct that they are entitled to safe water. A United Nations resolution passed in July this year is about to change that. Shripad Dharmadhikary reports.
In March 1996, the Government of Maharashtra issued a circular directing that slums which had come into existence after 1 January 1995 should not be supplied with water. This was presumably so that they could not later claim eligibility for regularisation. According to urban activist Sitaram Shelar of YUVA, Mumbai, this has resulted in some 20-25 lakh people in Mumbai being legally denied any water supply. They depend on middlemen and buy water from illicit suppliers at exorbitant rates.
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Saturday,04 December, 2010 | Hits: 131
How does one go about saving energy during construction or in the lifetime of a building when we live in it? A lot of this has to do with your being sensitized to this concept of 'embodied energy', writes Chandrashekar Hariharan. Buildings are not buildings but energy forms. So what can you do about bringing sanity to such energy use when you build? It is useful to remember when you set out to build a house or an office building, a hotel or hospital, that every material that we use is expending energy in different forms, and is releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
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Saturday,04 December, 2010 | Hits: 122
Executive Summary
The growth of population is a major factor behind climate change today. Human-caused climate change is fundamentally an imbalance of scale, as people release heat-trapping gases into Earth’s atmosphere faster than the oceans and living things can remove them. This imbalance stems from both the explosion of technologies made possible through the combustion of fossil fuels since the late 1700s and the more than sevenfold increase in human numbers since that time.
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Thursday,25 November, 2010 | Hits: 178
Next week may be make-or-break for the future of wild tigers around the world. Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin will be hosting delegations from tiger-range countries for the first ever International Tiger Summit in Saint Petersburg. Heads of state from 13 tiger-range countries plus a high-level delegation from the United States will gather to discuss responses to the alarming decline of tiger populations in the wild. What all parties can agree with going in, is that inaction will inevitably lead to the extinction of this beautiful creature, one of the world's most beloved.
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Thursday,25 November, 2010 | Hits: 144
According to the U.N. Population Division, over 70 percent of Indians live in rural areas and over half of all Indians are farmers. Yet access to technology and information in many areas is limited, meaning farmers are often left uninformed and at the mercy of erratic weather and disease and pest outbreaks. And even in good growing conditions, farmers may not have access to price information that could help them negotiate with buyers or decide which markets to bring their products to.
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Saturday,13 November, 2010 | Hits: 319
At a recent United Nations event about global hunger, held on November 4th, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon declared partnerships as the key to feeding the world’s hungry.
Although the number of hungry people worldwide has fallen for the first time in 15 years, this progress is not nearly enough. The global food system is still failing to provide the most basic human right to 925 million people who remain chronically hungry.
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Saturday,13 November, 2010 | Hits: 125
