Monbiot: After Rio, we know. Governments have given up on the planet

By George Monbiot, www.guardian.co.uk 25 June 2012 It is, perhaps, the greatest failure of collective leadership since the first world war. The Earth’s living systems are collapsing, and the leaders of some of the most powerful nations – the United States, the UK, Germany, Russia – could not even be bothered to turn up and […]

Peru needs glacier loss monitoring: UN warning

By Roberto Cortijo 4 June 2012 Peru needs a permanent monitoring system to gauge Andean mountain glacier shrinkage caused by global warming and its effect on people who depend on the ice for water, UN experts warned. “We have spoken with Peruvian government institutions, and there is no sufficient monitoring system to tell us the […]

Web of marine life disintegrating under human onslaught

NEW YORK, New York, 22 May 2012 (ENS) – Oceans cover about 72 percent of Earth’s surface area and there are an estimated 250,000 marine species. “Yet, despite its importance, marine biodiversity has not fared well at human hands,” UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said today in his message to mark the International Day for Biological […]

Will climate refugees get promised aid?

By Marwaan Macan-Markar 8 April 2012 BANGKOK – With extreme weather pounding countries across a wide arc in the Asia-Pacific region, questions hover over entitlements for millions of people displaced by climate change, pledged under the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and other sources. Will the long wait by climate change migrants – including the 42 […]

Scientists warn of ‘emergency on global scale’

29 March 2012 (AFP) – Leading scientists on Thursday called on the upcoming Rio Summit to grapple with environmental ills that they said pointed to “a humanitarian emergency on a global scale.” In a “State of the Planet” declaration issued after a four-day conference, the scientists said Earth was now facing unprecedented challenges, from water […]

UN scientists warn of increased groundwater demands due to climate change

San Francisco, 12 March 2012 (SPX)  – Climate change has been studied extensively, but a new body of research guided by a San Francisco State University hydrologist looks beneath the surface of the phenomenon and finds that climate change will put particular strain on one of our most important natural resources: groundwater. SF State Assistant […]

Millions of Pakistan flood victims still at risk – U.N. issues desperate plea for $440 million

16 February 2012 (presstv) – Millions of Pakistanis are still at serious risk of malnutrition and disease due to a weak international response to the country’s second major flooding crisis in two years. The Pakistan Humanitarian Forum (PHF) said Thursday that at least 2.5 million people in the flood-hit country are still suffering from the […]

10 million face drought in the Sahel – ‘The cycles are getting closer together’

NIAMEY, Niger, 28 January 2012 (UPI) – An estimated 10 million people across Africa’s arid Sahel region are feeling the effects of drought, humanitarian agencies say. A survey by the U.N. Children’s Fund estimated there will be 1 million cases of severe malnutrition caused by the drought, with between 25 percent and 60 percent of […]

Earth Summit is doomed to fail, say leading ecologists – ‘We are not remotely on a course to be sustainable’

By Fred Pearce10 February 2012 LONDON – We can forget about fixing the planet’s ecosystems and climate until we have fixed government systems, a panel of leading international environmental scientists declared in London on Friday. The solution, they said, may not lie with governments at all. “We are disillusioned. The current political system is broken,” […]

Graph of the Day: National Current-Account Balances as a Percentage of World Gross Product, 1996-2013

The large and persistent external imbalances in the global economy that have developed over the past decade remain a point of concern for policymakers. Reducing these imbalances has been the major focus of consultations among G20 Finance Ministers under the G20 Framework for Strong, Sustainable and Balanced Growth and the related Mutual Assessment Process (MAP) […]

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