In The News

Ehsan Masood May 19, 2005
According to a new report, UN Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to reduce global poverty will interfere with efforts to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss. Infrastructural development such as road building can have a negative environmental impact, disrupting habitats and leading to species loss in many places. This has sparked much debate over which is the more important goal to meet,...
R.K. Pachauri April 28, 2005
The recent record surge in oil prices has led many OPEC countries to re-evaluate their energy demand. This Outlook India commentary suggests that these newfound concerns are only the beginning of a worldwide reckoning of oil security. Rising prices are a symptom not of an impending global supply crisis, but of a concentration of reserves and an enormous projected leap in production in primarily...
Leony Aurora April 19, 2005
Speaking before the upcoming Asian-African Summit, Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono called on leaders from the two continents to initiate increased use of renewable energy. High investment costs and limited incentives make renewable energy a tough sell across the region. Yet as conventional energy resources decline, nations are increasingly engaged in conflict over resource-rich...
Tim Johnson March 7, 2005
Much to the distress of their US competitors, Chinese manufacturers are charging very low prices for their furniture. They can do so because, as environmentalists are increasingly discovering, they benefit from large, cheap supplies of illegal timber imported from all over the world. Much of this timber comes from rare hardwood forests, which are being depleted by illegal logging. China has...
Ochieng' Ogodo March 3, 2005
A recently released United Nations report details the environmental consequences of the South Asian tsunami. Sewage, asbestos, and oil have contaminated groundwater throughout the region. The ecological disaster has spread to Somalia, whose coastline has long been used as a dumping ground for hazardous waste by other nations. Evidence now shows that the tsunami stirred up this nuclear waste,...
James Gustave Speth February 16, 2005
The Kyoto Protocol to combat global climate change goes into effect today, February 16. This treaty, signed on December 11, 1997, is an international effort to protect the earth's climate and slow down global warming. Today, 141 countries have ratified the agreement, and 34 economically advanced countries have accepted the Protocol's targets on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions....
Bjorn Lomborg February 15, 2005
On Wednesday, the Kyoto Protocol on global climate change enters force, marking a milestone for environmentalism. But making climate change "a central moral test of our time" was wrong, writes Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Lomborg points to existing climate models that predict that even universal acceptance of the Kyoto rules would postpone warming by a mere...