Tag Archives : rich countries

In the run-up to the UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December, African countries are boycotting climate change conferences. They allege that ‘the world’s rich nations must do more to cut emissions.’ This is just one of the hurdles being encountered by the controversial climate deal negotiations whose final agreements hope [...]

The global fate of fisheries, their decline and overexploitation, may yet show a more promising environmental future. Where trade agreements failed to halt the overfishing of oceans, the United Nations Climate Change Conference taking place next month in Copenhagen may yet be the solution. The trick lies in the pledge by the leaders of the G20 group [...]

In spite of many local and international restrictions, overfishing continues to be a glaring reality, even escalating at an alarming rate. Countries have been breaking their environmental pledges in this regard, creating a huge gap between what countries promise to do to end overfishing and what actually happens in the seas, oceans, and coastal waters. [...]

According to Phil Edwards, a researcher from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, “We need to do a lot more to reverse the global trend towards fatness. It is a key factor in the battle to reduce carbon emissions and slow climate change.” Edwards’ research found that ‘the average overweight person is responsible for an extra [...]

The G20 ‘agreed that all subsidies that encourage wasteful consumption must go.’ The G20 is composed of 19 countries plus the European Union and international financial institutions. This group accounts for 80 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions, also because of fossil fuel subsidies that do not augur well for the fight against climate change [...]

There is a popular notion that to effectively solve climate change and other environmental ills, the problem of ‘exponential population growth’ has to be necessarily solved. Strict birth control is touted to prevent doomsday. In the past, there had been concrete efforts to stem the burgeoning human population on the planet. Forced vasectomies [...]

The passing away this week of Norman Borlaug, the father of Green Revolution that ‘created high-yielding wheat varieties to stave off famine,’ is a reminder that his well-intended campaign did not end up as he dreamed it would. Today, there is prevailing hunger in the world in spite of the potential to have so much food. Little did Borlaug imagine [...]

It is but 18 months away from the G8′s self-imposed deadline for promises pledged to aid Africa but only $7 billion out of the $21.5 billion in aid, promised at the Gleneagles summit in 2005, have actually been delivered. This means that a paltry one-third of the total pledges made by the G8 group of industrialized countries has actually benefited [...]

According to the latest update from the World Health Organization (WHO), the Influenza A (H1N1) virus, formerly called swine flu, has infected nearly 10,000 people across 40 countries. To date, 79 people have died from this viral infection. In the preceding 24 hours alone, the count rose by 1,000 cases. At the top of the list in number of cases is [...]

Pride renders in a proud man’s mind the idea that he has more rights than others, since he is deemed to be in a superior position. He, therefore, has the right to amass wealth more than the others. Pride leads to greed and gluttony, two more deadly sins, because pride gives the false impression that it is alright to gain more and merit more. The [...]