Environment

[By Christian Gollier,Jean Tirole] As the Paris 2015 climate talks get under way, the fear is growing that this international conference will be reduced to a simple list of good intentions. Current negotiations based on voluntary “intended nationally determined contributions” (INDCs) allow participants to make attractive promises and claim victory when, in reality, their primary use will be to keep ...

[The Conversation] More than a billion tonnes of potentially toxic, bleach-like waste is produced and piled in landfills every year, with often devastating effects. And yet most people haven’t even heard of these “alkaline wastes”. We want to change this. Our research has identified nearly two billion tonnes of alkaline residues that are produced in the world each year, most ...

[Peter Fisher | The Conversation] Much of the world still lacks clean, safe water. Progress on sanitation is falling far short of the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals. The scale of the problem is highlighted by India, where half the population – some 665 million people – still defecate in the open, and where most sewage, even from toilets, is dumped ...

[By Fernanda Dobal ] Last month I went on safari. It was a trip I had wanted to take for as long as I can remember. I left New York bubbling with excitement, and after 24+ hours of travel, I arrived at a beautiful South African reserve. Each day, we would wake up before the sun and drive into the ...

By Gisele Bündchen New York (Women’s Feature Service) – Did you know how big an impact a simple wood-burning stove can have on a woman’s life? Stoves produce toxic smoke that harms the environment as well as human health. In fact, more people die from this smoke than malaria – globally, about 4.3 million every year. And that’s not all. ...

[By Zsuzsanna Gal] In an atmosphere where every morning newspapers greet people with stories of girls being tormented, raped, killed or treated like a doormat, India’s beautiful small village communities can still bring some good news from time to time. Many parts of India historically favors the birth of a son, but villages like Piplantri in Rajasthan state have a ...

[By Brahma Chellaney] BERLIN – This December, world leaders will meet in Paris for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, where they will hammer out a comprehensive agreement to reduce carbon emissions and stem global warming. In the run-up to that meeting, governments worldwide should note one critical, but often overlooked, fact: the single biggest driver of environmental degradation and ...

New Delhi June 5 (WFS) — Climate change is a reality that no one can refute any longer. If left unchecked, it will have far reaching impacts on human health, global food security and economic development. Whereas no single country causes climate change, and no one country can stop it, there is an urgent need for concerted action. As the world ...

[The Conversation] The recent unveiling by Tesla founder Elon Musk of the low-cost Powerwall storage battery is the latest in a series of exciting advances in battery technologies for electric cars and domestic electricity generation. We have also seen the development of an aluminium-ion battery that may be safer, lighter and cheaper than the lithium-ion batteries used by Tesla and ...

[By Aishwarya Yerra] At midnight, Google changed its homepage to a funky doodle with a spinning Earth but it was their Earth Day quiz that further upped their cool quotient. Google clearly had a point here — if you want more people to celebrate Earth Day, make the campaign snazzy and one that has enough potential to go viral on ...