It is still under wraps. Despite an effort made through the Right to Information, no one outside government has seen it. The Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has proposed to introduce the Environment Tribunal Bill, which envisages the setting up of "green" courts to deal with environmental disputes. Why is this necessary? How will the "green" courts work? Who will benefit from them?

These are just some of the questions people involved in the environmental movement are asking. The substance of the proposed law should be in the public domain and ought to be debated by people beyond those in government before it is presented in Parliament. But none of this will happen if the MoEF has its way.

For more than two decades, groups concerned at the environmental impact of infrastructure and industrial projects have had to turn to courts for redress. The results have been patchy. Court intervention has sometimes helped. At other times, even when the court laid down criteria to ensure that environmental considerations are incorporated, those implementing projects have blatantly ignored the suggestions.

As a result, environmental groups have had to spend many frustrating years fighting the same issue in courts. The decade-long struggle of the Narmada Bachao Andolan against the Sardar Sarovar Project is a classic illustration. Despite the Supreme Court's directive that rehabilitation and ameliorative steps to minimise environmental damage must precede the construction of the dam, this has not happened. Thousands await rehabilitation even as the dam nears completion.

Environmental law in India has developed partly in response to demands by environmental groups and partly as a result of international conventions. The laws to protect biodiversity were a direct outcome of the International Convention on Biodiversity. After the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, a number of laws were changed or new rules drafted to conform to international agreements. Local environmental groups played an important role in bringing in the Coastal Regulation Zone rules, an outcome of growing awareness of the impact of development along the coasts on marine resources.

Similarly, campaigns by civil society groups led to changes in antiquated forest laws that had not heeded the presence of forest-dependent communities and viewed forests only as an economic resource. After the 1984 Bhopal gas disaster, there was much greater awareness of hazardous chemicals resulting in rules and laws governing their manufacture, use and transport.

Although by no means perfect, India's environmental laws have the potential to make a difference if they are properly implemented. To implement them, apart from regulatory bodies such as the Pollution Control Boards, the MoEF had set up "expert" committees that looked at projects and evaluated their impact on the environment. These committees included representatives of non-governmental organisations with a long track record of monitoring environmental impact. Even if the government did not accept all the suggestions made by the NGO members, several important interventions were accepted over the years. More important, these members were considered as "expert" as anyone with formal qualifications in one of the sciences or in economics.

In addition, on specific issues, monitoring groups were established that had the authority to check if a particular project, or development in a particular area, conformed to the environmental laws and regulations. For instance, an ecologically fragile area like Dahanu, north of Mumbai along the western coast, had the Dahanu Taluka Environment Protection Authority (DTEPA). It was set up following a long battle by local farmers and environmentalists against the 500-MW coal-fired power plant located in the area. Although the power plant was built and is functioning today, it was compelled to take measures to limit its polluting impact on the environment, and the DTEPA continues to monitor its performance. Similarly, the Mahabaleshwar Panchgani Monitoring Committee played a crucial role in protecting the popular hill stations from being destroyed by unchecked construction. The committee's term ran out in January 2005 and since then it has not been renewed.

This, in fact, seems to be the emerging pattern, indicative of the Ministry's approach to such committees. It seems unconcerned and unimpressed with their work and probably prefers that they be wound up.

The most important of such groups is the Central Empowered Committee (CEC), which has made many significant interventions where forestlands are concerned. It has not always agreed with the Ministry and, more often than not, rejected proposals that would endanger India's already dwindling forest cover. The term of the CEC is due to end in May and it is generally believed that the MoEF will not renew its mandate. Even if it is done, the committee will probably be reconstituted.

The excuse being used to set up an environmental tribunal is that there are too many cases pending in courts. A central tribunal in Delhi and regional ones, it is argued, will take the burden off the courts. The plan is based on the assumption that the groups presently taking matters to court will be satisfied with the civil remedies that the environmental tribunal will offer. What is not so well known is that apart from communities with grievances, proponents of projects can use the tribunals to clear their projects if they feel aggrieved that they have been denied permission on environmental grounds. The government would argue that such a set-up would obviate the need for specific committees as the tribunal could set up its own committees to look into specific projects.

On the surface, this appears reasonable. But people selected by the government will man the tribunals. When the majority of the cases that land up in court concern government policy and the perception of groups and communities that the government is violating its own laws, how can such tribunals be viewed as impartial?

Fortunately, people's fundamental rights to turn to courts and use public interest litigation cannot be affected by this new set-up. Environmental groups have used this to fight for environmental justice, although the outcome has not always been positive. But the avenue remains open and if the tribunals turn out to be what environmentalists suspect they will be, a process to rubber-stamp government proposals, these groups will have to continue to use the courts to seek justice.

It is also significant that the Ministry wants to change the definition of the word "expert." It restricts it to people with certain educational qualifications as well as people with experience in administration. In other words, people with science and economics degrees will qualify as also retired bureaucrats but people with decades of experience in understanding and monitoring the environment and the inter-linkages between different aspects of the environment will be kept out. This appears a deliberate attempt to exclude the activists who have served with distinction on numerous "expert" committees over the last two decades and who have also been the ones asking uncomfortable questions.

None of this bodes well for the future of environment in India. What is worrying is not just the precise nature of the law being proposed, but the motive behind it. The Ministry seems to have forgotten that the very reason environmental laws were enacted, or even a separate Ministry for environment and forests was created, was to ensure that development went hand in hand with environmental protection. Objections consistently raised by environmental groups to cursory handling of environmental concerns should have been welcomed rather than viewed as an irritant that needs to be removed.

A case in point is the way Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is done for projects. Rarely is the intent sincere to ensure that a new project minimises adverse environmental impact. Instead, EIAs routinely try to underplay negative impacts to ensure speedy clearance of projects. When these adverse impacts become so obvious that they cannot be ignored, it is most often too late. The project is already in place and communities around it have to resort to a long and complex struggle through courts.

India's natural environment is as much its wealth as the minerals that lie below the ground or the land that can be used for other purposes. Development versus environment is just not a debate any more. There is enough evidence to support the belief that the best possible form of development is that which integrates the concerns of environment and of people.

The imminent climate change and concerns about environment conservation figured prominently in the budget speech of Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, who today admitted that India was among the countries more vulnerable to climate change.

His "green intentions" were also highlighted when he proposed subsidy for farmers to encourage them to set up "dug wells" to trap rain water and recharge fast-depleting groundwater in several parts of the country, besides tax benefits for eco-friendly industry like coir.

The Minister informed the House that the government proposed to appoint an expert committee on climate change in the country in order to study the impact of climate change and identify measures to tackle it.

"India is not a significant contributor to emissions, nor will it be so in the foreseeable future. Nevertheless, in line with the principle of common but differentiated responsibility, India has taken steps to mitigate the green house gas (GHG) emissions and adapt to climate change impact," he told the House, however, also adding that India was among the countries more vulnerable to climate change.

Chidambaram said that India strongly promoted the Clean Development Mechanism under the Kyoto Protocol and had the world’s largest number of CDM projects.

Since plywood helps to save wood, the minister announced a reduction in excise duty on plywood from 16 per cent to eight per cent and exempted biodiesal completely from excise duty, as they "greatly reduce dependence on fossil fuels".

Considering that depletion of groundwater has assumed grave proportions in several parts of the country, he also proposed to provide 100 per cent subsidy to small and marginal farmers and 50 per cent to other farmers to encourage them to construct "dug wells" to recharge groundwater.

The Central Ground Water Board has identified 1065 assessment blocks in the country as "over-exploited" or "critical" and over 80 per cent of these blocks are in 100 districts in seven states.

"The strategy for groundwater recharge is to divert rain water into "dug wells". Each structure will cost about Rs 4,000. The requirement is seven million structures, including about two million on land belonging to small and marginal farmers," he said, voicing his concern.

While the scheme is being finalised, the government intends to transfer Rs 1,800 crore to NABARD, which will be held in escrow and disbursed through lead bank of the district concerned to beneficiaries.

Besides this, the minister also allocated Rs 100 crore for new Rainfed Area Development Programme and urged states to come up with propopsals to repair, renovate and restore water bodies in their areas

Scientists from around the world will focus their energies studying various natural phenomena in polar regions as they try to understand the mysteries of climate change and a number of other processes. The study will be a part of the International Polar Year—beginning Thursday—which will see more than 60 countries participating in 220 research projects in what is being termed the largest internationally coordinated scientific research effort in 50 years.

The experiments, which will last two complete years, will give the scientists a chance to take at least two measurements in the region which has a six-monthly day and night cycle.

India will be an active participant in these experiments and will contribute mainly to three large projects — including one which will study climate variabilities in Antarctica in the last 10,000 years.

"The polar region is an ideal place to observe a host of natural phenomena," said Dr. Manish Tiwari of the National Centre for Antarctic and Ocean Research in Goa, which is spearheading the research efforts in India.

"Because of the pristine environment in the region, the effects of global warming are easy to monitor. Besides, the ozone layer is found at lower altitudes near the poles, which also helps in carrying out the kind of experiments that are planned," he said.

The experiments will result in a database of different meteorological parameters that can also be preserved for future reference.

Similar polar years have been observed on three earlier occasions—1882-83, 1932-33 and 1957-58—the last one was renamed ‘International Geophysical Year’.

The data collected in the past will be compared with the latest observations and this will help scientists in understanding the pace and manner of changes taking in nature.

EU leaders agreed a full package of binding measures today to build a common energy policy and fight climate change, challenging the world to follow suit, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said.

Merkel, who chaired a two-day summit, said the decisions taken by the 27-nation bloc, including a disputed binding target for renewable energy sources, were "ambitious and credible".

"I personally am very satisfied and happy that it has been possible to open the door into a whole new dimension of European cooperation in the years to come in the area of energy and combating climate change," she said.

"We can avoid what could well be a human calamity," she said.

The deal set targets for slashing greenhouse gas emissions, developing renewable energy sources, promoting energy efficiency and using bio-fuels. But while the deal laid down Europe wide objectives, national targets will be set with the consent of member states.

"We can say to the rest of the world, Europe is taking the lead. You should join us fighting climate change," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso said.

Merkel put forward the key compromise to secure agreement to set a legally binding target for renewable fuels such as solar, wind and hydro-electric power – the most contentious issue.

Leaders accepted the target of 20 per cent of renewable sources in EU energy consumption by 2020 in exchange for flexibility on each country’s contribution to the common goal.

Germany added wording to win over states reliant on nuclear energy, led by France, or coal, such as Poland, and small countries with few energy resources, such as Cyprus and Malta, by adding references to the national energy mix.

The world is in the midst of a great political transformation, in which climate change has moved to the center of national and global politics. For politicians in persistent denial about the need act, including US President George W. Bush, Australian Prime Minister John Howard, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, there is no longer any place to hide. The science is clear, manmade changes in climate are being felt, and the electorate’s demand for action is growing. Though unlikely just a few months ago, a strong global agreement by 2010, one that will set a path for action for decades to come, now stands a good chance of being implemented.

Political leaders in countries that produce coal, oil, and gas – like the US, Australia, and Canada – have pretended that climate change is a mere hypothesis. For several years, the Bush administration tried to hide the facts from the public, deleting references to manmade climate from government documents and even trying to suppress statements by leading government scientists. Until recently, Exxon Mobil and other companies paid lobbyists to try to distort the public debate.

Yet truth has triumphed over political maneuvers. The climate itself is sending a powerful and often devastating message. Hurricane Katrina made the US public aware that global warming would likely raise the intensity of destructive storms. Australia’s great drought this past year has similarly made a mockery of Howard’s dismissive attitude toward climate change.

Scientists themselves have operated with great seriousness of purpose in educating the public. We can thank the United Nations for that. The UN sponsors the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a worldwide body of hundreds of climate scientists who report every few years to the public on the science of climate change.

This year, the IPCC is releasing its fourth round of reports, starting with the one issued early in February. That report was unequivocal: there is a powerful scientific consensus that human activity, mainly the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, gas), as well as deforestation and other land uses (such as growing paddy rice), leads to massive emissions of carbon dioxide into the air. This is causing climate change, which is accelerating and poses serious risks to the planet.

The single biggest threat comes from the production and consumption of energy for electricity, transport, and heating and cooling buildings. But the world’s scientists and engineers, as well as global technology leaders such as General Electric, are also sending a clear message: we can solve the problem at modest cost if we put our best thinking and action into real solutions.

By shifting to alternative energy sources, economising on energy use, and capturing and safely storing the carbon dioxide produced by fossil fuels, global society can limit its emissions of carbon dioxide to prudent levels at an estimated cost of under 1 per cent of global income. The changeover to a sustainable energy system will not come quickly, and will require new kinds of electrical power plants, new kinds of automobiles, and "green buildings," which economise on energy use.

The process will take decades, but we must start now and act on a global basis, using carbon taxes and emission permits to create market-based incentives for companies and individuals to make the necessary changes. Those incentives will come at modest cost and huge benefit, and they can be designed to protect the poor and shift the climate-change burden to those who can afford it.

A reasonable timetable is possible. By the end of 2007, all of the world’s governments should begin negotiations on a climate-change system for the years after 2012, when the current Kyoto Protocol expires. Basic principles should be established during 2008, and by 2009, the world community, including the two largest emitters of carbon dioxide, the US and China, should be ready to make a serious deal, which should be concluded by 2010 and ratified in time to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

The Kyoto Protocol was the first attempt at such a system, but it applied only to rich countries and set only modest objectives. The richest country and biggest contributor to global climate change, the US, didn’t even sign it. Neither did Australia. Canada signed but has failed to act. Nor did huge energy users like China and India, which must be part of any meaningful solution, face serious responsibilities under the Kyoto agreement.

All of that will have to change. All countries will have to shoulder their responsibilities to the rest of the world and to future generations.

There is now a way for individuals and companies to make their own voices heard. The Earth Institute at Columbia University, hosted a Global Roundtable of leading businesses, environmental groups, and other international organisations to reach a consensus to help inform the upcoming negotiations. The Roundtable produced an important Statement of Principles and a longer overall statement, signed by many of the world’s largest businesses, including those based in the US, Europe, Canada, China, and India. Many of the world’s leading scientists signed, too.

An Inconvenient Truth is a documentary that presents former US vice-president Al Gore's campaign to make the problem of global warming a recognised issue worldwide. Released in early 2006, the film has been the third highest grossing documentary ever in the US. It received two Oscars at the 2007 Academy Awards, and has been acclaimed for its presentation of scientific research and educational value. Though the film has had its share of controversy, with detractors claiming that it goes overboard with certain claims relating global warming to human activity, the fundamental issue about climatic changes has been accepted across the board, in a large part on account of Gore's campaign of many years.

A line from the film — 'You can't make somebody understand something if their salary depends upon them not understanding it' — captures the essence of its title. The truth of global warming is an inconvenient truth in an industrialised world driven by mechanised systems, where processes like artificial heating and cooling are so internalised that one cannot imagine a Delhi summer or Chicago winter otherwise. For the average person, environment, climate or temperature is often a matter taken for granted, until an occurrence like Katrina jolts them into reckoning with consequences. The message of the film is that Katrina was not a one-off disaster. With the current state of pollution and gases released into the atmosphere, there will be hotter winters, higher levels of precipitation and stronger storms, with a future where part of Florida could be under water, as well as areas around Shanghai and Kolkata.

The film is of special significance to South Asia where pollution levels are among the highest in the world. According to recent surveys, Delhi and Kolkata are among the most polluted cities in the world. This year, Kolkata has had a delayed winter, untimely showers, and a late onset of summer. There has been snow in Darjeeling after more than two decades, and most have wondered at the climatic change. Yet, this is not a matter of great concern for the government and administration. The most striking case of apathy to environment issues was the controversy over the venue of this year's Kolkata book fair. Both the West Bengal government and leading intellectuals of the city stood in opposition to environmentalists' claims that the book fair held on the Maidan needed to be shifted to an alternate venue, outside the city. The environmentalist lobby was tagged 'anti-intellectual' for pointing their finger at an event that has fundamentally boosted the city's intellectual brand equity. With the Calcutta high court upholding the claims of environmentalists, the book fair question was to many the moral issue of a certain lobby prevailing over a much-cherished and prided literary culture. The moral implications would perhaps be differently evaluated if the same public had access to a larger global vision, where Katrina, Kolkata or the melting snows of the Arctic are part of the same cycle.

For a country like India, even basic appreciation of environmental issues becomes complex in most cases, because rains and storms and the sun are typically understood to be beyond the realm of human agency. And because nature is understood to have its own celestial cycle, a natural disaster does not strike the same urgency in people's minds as does the immediacy of terrorist attacks. Yet, we are also still in large part a society that lives by the seasons, lunar cycles, eclipses and the like, unlike in the West, where environment is more a matter of studied involvement. If nothing else, An Inconvenient Truth has the ability to shock anyone who, whether consciously or not, has a part of them that lives against the cycles set by the modern industrial clock.

The research presented by the film is not new; for those who have some acquaintance with the issue, the question of global warming and its causes have been debated for a long time now, and the former is now generally accepted as established. Rather this documentary, with its powerful presentation of the case on global warming, aims to reach a cross-section of international audiences, who might still be relatively uninitiated. Free copies of the film have been made available to school teachers as a teaching guide. In Scotland, the film will be part of the science curriculum for fourth and sixth-year students.

India is not keen to sign any global agreement on limiting emissions, however, New Delhi is willing to take only voluntary steps in the area of energy efficiency and reduction of emissions. With increasing global concerns on climate change, the discussions on energy efficiency, reduction in emissions and the move to renewable forms of energy have become more intense.

Instead of a binding international agreement on energy efficiency, India would like to propose consensus of greater global co-operation for the development of hydro potential and renewable sources such as solar photovoltaic.

For India, the issue takes on a more serious turn as energy efficiency measures beyond a point might have serious implications for India’s economic growth as a developing country. An inter-ministerial group comprising representative of the ministries of power, external affairs, environment and forests and the bureau of energy efficiency agreed that India would only consider voluntary co-operation, and there would be no question of entering into a binding agreement. Further, the group felt that at present, any agreement on the subject would be pre-mature and that there was a need for further discussion on the area of energy efficiency.

India’s current energy consumption by households is very low. According to statistics published by the International Energy Agency, the average annual per capita consumption of electricity in India for 2004-05 was 612.5 kWh compared to Australia’s 11,126 kWh, or the US 13,338 kWh and Brazil had an annual per capita figure of 1,955kWh. In such a situation when India is working at raising its standards to that of an acceptable world average, a binding agreement could derail India’s energy policy, which seeks to raise per capita consumption to at least 1,000 kWh. Instead, New Delhi would like to impress upon developed countries the need to co-operate in promoting more efficient biomass convergent technology which has the potential to stem shift to fossil fuel.

The meeting of environment ministers of G8 countries at Potsdam, Germany last week attempted to arrive at a consensus on efforts to slow down climate change, in a partnership with the developing world. The critical phase of the Kyoto protocol from 2008 to 2012 involves reduction of Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions by about five per cent from 1990 levels. This depends greatly on bringing around the United States, the biggest emitter of GHGs, to accept the protocol; the European Union is keen to effect massive cuts by 2020, and individual countries such as the United Kingdom and Germany want to improve upon their national commitments. The U.S. delegate spoke of emission reduction as a key item on the agenda of President George W. Bush. That is welcome but the U.S. must acknowledge that domestic actions on climate change lack the persuasive force of an international framework to which developing countries could commit themselves. Developing countries with strong growth rates are already emitting significant levels of GHGs. A good deal of work is needed to shift these economies to a low-carbon, energy-efficient path. The G8 initiative on climate change outlined in Gleneagles in 2005 and to be developed later this year under Germany's presidency, can help China, India, Brazil, Mexico, and South Africa collaborate with the industrialised nations in evolving and using clean development technologies early.

Responding to worldwide concern on global warming and climate change, India has constituted a taskforce to formulate a comprehensive strategy for protecting the environment, a member of the body said today.

Besides this, the country had already taken steps toward environment protection in consonance with the Kyoto Protocol guidelines which aim at cutting down greenhouse gas emission, taskforce member and Jadavpur University Professor Joyashree Roy told PTI here.

She said the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests was working on a strategy on how to best protect the environment in the country.

"It is a three-year project and the reports would be submitted in phases," Roy said on the sidelines of an interactive session on economics of climate change organised by the Indian Chamber of Commerce in association with British Deputy High Commission.

The taskforce has been set up under a provision made in the Union budget for 2007-08 which had announced appointment of an expert committee to study climate change in India and identify measures to be taken.

She said that six groups had been formed to undertake the study.

The European Union's new climate change goals will cost up to euro 1.1 trillion to implement over the next 14 years, according to a new study.

The most comprehensive investigation on managing the economics of climate change paints a daunting picture of the EU's plan to decrease greenhouse gases by at least 20 per cent by 2020. But the study by the consulting firm McKinsey published in a German newspaper on Tuesday, argues it is both economically and technically possible to reduce emissions on schedule, but that the political effort necessary will be immense.

"On the basis of a balanced, sensible application of the most easily accessible technology, we're calculating that the EU states will face annual costs of between euro 60 billion and euro 80 billion up until 2020," said Thomas Vahlenkamp, a McKinsey energy expert.

The EU heads of state agreed on the bloc's environmental goals at its meeting on March 9, but did not discuss how costs and targets would be met. A Cost Curve for Greenhouse Gas Reduction offers a detailed breakdown of the potential costs of reducing carbon emissions across different sectors, from forestry to transportation.

The study says that technology, such as energy-saving lightbulbs and windpower, is capable of reducing three-quarters of greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve cost-effective results, it says politicians should concentrate on implementing the cheapest and most effective environmental measures first, rather than the cost-heavy solutions such as building CO2-free coal power stations.

"The potential in building insulation should be given much more attention," Mr. Vahlenkamp said. "There is a wealth of cost-free possibilities that would neither negatively effect our lifestyles nor our comfort."

The report explains that it is easier and cheaper to reduce energy use than to capture and store byproducts of fossil fuels, such as CO2. The study says it is possible for the world to reduce CO2 levels by 27 billion tonnes by 2030, a figure at which, scientists suggest, global warming may be curbed.

European Union Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas criticized the US and Australia over their failure to sign the Kyoto Protocol, an international treaty that limits emissions of greenhouse gases for developed nations.

"We expect the United States to cooperate closer and not to continue having a negative impact" on international efforts to fight climate change, Dimas said on Monday at a press conference in Brussels. The US approach does not help in reaching an international agreement, and is not cutting emissions".

Under Kyoto, 35 countries and the EU agreed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by a combined 5 per cent from 1990 levels by the 2008-2012 period.

EU leaders on March 9 unilaterally agreed to cut green house gas emissions by 20 per cent from 1990 levels by 2020, and said they would commit to a 30 per cent reduction if other developed nations entered an agreement.

The US, the largest emitter of greenhouse gases, didin’t ratify Kyoto Protocol, citing potential damage to its economy. According to Dimas, the US emissions are about 16 per cent above 1990 levels, while the 15 countries covered by Kyoto’s target for the EU in 2005 were 1.6 per cent below 1990 rates.

Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt also urged the US to sign up the Kyoto Protocol, and said that America, India and China should start with new, necessary negotiations on these extended goals," referring to the EU’s unilateral commitment.

The EU has been pushing for a new global framework that will replace Kyoto to be in place by the end of 2009, in order to allow time for individual countries to sign it into law.

"We have to live in a global environment just as we live in a global economy. Issues such as global climate change, regional and long-range transport of air pollutants, protection of our international waters and safe disposal of hazardous waste cannot be addressed by one or even a handful of nations," United States Environmental Protection Agency administrator Stephen Johnson has said.

On his first visit to India, during which he visited Mumbai, Hyderabad and Delhi, Mr. Johnson told The Hindu that strengthening cooperation in the environment sector was as important as strengthening the economies of the world. "Pollution knows no political boundaries and the United States recognises that environmental responsibility does not stop at our borders."

He said environment was every individual's responsibility, be it a child, a non-governmental organisation or a government leader.

"The U.S. has been the world leader in addressing the global climate change. It has already invested $29 billion in the sector."

Mr. Johnson dismissed the European Union's criticism that the U.S. should end its "negative attitude" towards international negotiation to reduce carbon emissions. "Climate change needs to be addressed in the context of sustainable economic development and we need to invest more in technology."

On the `Energy Star' ranking system adopted in the U.S., he said that by buying graded equipment, $15 billion worth of energy and greenhouse gas emission equivalent to $25 million was saved.

The U.S. Congress was in the process of passing new laws to raise the efficiency of automobiles and shift from oil to renewable alternative sources of energy.

Appreciating India's readiness to cooperate with the U.S. in the field, Mr. Johnson said the two had agreed to work with each other.

On India's progress in checking greenhouse emissions, he said it had done extremely well in areas such as cleaning the Mithi, initiating the concept of green buildings (Hyderabad) and making New Delhi the greenest city of the world, but more had to be done.

Mr. Johnson on Monday signed a memorandum of understanding with India, renewing the commitment to work together on environmental issues.

The MoU focuses on four priorities: air quality, water quality, toxic chemicals and waste and management of environmental agencies.

The Agency, which has worked to reduce mercury from hospitals in the U.S. and around the world, sees the area as an opportunity for collaboration in India.

Through the Methane to Markets Partnership — of which India is a charter member — the two partners are promoting the cost-effective recovery of methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

The UN Security Council put climate change on its agenda for the first time, warning global warming could be a catalyst for new conflict around the world.

The council said it would hold a high-level meeting later this month on how changing weather patterns could threaten international security.

"The traditional triggers for conflict which exist out there are likely to be exacerbated by the effect of climate change," Britian’s UN Ambassador Emyr Jones Parry, the Council President, said on Wednesday.

British Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett will chair the 17 April meeting and has invited the 14 other council nations to be represented at ministerial level, Jones Parry said. No statement or resolution is expected from the meeting, the council’s first on the subject.

Last month, an international panel of scientists presented the United Nations with a sweeping, detailed plan to combat climate change, warning that failure would produce a turbulent 21^st century of weather extremes, spreading drought and disease, expanding oceans and displaced coastal populations.

Diplomats are meeting with scientists this week in Brussels to endorse the study, which will guide policymakers for decades to come.

The report was issued just three weeks after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an authoritative UN network of 2,000 scientists, reported that global warming is being caused largely by the accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, mostly from man’s burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels.

Jones Parry said he expects a summit on climate change next year, likely in September 2008.

Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon has not committed to a summit, but he has said he would discuss how best to confront the climate change problem with world leaders at a meeting of the Group of Eight industrialized countries in June.

In another report The Himalayas and Sunderbans are among ten of the world’s natural wonders which face destruction if global warming continues at the same pace, warns the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). A WWF briefing released ahead of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Second Working Group Report says that only "drastic action" by governments to reduce emissions can hope to stop the complete destruction of these natural wonders.

"While adaptation to changing climate can save some, only drastic action by governments to reduce emissions can hope to stop their complete destruction," Dr. Lara Hansen, Chief Scientist of WWF’s Global Climate Change Programme, said.

Climate experts in a UN panel today issued their bleakest forecasts of global warming, predicting hunger in Africa, loss of Himalyan glaciers and listing Asian megadeltas among specially vulnerable regions.

Delegates from more than 100 nations agreed on a final text of a report after four days and an entire night of dispute during which some scientists accused some governments of watering down forecasts about threats from global warming.

"This process has taken much longer than anyone expected," said Anand Patwardhan, one of the lead authors from India who had participated in the discussions in Brussels. "There was strong divergence in some views when it came to policy issues such as when and how soon to act," Patwardhan told The Telegraph in a telephone interview.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) group, which focuses on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability said Asian megadeltas, the Arctic, small islands and sub-Saharan Africa will be more affected than other regions.

The IPCC said adaptation will be necessary to address impacts resulting from warming which is "already unavoidable" due to past emissions of greenhouse gases that trap heat from the sun and raise global temperatures.

"It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who’re going to be the worst hit," said India’s Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC.

According to the report, desertification, droughts, rising seas would hit the tropical areas hard. Low-lying coasts, mangroves and coral reefs are among systems that are likely to be specially vulnerable.

"In addition to climate change, human factors such as the high population density in the Asian megadeltas such as the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta will put additional stresses," Patwardhan said.

The disputes at the talks appeared rooted in policy position of various governments, a delegate at the conference told The Telegraph. From the EU, for instance, there was a strong attempt to create a case for urgent action. But Saudi Arabia, the US and China appeared cautious on issues that would have policy implications, the delegate said.

A Reuters report said scientists from China, Russia and Saudi Arabia had raised objections seeking to tone down some findings. US delegates rejected suggested wording that parts of North America may suffer "severe economic damage" from global warming.

China, the second largest source of greenhouse gases after the US, sought to cut a reference to "very high confidence" that climate change was already affecting "many natural systems, on all continents and in some oceans.

"In line with the IPCC report, the World Health Organiation (WHO) also warned yesterday that rising temperatures, changing rainfall patterns and the anticipated loss of fresh water will increase disease and malnutrition."

A lack of commitment from the top greenhouse gas emitters has resulted in global changes in climate with grave consequences for health security," the WHO said in a document released yesterday ahead of World Health Day.

A higher incidence of heat waves could put children and elderly people at higher risk of potentially fatal illnesses such as hypothermia- heat stress as well as heart and respiratory diseases, the WHO said. "An increase in the frequency of heat waves may lead to severe health impacts in India," said Poonam Khetrapal Singh, a WHO official in New Delhi.

Climate experts issued their starkest warning yet about the impact of global warming, ranging from hunger in Africa to a fast thaw in the Himalayas, in a report on Friday that increased pressure on governments to act.

More than 100 nations in the UN climate panel agreed on a final text after all-night talks during which some scientists accused governments of watering down conclusions that climate change was already under way and damaging nature.

The report said warming, widely blamed on human emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, would cause desertification, droughts and rising seas and would hit hard in the tropics, from sub-Saharan Africa to Pacific islands.

"It’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit," said Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "This does become a global responsibility in my view."

The IPCC, which groups 2,500 scientists and is the world authority on climate change, said all regions of the planet would suffer from a sharp warming.

Its findings are approved unanimously by governments and will guide policy on issues such as extending the UN’s Kyoto Protocol, the main UN plan for capping greenhouse gas emissions, beyond 2012.

In Washington, the Bush administration indicated the United States, which pulled out of Kyoto in 2001, still planned to tackle limiting carbon dioxide emissions on its own rather than support global mandatory caps.

"Each nation sort of defines their regulatory objectives in different ways to achieve the greenhouse reduction outcome that they seek," Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, told reporters.

Today’s study said climate change could cause hunger for millions with a sharp fall in crop yields in Africa. It could also rapidly thaw Himalayan glaciers that feed rivers from India to China and bring heat-waves for Europe and North America.

"This further underlines both how urgent it is to reach global agreement on reducing greenhouse gas emissions and how important it is for us all to adapt to the climate change that is already under way," said European Environment Commissioner Stavros Dimas.

"The urgency of this report… should be matched with an equally urgent response by governments," said Hans Verolme of the WWF conservation group.

Scientists said China, Russia and Saudi Arabia raised most objections overnight and sought to tone down the findings, including those about the likely pace of extinction.

But delegates sharpened other sections, including adding a warming that some African nations might have to spend 5 to 10 per cent of gross domestic product on adapting to climate change.

The white House acknowledged yesterday that the "global challenge" posed by climate change "requires global solutions", but once again sought to play down some of most apocalyptic forecasts.

The comments from Sharon Hays and Jim Connaughton, senior White House officials on the environment, represent the latest evidence of a gradual recalibration of President Bush’s position towards the issue.

For much of his presidency he has cast doubt on scientific evidence that mankind is responsible for global warming and even now he still rejects the imposition of greenhouse gas controls on US industry.

Dr. Hays had led the US delegation to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and, it is alleged, watered down draft versions of yesterday’s report.

Other delegates said that a paragraph stating that North America was "expected to experience severe local economic damage and substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption" was removed at the behest of the US.

In a morning conference call, Dr. Hays was asked whether she had made changes.

"The US and many other nations were very much engaged in making sure that we took our role very seriously in getting a summary document that accurately reflects the underlying science…I think we helped craft a report that robustly reflect….. this underlying, very long technical document," she said.

A final draft of a report leaked from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to the authors lays out shocking scenarios for India and the rest of South Asia. The summary for policy makers that was released by the IPCC on Friday is a call for urgent action globally. While shocking, the fuller final draft version of the Second Working Group of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, which may be watered down before final publication, makes for even more sobering reading: It lays out in explicit detail what lies ahead for India and the rest of Asia. It also presents an opportunity for the country to take the lead in defining a more secure and sustainable future for itself.

Here are some of the devastating consequences detailed in the provisional February 16, 2007, IPCC report on Asia: Sea levels will rise by at least 40 cm by 2100, inundating vast areas on the coastline, including some of the most densely populated cities whose populations will be forced to migrate inland or build dykes — both requiring a financial and logistical challenge that will be unprecedented. In the South Asian region as a whole, millions of people will find their lands and homes inundated. Up to 88 per cent of all of Asia's coral reefs, termed the "rainforests of the ocean" because of the critical habitat they provide to sea creatures, may be lost as a result of warming ocean temperatures.

The Ganga, Brahmaputra, and Indus will become seasonal rivers, dry between monsoon rains as Himalayan glaciers will continue their retreat, vanishing entirely by 2035, if not sooner. Water tables will continue to fall and the gross per capita water availability in India will decline by over one-third by 2050 as rivers dry up, water tables fall or grow more saline. Water scarcity will in turn affect the health of vast populations, with a rise in water-borne diseases such as cholera. Other diseases such as dengue fever and malaria are also expected to rise.

Crop productivity will fall, especially in non-irrigated land, as temperatures rise for all of South Asia by as much as 1.2 degrees C on average by 2040, and even greater crop loss — of over 25 per cent — as temperatures rise to up to 5.4 degrees C by the end of the century. This means an even lower caloric intake for India's vast rural population, already pushed to the limit, with the possibility of starvation in many rural areas dependent on rainfall for their crops. Even those areas that rely on irrigation will find a growing crisis in adequate water availability.

Mortality due to heat-related deaths will climb, with the poor, the elderly and daily wage earners and agricultural workers suffering a rise in heat-related deaths.

This grim future awaits India in the coming century. The irony is that much of this damage will be self-inflicted, unless the country is prepared to make a radical, enlightened change in its energy and transportation strategies.

We are truly at a crossroads: Either we can be complacent or wait for leadership from a reluctant United States, the largest greenhouse gas emitter in the world, or begin to take action now, regardless of what other countries do.

The path that India has taken thus far, of waiting until wealthy countries take action on global warming, is understandable if viewed in isolation. The U.S., the U.K., and other countries in the wealthy North, have developed their economies largely thanks to fossil fuels. It is only fair that India be allowed to attain the same standard of living before curbing its emissions.

But as the IPCC report makes clear, while it may be "fair" to do so, it is also suicidal for India to pursue any strategy but the least carbon-intensive path toward its own development. Wealthy, less populous countries in the North are very likely — and very unfairly — going to suffer fewer devastating blows to their economies, and may actually benefit with extended growing seasons, while India and other South Asian nations will dramatically and painfully suffer if action is not taken now.

Today, much of India's energy comes from coal, most of it mined in the rural areas of Orissa, Jharkhand, and Bihar with devastating consequences. Tribals and small and marginal peasants are being forced to resettle as these mines grow wider by the day. Inadequate resettlement plans mean more migration of landless populations to urban slums. The environment is being destroyed by these mines and their waste products — among them fly ash laced with heavy metals and other toxic materials. But the biggest irony of this boom in coal-fired power is that much of the power is going to export-oriented, energy-intensive industry. Look at Orissa's coal belt and you will find a plethora of foreign-owned and Indian aluminium smelters, steel mills, and sponge iron factories — all burning India's coal, at a heavy cost to local populations — then exporting a good share of the final product to the China, the U.S. or other foreign markets.

Volatile mix
Add to the problem of export-oriented, energy-intensive industry the problem of carbon trades, and you have a volatile mix. India is one of the top destinations globally in the growing carbon market. In exchange for carbon trade projects in India, wealthy polluters in the North are able to avoid restrictions on their own emissions. Rather than financing "clean development" projects as promised, many of these trades are cheap, dirty, and harmful to the rural poor. Fast-growing Eucalyptus plantations are displacing farmers from their land and tribals from their forests. Sponge-iron factories are garnering more money from carbon trades earned by capturing "waste heat" than from the production of the raw material itself. Toxic fly ash from coal-fired power plants is being turned into bricks, and the carbon that would have been released from traditional clay-fired brick kilns, is now an invisible commodity that can be sold as carbon credits. These carbon trades are not helping finance clean energy and development for India's rural poor.

Add to this the special economic zones or SEZs — forcing people off their land, where blood, often of the most vulnerable, is shed at the altar of development.

Global warming will tighten this growing squeeze to a noose, as huge areas of Bangladesh go underwater and environmental refugees flood across India's borders. The leaked final draft of the IPCC report shows that Bangladesh is slated to lose the largest amount of land globally — approximately 1000 square km of cultivated land — due to sea level rise. Where will all of those hungry, thirsty, landless millions go? Most will flock to the border looking for avenues to enter, exacerbating an already tense situation not only in the states contiguous to Bangladesh but in cities as far off as Mumbai and Delhi.

Undoubtedly, global warming is not fair. It is exacting the highest price on those least responsible for the problem. But India can show the world that there is another way forward: A self-interested, self-preserving way, focussed on clean energy such as solar and wind; on energy efficiency; on providing for its own population's energy needs ahead of foreign corporations; on public transportation plans that strengthen India's vast network of rail and bus transportation routes, rather than weakening it with public subsidies to massive highways and to automakers. The IPCC final draft report urges India and other Asian countries to prepare for the coming climate apocalypse with crop varieties that can withstand higher temperatures, salinated aquifers, and an increase in pests. It also advises better water resource management and better disease monitoring and control. While important, prevention is always the best medicine.

Global warming is expected to decrease substantially the cereal production potential in Asia, particularly in India, according to the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change (IPCC) "Climate Change 2007: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" released last week.

Briefing the media on the climate change for Asia, IPCC Chairperson R.K. Pachauri said endemic morbidity and mortality due to diarrhoeal diseases, primarily associated with flood and droughts, were expected to rise in east, south and southeast Asia due to projected changes in the hydrological cycle associated with global warming.

Mr. Pachauri said climate change was likely to affect agriculture adversely and increase the risk of hunger and water scarcity due to enhanced variability and more rapid melting of glaciers.

Citing an example he said, an increase of 0.5 degree Celsius in winter temperature in India would reduce the wheat yield by 0.45 tonnes per hectare (average yield of wheat in India is 2.6 tonne per hectare).

There would be loss of cultivated land and nursery area for fisheries by inundation and coastal erosion in the low-lying areas of tropical Asia.

Increasing salinity
Climate change related to melting of glaciers could severely impact a billion people in the Himalaya-Hindukush region because of the unfavorable consequences for downstream agriculture in most south Asian countries that relied on glacier melt for irrigation water.

India, China, and Bangladesh were especially susceptible to increasing salinity and surface water resources along the coast due to an increase in the sea level as direct impact.

Mr. Pachauri said the projected decrease in winter precipitation over the Indian sub-continent would reduce the total seasonal precipitation during December, January and February, implying lesser storage and greater water stress.

Melting of glaciers in the Himalayas was projected to increase flooding, rock avalanches from destabilized slopes and affect water resources within the next two to three decades .

"We conclude that warming caused by human activities has likely had a discernible impact on the global level on man physical and biological systems with some systems being more vulnerable," Mr. Pachauri said.

The IPCC report suggests that 50 percent of Asia’s total biodiversity is at risk due to climate change and other anthropological factors.

Changes in the climate around the globe are expected to trigger a steep fall in production of cereals, say R.K. Pachauri, Chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The prices of wheat and other cereals have been rising in recent months.

Pachauri estimated that a rise of 0.5 degree Celsius in winter temperatures could cause a 0.5 tonne per hectare fall in wheat production.

The average per hectare production India is 2.6 tonnes. Similarly, he said, the production of other cereals and agricultural crops too will see a substantial fall.

Worse still, Pachauri said, total agricultural land will shrink and the available land may not remain suitable for the present crops for too long.

"Farmers have to explore options of changing crops suitable to weather," he said, pointing out that climatic changes could lead to major food security issues for a country like India.

"The loss of livelihood in rural India can lead to more slums in cities," he said. The UN body’s second working report, released Friday, also predicts huge coastal erosion due to a rise in sea levels of about 40 cm resulting from faster melting of glaciers in the Himalayan and Hindu-Kush ranges.

"It can adversely effect half-a-million people in India because of excessive flooding in coastal areas and also can increase the salinity of ground water in the Sunderbans and surface water in coastal areas," Pachauri said.

India’s per capita water availability is expected to fall from 1,820 million cubic metres per year in 2001 to 1,140 million cubic metres per year in 2050.

"The projected degrease in winter precipitation over the Indian sub-continent would reduce the total seasonal precipitation during December, January and February, implying lesser storage and greater water stress," he said, predicting a more erratic monsoon.

Terming the government’s response to this scenario inadequate, Pachauri sought more India-oriented research on the impact of climate change and a policy to combat it.

Surely of all God’s creations, none is more beautiful than the sunrise on the Masai Mara grassland, Kenya’s spectacular nature reserve and a backdrop for the movie Out of Africa. The sun’s ascent here is like a curtain going up on one of Mother Nature’s richest ecosystems. Through the day you can be greeted by a bull elephant in hot pursuit of a cow, serenaded by tropical boubou birds, intimidated by two lionesses devouring a warthog, amused by the cattle egrets riding on the backs of African buffalos and impressed by how each small cluster of topi antelope "assigns" one topi to stand on a small hill and keep watch for predators while the others graze. Everything seems in perfect balance.

Except … behind the curtain, deforestation, the poaching of wildlife and now climate change present a trio of threats to the Mara, which have Kenyans, and all those concerned about biodiversity, worried.

Over the last 10 years, "the weather has changed," explained our Masai naturalist, Daniel Memusi. "All of a sudden it is becoming unpredictable. …April has always been a rainy month – every afternoon and all night. You expect rain, but no rain."

One should never extrapolate about climate change from any single ecosystem or brief period. But as The Times’ environmental reporter Andrew C. Revkin recently noted, scientists say it’s increasingly clear "that worldwide precipitation is shifting away from the equator and toward the poles."

"Rainfall has changed dramatically in the last 30 years – it is less predictable now," said Julius Kipng’etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, which manages Kenya’s Noah’s ark of endangered species. If climate changes bring more severe droughts and floods, and the animal migrations are disrupted, "the brand of the Mara dies," added Mr. Kipng’etich, referring to Kenya’s Lion King grassland. That would really hurt Kenya’s economy. "When every Kenyan meets a wild animal, they should bow and say thank you."

Kenya also has to worry about deforestation and poaching, although poaching is now under better control. Kenya’s forests have been reduced from 10 percent of the country’s landmass at the time of its independence in 1963 to 2 per cent today. In the same period its elephant population went from 170,000 to 30,000 and its rhino population from 20,000 to around 500. "When you see a rhino today, you are very lucky," said Mr. Kipng’etich. "Your children or grandchildren may never see one."

"We have a message here to tell these countries, that you are causing aggression to us by causing global warming," President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda told an African Union summit in Ethiopia last February. "Alaska will probably become good for agriculture, Siberia will probably become good for agriculture, but where does that leave Africa?"

The Turkana people, said Oxfam, call this more persistent drought "Atiaktiak ng’awiyei" or "the one that divided homes’ because so many families split up to survive, migrating in all directions."

Apparently the Ministry of Environment and Forests is planning to introduce an environmental tribunal bill which envisages the setting up of `green courts' to deal with environmental disputes. There is much scepticism in the media regarding the real motives of the ministry behind this move and whether it is an attempt to make speedy clearances of projects ("Who will benefit from `green' courts?" The Hindu, March 23).

The environmental science scenario in the country presents a picture of near anarchy. The irony of it is that more than at any other time, we now need clarity of thinking, farsighted policies and an excellent regulatory framework in the area of environment as the Indian economy is growing at a rate of 9 per cent annually.

Nullified
A study by NEERI, Nagpur, has shown that during the period 1980-90, the entire growth of the economy at a rate of 5.6 per cent was nullified by the costs of environmental damage caused by this growth.

The situation is far worse now and pollution and degradation are posing a serious threat to the continued sustainability of our major ecosystems such as forests, grasslands, croplands, rivers, lakes and coastal waters.

The main reason for our poor performance in the area of environment is the inadequacy of scientific expertise in our country in this fledgling science. Although most universities and many colleges now have departments of environmental sciences, the level of expertise available in many areas is too fragmentary and inadequate to provide comprehensive solutions to the pressing problems of urban decay, water and soil pollution, climate change, etc.

One of the reasons why the environmental science community in India is found wanting is the narrow disciplinary background of many of our scientists and the fundamentally trans-disciplinary nature of environmental science which crosses over even to humanities. Our poor record in the area of environmental science has a reflection in the area of environmental legislation too in India — a clear case of poor science leading to poor legislation.

While science is thus lagging behind, there has been a surge forward with regard to public awareness regarding environmental issues.

The public awareness is almost directly proportional to literacy and in some of the most literate states like Kerala, the way forward has become thorny for all industrial projects, existing and emerging. Responding to the mood of the general public the courts have become activists and many a time action in the area of environment is guided and directed by the courts.

Thus an area of modern science wherein challenging problems are thrown up repeatedly and solutions have to be found through the application of highly sophisticated scientific approaches and experiments is generally left for courts to act as a final arbiter.

While states are quarrelling over sharing of river waters, there are already forebodings that the health of the rivers including the Ganga is itself under serious threat due to mismanagement and climate change ("Rivers in danger," The Hindu, March 24). It is not legislation or court intervention but comprehensive scientific study and management that is the right way forward in ensuring the conservation and long term sustainability of our natural ecosystems.

Climate change that has taken place so far threatens to be permanent. Millions will be at risk of hunger and water stress if emission of greenhouse gases is not cut, according to Geneva-based Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "A portfolio of adaptation and mitigation measures can diminish the risks associated with climate change ……Adaptation will be necessary to address impacts resulting from the warming which is already unavoidable due to past emissions," recommends IPPC’s Climate Change 2007: Climate Change Impacts Adaptation and Vulnerability.

Clarifies IPCC Chairman Rajendra K Pachauri, "It’s not adaptation versus mitigation. The impacts of climate change is so server that we have to do both. "IPCC next report due in May 2007 will focus on mitigation.

In the case of adaptation, the options are obvious. Do nothing and absorb the loss, substitute unsustainable activities, relocate to a less vulnerable place or avoid the loss by adopting new measures.

Adoption of new measures is driven in good measure by technology it can vary from the traditional like building sea walls and rotating crops to the modern like installing early warning systems and using drought resistant seeds.

Elaborates James P. Leape, Director- General, WWF International, "Adaptation covers a huge area of policies and measures. The measures will vary depending upon the place we are looking at and the type of emerging impact."

He adds that in the Caribbean and the south of the US, for instance, infrastructure will have to be designed to resist more intense hurricanes. In large parts of Europe, summer heat waves and drought will occur much more frequently. So preparations will have to be made accordingly.

Sectors like agriculture, construction, transport, energy and power plants lend themselves more easily than others to adaptation all over the world.

Says Achim Steiner, Executive Director, United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP), "Indigenous people, local communities and often the female members of society have for millennia harnessed ‘traditional knowledge or science’

to deal with extreme weather events."

For example, in Sudan women are directly responsible for selecting sorghum seeds for planting. They select a variety of seeds with different characteristics that ensure resistance to a variety of conditions that may emerge in the next growing season, he adds.

Change can’t be regular, though, cautions Magsaysay award winner and founder of Tarun Bharat Sangh, Rajendra Singh. He adds, "Whatever we do should not only be to save ourselves from adverse impacts of climate change, but it should also look at the balance of the ecosystem as a whole."

Earlier, some communities did keep it in mind when they used traditional construction material and design inspired by nature. It’s happening on a large scale today. Deployment of energy efficient devices is also gaining currency now.

Says another recently launched report, "The right mix of appropriate government regulation, greater use of energy saving technologies and behavioural changes can substantially reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the building sector, which accounts for 30-40 per cent of global energy use."

The report Buildings and Climate Change: Status, Challenges and Opportunities, was brought out by the UNEP and the Sustainable Construction and Building Initiative.

Saying that 80 per cent of the energy consumption takes place while heating, cooling, lighting, cooking, ventilation, the report recommends use of thermal insulation, solar shading and efficient lighting and electrical appliances.

Likewise transport sector too can do better with improved efficiency of vehicles, rebates to encourage purchase of vehicles run on alternative fuels and promotion of such fuels.

It’s endorsed by yet another recently launched report that shows how "renewable energy accompanied by efficient energy use can provide half of India’s primary energy requirements and reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 4 per cent by 2050."

The report, Energy Revolution: A sustainable Energy Outlook for India, was commissioned by the European Renewable Energy Council and Green peace.

It calls policy changes, efficient lighting , increasing efficiency of cars and cutting down on wasteful energy consumption industry too needs to reduce carbon dioxide emission from products and production processes, adds the report.

Industry is an important stakeholder. Particularly, since climate change is gradually becoming an economic and trade issue rather than an environmental issue.

Explains Kristalin Georgieva, Director for Strategy and Operations, Sustainable Development Vice Presidency, The World Bank, "A new challenge always presents a new challenge always presents a new opportunity".

Adds Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate change (UNFCC), "In today’s context people are looking at climate change and energy security in an integrated manner because they are also weighing economic impact of climate change."

The paradigm shift in thinking to harness climate change as an opportunity has a rider, though.

Underlines Bjorn Stigson, President, World Business Council for Sustainable Development, "An enabling environment has to precede the development of markets. It can be a business opportunity only if there are commitments, policies and actions in that direction. Only then would it be a business proposition."

Whether climate change starts wars in the future is not yet clear, but it has already pitted India, China and Pakistan against the developed world led by UK and EU.

India, China and Pakistan have joined forces to oppose a move by the UK and European countries to bring the current hot topic in international discourse - climate change — into the ambit of the UNSC. During the first-ever debate in the UNSC this week, the differences were a pointer to more battles in future. India and China, two countries that will be pressured hard to accept emission norms, argued that the Security Council did not have any "competence" to deal with the matter, during the first UN debate on the issue on Tuesday.

India made a persuasive case to refer climate change issues to the UN Forum for Climate Change rather than the Security Council, where India has no presence at all. Indian ambassador to the UN Nirupam Sen rubbished the idea that climate change presented any kind of imminent security issue that the Security Council should deal with. "The UN Security Council does not have the expertise and may not have the mandate... to make an uncertain long-term prospect a security threat amounts to an informal amendment of the Charter," Sen said.

The differences are over the definition of what constitutes a security threat. UK's foreign secretary Margaret Beckett said these would be the causes of conflicts in future. "The Security Council is the forum to discuss issues that threaten the peace and security of the international community. What makes wars start? Fights over water. Fights over food production, land use," Beckett said.

India and China took the opposite position that attempts to curb economic growth would result in greater disparities and more insecurity. India said developed countries should reduce their emissions, which are the highest per capita in the world, and give developing countries more access to "energy markets" as well as make it easier for them to access technologies that enhance economic development, which Sen said was the surest guarantor of security.

Pakistan, as head of the G-77 group of nations, also opposed the move on behalf of developing countries. Russia, South Africa, Qatar, Indonesia and other countries all joined in as did the Non-Aligned Movement. China, a P-5 member of the UNSC, stayed on the side of the developing world. China remains one of the largest users of fossil fuels, just like India, and both countries, on an upward trajectory of economic growth, are loath to accept curbs on consumption patterns. "The developing countries believe that the Security Council has neither the professional competence in handling climate change, nor is it the right decision-making place for extensive participation leading to widely acceptable proposals," he said.

While most developing countries took the same line, small island nations supported the British and European points of view.

In fact on climate change, the US takes a more reasoned view, saying it is against curbing economic growth, while increasing the use of alternative sources of energy. India will be one of the big users of clean coal technology, for instance, while a nuclear agreement with the world will ensure that India's share of nuclear energy increases from its present pitiful levels. The government is openly opposed to accepting unilateral emissions curbs. In the UN, India said "a rapid increase in energy use per capita is imperative... it is essential developing countries have the policy space to address their energy needs".

The finding of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are of importance to Tamil Nadu too as they warned of impacts such as the rise in sea level, which could inundate vast stretches of the coast in south Asia, M.S. Swaminathan, Chairman, M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, said on Sunday.

Every state should have an interdisciplinary and multistakeholder climate management group to continuously monitor the situation, he said during a talk on ‘Managing climate change is everybody’s business," as part of a media Workshop on ‘Facing the Challenges of Global Warming’ organized by MSSRF and The Hindu Media Resource Centre to commemorate World Earth Day.

Climate change was not just an environmental issue but also a developmental issue as it could affect the poorest countries the worst. Citing the key findings of the Sir Nicholas Stern report on global warming commissioned by the U.K. government, Professor Swaminathan said the issues which needed to be focused upon by Tamil Nadu included increased frequency of coastal storms, higher mean temperature, more frequent droughts and sudden flash floods.

Only collaborative action by the government, the community and individuals could mitigate them.

It was essential to train climate managers at gram panchayat levels. A state-level Land Use Advisory Service should also be established to counsel farming families on mitigating the adverse impact of reduced precipitation and higher temperatures.

This called for development of a drought code, a flood code and a good weather code to enable rural families to minimize hardship caused by aberrant monsoons.

A mean rise of one to two degrees C in air temperature could decrease rice yield by about 0.75 tonnes per hectare in normal zones and 0.06 tonnes per hectare in coastal regions.

Impact on yield
A rise of 0.5 degrees in winter temperature could reduce wheat crop duration by seven days and decrease yield by 0.45 tonnes per hectare, he said.

Some 2,000 top international scientists and officials from 180 countries will convene in Bangkok next week to finalise and launch their most recent report, "Mitigation of Climate Change".

They will lay out how the world can avert the worst impacts of rising global temperatures on life on earth - with technology, and more importantly, political will.

This will be the third and final volume of the scientists' latest assessment on climate change since the formation in 1988 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN panel to assess scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding human-induced climate change.

The two previous reports rang alarm bells worldwide.

"Physical Science Basis" confirming a significantly warmer earth, was released in February in Paris, and "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" published earlier this month in Brussels, presented how life in almost every corner of the globe will be affected.

Reiterating that global warming is already upon us due to the increasing levels of carbons humans are putting into the atmosphere, the third report to be discussed in Bangkok from Monday to Thursday is slated to provide an up-to-date assessment on potential policies and technologies to reverse this trend.

The final report will be launched with a press conference at the United Nations building on Rajadamnoen Avenue on Friday.

Scientists estimate that greenhouse gases, which contribute to the world's rising temperatures - such as methane, nitrous oxide and, chiefly, carbon dioxide - have jumped by 70 per cent between 1970 and 2004.

The two previous IPCC reports predicted a gloomy future in which unabated greenhouse emissions could drive global temperatures up by as much as six degrees Celsius by the end of this century.

Even a CO₂ rise could subject up to two billion people to water shortages by 2050 and threaten extinction for 20 to 30 percent of the world's species, the IPCC said.

The new draft report says emissions can be cut below current levels if the world shifts away from carbon-heavy fuels like coal, embraces energy efficiency and significantly reduces deforestation.

However, the UN initiative won't be without controversy. Chula-longkorn University's Anond Snidvongs, head of the Southeast Asia START Regional Centre, and part of the review team for the draft report from Thailand, said international scientists and government reps were expected to engage in hot debates on the political aspects of climate change.

For example, Southeast Asia, he noted, did not appear as a region in the draft report. Southeast Asian countries were regrouped in either "South" or "East Asia".

Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam were listed as East Asian nations while Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines and Singapore were grouped with India and other South Asian countries.

The grouping is important because population and GDP determine the emission quota for greenhouse gases, Anond said. Countries with higher GDP are expected to comply with tighter regulations.

Environmentalists also raised concerns about the draft report. Measures listed to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from the energy sector include nuclear power, hydropower and coal power plants with carbon capture and storage facilities. The panel also recommended genetically modified crops as sources of alternative fuel production.

Thai activists who have closely followed the IPCC climate change panels expressed fears that the Thai government might use the UN recommendations to promote and develop controversial energy technologies.

Wanun Permphibun, Co-ordinator of Climate Action Network (CAN) Thailand, said the fact that the IPCC only focused on cutting carbon dioxide emissions made it neglect other social aspects and environmental impacts of alternate technologies.

"True, nuclear and hydro power do not generate CO2. But both energies have other points of concern, as we all know," she said.

CAN is a worldwide network of non-government organisations working to promote government, private sector and individual action to limit human-induced climate change to ecologically sustainable levels.

But Wanun said she appreciated the IPCC, as it was the only global body to seriously assess climate change with a scientific basis, and had tried to find out what could be done to alleviate the impact of this global phenomenon and cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Another activist, Tara Buakhamsri, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace Southeast Asia, urged the Thai government to select the best possible mitigation option for the country's socio-economic conditions.

For example, the government should gear its energy sector towards renewable sources readily available in the country such as bio-mass, solar and wind power instead of expensive, technologically sophisticated carbon capture and coal fired plants.

"Some measures are good for most developed countries but not developing countries. The Thai government should consider recommendations of the IPCC in the context of our environment," Tara said.

Prasertsook Chamornmarn, of the Office of Natural Resources and Environmental Policy and Planning (ONEP), did not disclose the content of the draft, saying it was secret as had not been finalised yet.

For decades, hurricane researchers found it difficult to work with the inconsistent nature of hurricane data. Before the advent of weather satellites, scientists were forced to rely on scattered ship reports and sailor logs to stay abreast of storm conditions.

The advent of weather satellites during the 1960s dramatically improved the situation, but the technology has changed so rapidly that newer satellite records are barely consistent with older ones.

Fresh evidence
Scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and affiliated with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., reported fresh evidence to support the theory that global warming has contributed to the emergence of stronger hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean.

But the trend doesn't hold up in the world's other oceans. The work should help clarify two studies last year that drew connections between global warming and increasingly intense hurricanes, according to a National Science Foundation press release.

"Documenting trends in hurricane intensity is made more difficult by sparse observations and has led to debates about whether the trends are real, or are artefacts of observations," says Jay Fein, program director in NSF's division of atmospheric sciences.

"This study has directly addressed this point by using, for the first time, a new satellite data set to look at hurricane trends." Working with an NCDC archive that holds global satellite information for the years 1983 through 2005, James Kossin, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and his colleagues evened out the numbers by simplifying newer satellite information to align it with older records.

"This new data set is unlike anything that's been done before," says Kossin. "It's going to serve a purpose as being the only globally consistent data set around. The caveat of course, is that it only goes back to 1983."

Support, contradiction
After NCDC researchers recalibrated the hurricane figures, Kossin took a fresh look at how the new numbers on hurricane strength correlate with warming ocean temperatures, a side effect of global warming. What he found both supported and contradicted previous findings.

"The data say that the Atlantic has been trending upwards in hurricane intensity quite a bit," says Kossin. "But the trends appear to be inflated or spurious everywhere else, meaning that we still can't make any global statements." Sea-surface temperatures may be one reason why the Atlantic Ocean is unique, says Kossin.

"The average conditions in the Atlantic at any given time are just on the cusp of what it takes for a hurricane to form," says Kossin. "So it might be that only a small change in conditions creates a much better chance of having a hurricane."

Ripe conditions
The Atlantic is also unique in that the physical variables that converge to form hurricanes — including wind speeds, wind directions and temperatures — mysteriously feed off each other to make conditions ripe for a storm. But scientists don't understand why, he adds.

If man is inadvertently capable of heating the entire planet, surely it is not beyond his wit to cool it down as well? Although most climate scientists do not like to talk about it, cutting greenhouse-gas emissions is not, strictly speaking, the only way to solve the problem of climate change. Just as technology caused the problem, it might also be able to help reverse it. The use of planetary-scale engineering to counteract climate change is known as "geo-engineering".

The idea has been around for years. When a report on climate change was submitted to President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, the authors did not even bother to consider the idea of reducing carbon-dioxide emissions. Instead, the report suggested spreading "very small reflecting particles" across the ocean surface to reflect light and heat back into space.

Since then most campaigners and policymakers have focused on cutting emissions, but the idea of deliberately cooling the Earth has never gone away. Most people think cutting emissions is the more sensible path. But global emissions are still rising, and seem likely to do so for years to come, so some scientists believe it might be worth thinking about a second line of defence, if only as an insurance policy.

The idea has gained new currency in recent months. Climate Change, a scientific journal, published a series of papers on geo-engineering last August, including one by Paul Crutzen, a Nobel prize-winning atmospheric chemist. In November the Carnegie Institution and America’s space agency, NASA, held a conference on the topic. And American officials have lobbied for geo-engineering research to be included among the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report on climate-change mitigation.

Of all the schemes proposed, the most ambitious (and expensive) idea would be to place a giant sunshade in space at the inner Lagrange point, the position on the line between the Earth and the sun where the combination of centripetal and gravitational forces allows an object to maintain a constant position between the two. If the object is big enough, it could block out enough of the sun’s rays to cool the Earth. Roger Angel, an astronomer at the University of Arizona, has suggested assembling a cloud of millions of small, reflecting spacecraft less than a metre across at this point, where together they would block out 1.8 per cent of the sun’s rays.

Dr. Angel estimates that the total mass of the sunshade required would be around 20m tonnes. The shade would consist of individual craft around one metre across, put into position using a combination of magnetic launchers and ion propulsion. He believes the total cost of the project would be a few trillion dollars, or less than 0.5 per cent of world GDP. Dr Angel admits that this is a somewhat far-fetched solution, and does not believe it would be attempted unless all other options had failed. But he has been given a small grant by NASA to explore the idea.

A less exotic approach, endorsed by Dr. Crutzen, would be to spread tiny particles in the upper atmosphere to reflect the sun’s rays. This effect has already been shown to work in nature: fine sulphate particles, called aerosols, ejected by large volcanic eruptions like that of Mount Pinatubo in 1991, have produced periods of global cooling. And sulphate pollution from industry had similar consequences, helping to balance the warming effects of carbon dioxide until the 1990s, when pollution controls in many regions had the perverse effect of increasing warming.

Ken Caldeira, a scientist at the Carnegie Institution, suggests that this idea might be more suited to local rather than global application, at least at first. The Arctic, for example, is among the regions most affected by global warming, and keeping the polar sea-ice frozen would be a good thing: white ice reflects more heat back into space than dark ocean, and the scheme would also save a few polar bears from drowning.

The most down-to-earth idea is that proposed by John Latham, a scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. He suggests that blasting tiny droplets of seawater into the air would stimulate the formation of highly reflective, low-lying marine cloud. Simulations suggest this would have a substantial cooling effect. The question is how to do it economically. Stephen Salter of the University of Edinburgh has designed an unmanned vessel which would produce these clouds using wind power. Just 50 vessels, each costing a few million dollars and spraying around 10kg (22lb) of water per second, could cancel out a year’s worth of global carbon-dioxide emissions—though another 50 vessels would be needed every year until carbon-dioxide emissions were under control.

Dr. Salter’s ships would be much more precise than other geo-engineering schemes—"like an artist’s paintbrush", as he puts it. They could be deployed to the North Atlantic to cool the Greenland ice sheet during the northern summer and then migrate to Antarctica for the southern summer. Dr. Caldeira even suggests that by cooling the sea, these ships could be used to combat hurricanes, since high sea-surface temperatures are linked to hurricane formation.

Other proposals include seeding the oceans to get them to absorb more carbon dioxide and building huge reflectors in desert regions to reflect sunlight back into space. This latter idea is impractical, says Dr. Caldeira, who reckons that half the world’s deserts would have to be covered. Indeed, most geo-engineering schemes sound half-crazy and tend to have both technical and aesthetic complications. Deliberately polluting the stratosphere would make the sky less blue, although sunsets would probably be prettier. Blocking out the sun would help to cool the planet, but it would do little to address other nasty side-effects of high carbon-dioxide levels, such as the acidification of the oceans.

At last, here’s some good news for everyone trying to save the planet from getting warmer. A recent study has found that the reduction in production and use of ozone-depleting substances as mandated by the Montreal Protocol is having a significant collateral benefit – it has slowed down global warming by several years.

The study by scientists from the Netherlands and the United States has concluded that if the Montreal Protocol had not mandated an end to the use of ozone-depleting substances like chloro-fluoro carbons (CFCs), the radiative warming of the climate by these substances would have been twice more than what it is today.

The study further reveals that the amount of warming thus avoided is equivalent to about 7-12 years of rise in the carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere. And the fact that the Montreal Protocol is not aimed at controlling global warming makes the study more significant. In fact it’s the Kyoto Protocol which targets the reduction of carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases.

The Montreal Protocol – which came into being in 1989 – is designed at phasing out CFCs and other chemicals that erode the ozone layer, thereby exposing the earth’s atmosphere to harmful ultra-violet radiations. But since these ozone-depleting substances also happen to be greenhouse gases, the Protocol has ensured that it has a positive impact on global warming as well.

The study, published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of the Sciences, is the first attempt at quantifying this impact. And as it turns out, Montreal Protocol has been found to be working even better than Kyoto in capping greenhouse gas emissions.

"We have found that the accomplished reductions in carbon dioxide equivalent emissions is five-six times larger than what Kyoto Protocol may accomplish by 2010," Guus Velders of the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency told The Indian Express.

Velders, along with Stephen Anderson of the US Environmental Protection Agnecy, is the lead author of the study which was conducted between July and September last year.

One of the biggest reasons why Montreal is proving to be much more effective than Kyoto, Velders said, is that it is truly universal in character. The Kyoto Protocol is handicapped because some key polluting countries, like the United States (which is the single largest emitter of carbon dioxide) and Australia have not ratified it.

India is bound to feel the heat from the climate change deal that the Eropean Union struck over the weekend with its member states, committing to achieve a 20 per cent cut in greenhouse gases from the 1990 levels by 2020.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who holds the presidency of both the EU and the G-8 countries, has challenged the "rest of the world" to follow EU’s example. While the commitment is a significant increase, Europe held back from 30 per cent cut, dangling the additional 10 per cent cut as a bait, asking developing countries like India and China as well as Russia and US to also undertake voluntary commitments if they want EU to up the emissions cut.

The EU energy plan, which does not yet have an enforcement mechanism, requires EU to shift 20 per cent of its energy consumption to renewable sources like wind and solar. At present, EU produces about 6 per cent of its energy from renewable sources like wind and solar. The EU decision will also require 10 per cent of the transport fuel consumption to shift to bio fuel sources by 2020. India does not have any commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol unlike developed countries in the EU.

Over the past couple of years, UK and other EU countries have been diplomatically nudging India to start considering cuts, a proposition bound to take a toll on economic development, in the next phase of Kyoto post-2012. "The move is significant and it will certainly create new ground for the EU to ask India to also undertake emission cuts, "said R.K. Pachauri, chairman of the UN-mandated Inter-governmental Panel on Climate change. "But that does not mean India is going to yield at the moment, "he added.

Global warming is expected to turn the planet a bit greener by spurring plant growth but crops and forests may wilt beyond mid-century if temperatures keep rising, according to a draft U.N. report

Scientists have long disputed about how far higher temperatures might help or hamper plants - and farmers - overall. Plants absorb carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, as they grow and release it when they rot "global agricultural production potential is likely to increase with increases in global average temperature up to about 3⁰ Celsius (5.4⁰ Fahrenheit), but above this it is very likely to decrease," the draft said. Plants in tropical and dry regions from Africa to Asia are set to suffer from even a small rise in temperatures, threatening more hunger linked to other threats such as desertification, drought and floods. But some plants in temperate

regions, such as parts of Europe or North and South America, could grow more in a slightly warmer world, according to the draft.

A 79-page technical summary, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters, will be released in Brussels on April 6 after a final review as part of a report based on the work of 2,500 scientists to guide governments in combating warming.

Leading climate change experts have warned of the "Hollywoodisation" of global warning and criticised American scientists for exaggerating the message of global warming.

Paul Hardaker and Chris Collier of the U.K.'s Royal Meteorological Society said scientists, campaign groups, politicians, and the media were all guilty of making out that catastrophic events were more likely to happen when this could not be proved by scientists. They also criticised the tendency to say individual extreme events — such as a typhoon or floods — were certain evidence of climate change.

They singled out for criticism a report last month by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which said intensification of droughts, heat waves, floods, wildfires and storms were "early warning signs of even more devastating damage to come."

"It's certainly a very strong statement," said Professor Collier. "To make the blanket assumption that all extreme weather events are increasing is a bit too early yet."

Media criticised
Reporting of the recent report by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change by the media was also criticised, especially the use of words not in the report such as "catastrophic," "shocking," 'terrifying," and "devastating."

"Campaigners, media, and some scientists seem to be appealing to fear in order to generate a sense of urgency," said Mike Hulme, director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.

The report by Professors Hardaker and Collier, and other climate experts, "Making Sense of the Weather and Climate," was launched at a conference in Oxford, England, organised by the charity Sense About Science. The authors said they firmly believe global warming is happening and man-made emissions of greenhouse gases are partly to blame.

Some scientists also acknowledged that dramatic warnings about climate change had helped generate public debate and support for action to reduce the threat. But Professor Hardaker warned that exaggeration of the problems made the public confused and made it easier for sceptics to argue that the scientists were wrong.

An example of a low probability event given too much weight was the risk of the Gulf Stream, which keeps the North Atlantic relatively warm, "switching off" and plunging the region into an ice age — the scenario dramatised by the Hollywood film The Day After Tomorrow, which also came in for criticism for exaggerating that problem. As a result scientists had to be more honest about the uncertainties surrounding climate change prediction to avoid losing public trust, said Professor Hardaker.

Cuts in emissions of greenhouse gases can mute the worst impacts of global warming, such as water shortages for billions of people or extinction of almost half of Amazonian tree species, a draft UN report shows.

The report, due for release on April 6, foresees ever worsening damage to the planet as temperatures gain, including rising seas that could swamp low-lying Pacific island states or declining crop yields that could mean hunger for millions.

"The longer we go without action (to curb greenhouse gases) the more likely it is that some of the big feedbacks will kick in," Richard Betts, manager of the climate impacts research team at the British Met Office and Hadley Centre.

"We can make a big difference by either choosing a low emissions scenario or a high emissions scenario," said Gunnar Myhre, of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research in Oslo. Both were among lead authors of a UN climate report in February, based on the work of 2,500 scientists, that laid out scenarios of temperature rises of 1.1-6.4⁰Celsius (2 to 11.5⁰ Fahrenheit) by 2100 over 1990 levels.

In the scenarios, the biggest temperature gain comes if the world stays dependent on fossil fuels, with 70 percent of energy in 2100 from sources such as coal and gas, and sharply raises greenhouse gas emissions.

The scenario with the smallest temperature gain, below about 3⁰Celsius (5.4⁰F), assumes that carbon emissions will dip by 2100 by when the world will get about half its energy from renewable sources.

Spring is here. But you will hardly suspect its presence from the almost-denuded hills of the state. The near-absence of green cover has made this world-famous hill station seem desolate – something usually associated with winters.

Nature watchers attribute this to the ‘erratic weather conditions in the Uttarakhand hills caused by global warming." The situation is the same in all the high-altitude areas of Uttarakhand, they say.

"Spring usually begins in Nainital by February end. By mid-March nature is in full bloom," said Dr. Jeet Ram, Reader at the Forestry Department of Kumaon University’s Thakur Dev Singh Bisht Campus here. This time the "the process of bud bursting and leafing, with which spring is identified, has taken place after half the season has passed," he told the Hindustan Times.

Dr. Ram said there had been "an unduly late occurrence of rain and snowfall this winter, thanks to global warming." He cited the example of tilonj (Quercus floribunda), a variety of Oak. Leafing of this tree species "in Nainital began in March. Normally the process is completed by now".

Forestry expert Dr. Laxman Singh Lodhiyal attributed this to the "disturbance in the physiology of vegetation, which was due to the late occurrence of rain and snowfall in Nainital this winter."

The Change is noticeable not only in Nainital’s evergreen oak forests but also in the deciduous varieties of trees like the Pangar,
Chinar etc., around the Naini Lake, a major tourist attraction of this hill station. Consequently, the natural water body that used to seem bountiful during spring is quite desolate this time.

Scientists said the erratic weather conditions have also adversely affected the rhododendron, the state flower of Uttarakhand, which has started flowering ahead of its time. "Normally rhododendron flowers in March. This time, it flowered a month in advance all across Uttarakhand." Said Dr. Tiwari, a Reader at the Botany Department of Kumaon University’s Thakur D. S. B. Campus. "This sudden change in the flowering pattern has been seen over the last four years," he pointed out.

Global warming could re-make the world's climate zones by 2100, with some polar and mountain climates disappearing altogether and formerly unknown ones emerging in the tropics, scientists said on Tuesday.

And when climate zones vanish, the animals and plants that live in them will be at greater risk of extinction, said Jack Williams yesterday, lead author of a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"What we've shown is these climates disappear, not just regionally, but they're disappearing from the global set of climates, and the species that live in these climates really have nowhere to go as the system changes," said Williams, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Previous studies have raised the concern about species extinctions in specific areas -- such as the cloud forest of Costa Rica or the Cape region in South Africa -- but this is the first to predict this global change, Williams said in a telephone interview.

As Earth warms, predicted to happen by up to 8 degrees C at some latitudes by the end of this century, climate zones are likely to shift away from the equator and toward the poles, the study said.

"It's those climates near the poles or at the tops of mountains that are being pushed out...," Williams said. "It's getting too hot." Polar bears and ring seals, which depend on Arctic ice, could be among those species threatened by the shifting of climate zones, Williams said, but the study did not specifically address the fate of these animals. As polar climate zones disappear, new zones will be created in the parts of the world that are already the hottest, the study predicted, using models of climate change.

The change in temperature is likely to be greater in the Arctic and Antarctic because when snow and ice melt, their ability to reflect sunlight goes away too, accelerating the warming effect.

However, because normal fluctuations in temperature and rainfall are smaller in the tropics, even small changes in temperature can make a big difference in this warm region, co-author John Kutzbach, also of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said in a statement.

Better architecture and energy savings in buildings could do more to fight global warming than all curbs on greenhouse gases agreed under the UN's Kyoto Protocol, a UN study showed on Thursday. Better use of concrete, metals and timber in construction and less use of energy for everything from air conditioners to lighting in homes and offices could save billions of dollars in a sector accounting for 30-40 per cent of world energy use. "Buildings can play a key role in combating climate change," the UN Environment Programme said in a report issued in Oslo during a Conference on Ways to Promote Economic Growth Without Damaging the Environment.

The size of the global market for greenhouse-gas emission permits more than doubled to 22.5 billion euros ($30 billion) last year, according to Point Carbon, an Oslo-based research and publishing company.

Volumes are likely to surge 50 percent this year, Point Carbon said in an e-mailed statement. Value may rise 4.9 percent to 23.6 billion euros, based on current prices, Point Carbon said.

Prices for European Union allowances, the most widely traded permits, have fallen.

In 2005, the market was worth 9.4 billion euros, Point Carbon said. Volume rose to 1.6 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in 2006 from 799 million tons a year earlier. The figures don’t include the largely unregulated market for carbonoffsets in the U.S., for instance.

Lawmakers around the world are considering new rules to limit production of greenhouse gases, which are blamed for climate change. Starting in 2005, the EU required about 12,000 factories and power stations to hold a permit for each metric ton of carbon dioxide they produced.

Emitters in the region can sell spare permits or buy additional allowances in a market if they want to boost emissions above their allocation.

The EU system accounted for 18.1 billion euros, or 80 percent, of global emissions trading value in 2006, Point Carbon said in a Carbon Market Analyst report.

Volume in the EU system reached 1 billion tons in 2006, more than double the 362 million in 2005. They may rise to 1.75 billion tons this year, Point Carbon estimated.

Clean development
The value of trading in clean development mechanism credits, created under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, may rise to 4.3 billion euros this year from 3.9 billion euros last year, the report said.

President of the World Environment Foundation, UK, Madhav Mehra has called for initiating steps to ensure that the increasing greenhouse emissions are controlled to make the earth a safer place to live.

He was interacting with scientists, representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and representatives of the local administration at Palampur in Kangra district, today.

He said if immediate steps were not taken to check the greenhouse effect, universal temperature would rise by 3 to 5°C by 2050. It would deprive the high mountains of their snow cover and inundate large areas, thus causing misery and havoc in the world.

In order to ensure a healthy life for the coming generations, it was essential that the today’s generation initiated steps to check this devastation, he added. He said the nature had its own system of recycling its waste and that was the reason that nature left no waste while human beings created huge quantities of waste annually without resorting to ways and means to recycle it. He said an average Indian utilised 6 tonnes of natural resources annually, while the figure was 72 tonnes in case of an American.

Earlier, addressing the gathering, Palampur MLA and CM’s Political Adviser Brij Behari Lal Butail said whenever humanity had harmed nature, the natural forces had taken their revenge by causing misery to the people. He lauded the role of NGOs for creating awareness about the need to control greenhouse emissions and check environmental devastation.

He briefed about the steps being taken by the state government to control pollution while continuing development. He said efforts were also being made to make Palampur a clean and green town so that tourists and locals could enjoy its natural beauty.

Later, while initiating an interactive discussion on climate change, K.B. Ralhan, Regional Director of the World Environment Foundation and president of the Palampur Welfare and Environment Protection Forum, said the ozone layer that protects the life on earth by blocking the harmful ultraviolet rays of the sun has been severely depleted due to the release of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide in the upper atmosphere.

Dean of the College of Home Science of Himachal Pradesh Agriculture University, Palampur, Manoranjan Kalia expressed concern over the depleting environment by giving examples of weather changes in the world. He stressed the need to take steps to check environmental degradation at the earliest.

US investors who control $4 trillion in assets have added their voice to a growing crescendo of demands that Washington act quickly to mandate controls on carbon emissions blamed for global warming.

The group of 65 institutional investors and major corporations said they were alarmed by the financial risks of global warming and worried that US companies cannot compete with technology initiatives in countries like Germany, where strict regulations are already in place.

The group includes companies like Allianz, which manages $1.6 trillion in assets, Merrill Lynch, Alcoa, DuPont , BP America and other companies, and dozens of pension funds, labour group and state employee pension funds.

The initiative, organised by a coalition that operates the Investor Network on Climate Risk, represented one of the highest profile bids yet to put pressure on the White House and Congress to limit carbon emissions blamed for rising Earth temperatures.

Among other proposals, the network is demanding laws to reduce emissions by 60 to 90 per cent below 1990 levels by 2050.

Ten US companies in January made headlines with similar urgings, but the bid lacked the investor focus. Some of the same companies signed on to the current effort. "Global warming presents enormous risks and opportunities for US businesses and investors," said Fred Buenrostro, who heads the $230 billion pension fund for retired California public employees, in a statement. "To tap American ingenuity and drive business to a leadership position in the low-carbon future, we need regulations to enable the markets to deploy capital and spur innovation."

In addition to the call for 60 to 90 per cent reductions, the network’s statement, issued at an annual meeting of the Council of Institutional Investors in Washington, called for the US stock regulatory agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to build climate change measures into annual financial reporting requirements.

It also called for a "realignment" of national energy and transportation policies "to stimulate research, development and deployment" of clean technologies.

The prospect of investors speaking with an ever-more unified voice on any issue of global consequence is nearly unprecedented in US history, but comparisons could be made to the divestment initiative during the 1970s and 80s to force an end to apartheid in South Africa, or to pacifist initiatives that boycott military investments.

China is on course to overtake the United States this year as the world’s biggest carbon emitter, estimates based on Chinese energy data show, potentially pressuring Beijing to take more action on climate change.

China’s emissions rose by some 10 per cent in 2005, a senior US scientist estimated, while Beijing data shows fuel consumption rose more than 9 per cent in 2006, suggesting China would easily outstrip the US this year, long before forecasts.

Taking the top spot would focus pressure on China to do more to brake emissions as part of world talks on extending the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol on global warming beyond 2012.

Thirty five developed nations have agreed to cut emissions under Kyoto and they want others — especially the United States and China - to do more.

"It looks likely to me that China will pass the United States this year," said Gregg Marland, a senior staff scientist at the US Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), which supplies data to governments, researchers and non-governmental organisations worldwide. "There’s a very high likelihood they’ll pass them in 2007."

Carbon dioxide (CO2) is produced by burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas for heat, power and transport. Most scientists say it is a key contributor to global warming.

Marland used fossil fuel consumption data from oil company BP to calculate China’s CO2 emissions in 2005 at 5.3 billion tonnes, versus 5.9 billion for the US, with respective growth in 2005 of 10.5 per cent and less than 0.1 per cent.

In 2006 Chinese fuel consumption rose 9.3 per cent to the equivalent of 2.4 billion tonnes of coal that year, the deputy head of the office that advises China on energy policy, Xu Dingming, said on Thursday. This was faster than BP’s estimate of a 9 per cent rise in China’s oil, gas and coal consumption in 2005, to 1.45 billion tonnes of oil equivalent.

The International Energy Agency (IEA), which advises 26 rich nations, had already said last November that on current trends China would overtake the United States as the world’s biggest carbon emitter before 2010.

China’s Office of the National Coordination Committee on Climate Change said it could not comment on either forecast as it did not have a reliable estimate of the country’s emissions.

"These figures are very complicated — we don’t have an estimate of CO2 for such a recent date," said an official who declined to be named. "We have just set in motion our national reporting plan... but it will not be done for two or three years."

UN data for 2003 put the US top with 23 per cent of world carbon dioxide emissions and China second on 16.5 per cent. But US individuals were far bigger emitters, at 20 tonnes per capita against China’s 3.2 tonnes and a world average of 3.7. China argues that wealthy nations are responsible for most of the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere and should lead the way in cutting emissions.

And much of the growth in China’s emissions is to produce goods consumed in the West, raising ethical questions over who bears responsibility for those emissions.

Higher economic growth and fuel use translates into higher emissions, particularly in China, which gets around 70 per cent of its energy from coal, the highest carbon-emitting fuel.

CDIAC’s 2004 emissions estimates, based on BP data, closely matched the IEA’s

Sometimes, the pressure can only come from within. As most of you probably know, former American Vice President AL Gore testified in the US Congress last week about global warming.

It became an important ‘moment’ for a country that has, till now, treated global warming as ‘the thing that doesn’t exist’.

Why is this a particularly note-worthy incident? Leaving out the dramatic turns and the newsworthiness of this story, it’s useful to see the process. In his talk, Gore outlined 10 ways by which the US can reduce greenhouse emissions by 90 per cent in 2050. Most won’t ever believe that-it seems impractical. But the beauty of Gore’s suggestion is that it mainstreams carbon into government regulation and action. For example, he calls for a reduction in income tax, while collecting potentially lost revenues through a carbon tax. Given how public behaviour is skillfully adapted to reduce taxes, they are likely to reduce carbon to save money. Carbon is everywhere in everyone’s lives, but there are some well known examples of how you can minimize your carbon consumption. Gore believes that the US government should stop the use of incandescent light bulbs.

Since the Americans are gluts for lighting, the impact might be bigger than what we can imagine here in India. Such simplistic ideas might not be the sole solutions, but it seems as if the simplification is intentional, to create a sense of comfort with an idea that frightens people as being too big to grasp. He has other ideas-no more coal plants, for one. This has been discussed at length in an energy paranoid society.

It’s unclear how electricity will be generated in the Gore Raj, but he sees local generators who feed their surplus into grids.

The real point is not what he says but that by saying some of these things, he generates mass public debate. Apart from that, by breaking down a large problem into smaller, do-able bits, Gore offers thousands of Americans a way to be apart of the solution. For making these bridges, he deserves applause.

Train it
Imagine traveling routinely from Delhi to Chennai by train these days. Before you laugh, bear in mind that it is increasingly becoming an acceptable idea, mostly as a way to reduce green houses gases emitted by planes as they burn aviation fuel.

It used to be a matter of good intentions gone awry. Now it is plain fraud. The governments using biofuel to tackle global warming know that it causes more harm than good. But they plough on regardless. In theory, fuels made from plants can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide emitted by cars and trucks. Plants absorb carbon as they grow — it is released again when the fuel is burned. By encouraging oil companies to switch from fossil plants to living ones, governments on both sides of the Atlantic claim to be "decarbonising" our transport networks.

In the U.K.'s budget this month, Chancellor Gordon Brown announced that he would extend the tax rebate for biofuels until 2010. From next year all suppliers in the U.K. will have to ensure that 2.5 per cent of the fuel they sell is made from plants — if not, they must pay a penalty of 15p a litre. The obligation rises to 5 per cent in 2010. By 2050, the Government hopes that 33 per cent of our fuel will come from crops. Last month, President George W. Bush announced that he would quintuple the U.S. target for biofuels: by 2017 they should be supplying 24 per cent of the nation's transport fuel.

Formula for disaster
So what's wrong with these programmes? Only that they are a formula for environmental and humanitarian disaster. In 2004, I warned that biofuels would set up a competition for food between cars and people. The people would necessarily lose: those who can afford to drive are richer than those who are in danger of starvation. It would also lead to the destruction of rainforests and other important habitats. I received more abuse than I've had for any other column — except for when I attacked the 9/11 conspiracists. I was told my claims were ridiculous, laughable, impossible. Well in one respect I was wrong. I thought these effects wouldn't materialise for many years. They are happening already.

Since the beginning of last year, the price of maize has doubled. The price of wheat has also reached a 10-year high, while global stockpiles of both grains have reached 25-year lows. Already there have been food riots in Mexico and reports that the poor are feeling the strain all over the world. The U.S. Department of Agriculture warns that "if we have a drought or a very poor harvest, we could see the sort of volatility we saw in the 1970s, and if it does not happen this year, we are also forecasting lower stockpiles next year." According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation, the main reason is the demand for ethanol: the alcohol used for motor fuel, which can be made from maize and wheat.

Farmers will respond to better prices by planting more, but it is not clear that they can overtake the booming demand for biofuel. Even if they do, they will catch up only by ploughing virgin habitat.

Already we know that biofuel is worse for the planet than petroleum. The U.N. has just published a report suggesting that 98 per cent of the natural rainforest in Indonesia will be degraded or gone by 2022. Just five years ago, the same agencies predicted that this wouldn't happen until 2032. But they reckoned without the planting of palm oil to turn into biodiesel for the European market. This is now the main cause of deforestation there and it is likely soon to become responsible for the extinction of the orang-utan in the wild.

But it gets worse. As the forests are burned, both the trees and the peat they sit on are turned into carbon dioxide. A report by the Dutch consultancy Delft Hydraulics shows that every tonne of palm oil results in 33 tonnes of CO2 emissions, or 10 times as much as petroleum produces. I feel I need to say that again. Biodiesel from palm oil causes 10 times as much climate change as ordinary diesel.

There are similar impacts all over the world. Sugarcane producers are moving into rare scrubland habitats (the cerrado) in Brazil, and soya farmers are ripping up the Amazon rainforests.

As President Bush has just signed a biofuel agreement with President Lula, it's likely to become a lot worse. Indigenous people in South America, Asia, and Africa are starting to complain about incursions on to their land by fuel planters. A petition launched by a group called biofuelwatch, begging Western governments to stop, has been signed by campaigners from 250 groups.

In February the European Commission was faced with a straight choice between fuel efficiency and biofuels. It had intended to tell car companies that the average carbon emission from new cars in 2012 would be 120 gm per kilometre. After heavy lobbying by Angela Merkel on behalf of her car manufacturers, it caved in and raised the limit to 130 gm. It announced that it would make up the shortfall by increasing the contribution from biofuel.

We need a moratorium on all targets and incentives for biofuels, until a second generation of fuels can be produced for less than it costs to make fuel from palm oil or sugar cane. Even then, the targets should be set low and increased only cautiously. I suggest a five-year freeze.

This would require a huge campaign, tougher than the one that helped to win a five-year freeze on growing genetically modified crops in the U.K.

That was important — GM crops give big companies unprecedented control over the food chain. But most of their effects are indirect, while the devastation caused by biofuel is immediate and already visible.

Equatorial lands that are home to hundreds of millions of people will become uninhabitable as food and water run out due to climate change, scientists will warn this week.

A report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to be published on Friday, will warn that the temperature rises of 2-3⁰C predicted by 2050 spell global disaster for both humanity and the environment.

It will say that up to 40 per cent of animal and plant species face extinction as rising temperatures destroy the ecosystems that support them. And it will point out that the 29 billion tons of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere each year are acidifying the oceans – threatening to destroy coral reefs, plankton and many commercial fish species.

By the middle of the century, the report will warn, more than 200m people could have been forced from their native lands by rising sea levels, floods and droughts, with many more facing early deaths from malnutrition and heat stress.

"The picture that emerges from the research is quite appalling," said Rachel Warren, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, and one of the IPCC’s senior authors. "It is just horrendous realising what damage climate change can do to ecosystems."

The IPCC report is a collation of the best peer-reviewed scientific research into the impact of climate change, published over the past five years or so. It will say that many of the worst effects on humans will be caused by water – or lack of it – in the form of floods, drought, melting glaciers, rising sea levels and ocean acidification.

Nearly a third of the world’s land surface may be at risk of extreme drought by 2099, compared with about 1 per cent. Such a change would destroy farmland and water resources and lead to mass migrations of "environmental refugees".

The IPCC will also warn that the Amazon rainforest could be in danger. Professor Diana Liverman, Director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University, said the region was already experiencing an alarming reduction in rain.

"The warming of the oceans seems to be changing the water cycle," she said. In lands close to the equator, especially in Africa, declining crop yields could leave hundreds of millions of people unable to grow food.

Australia’s largest city dimmed today night as businesses and home owners switched off the lights to draw attention to global warming.

The normally gleaming white sails of the Sydney Opera House darkened, and so did the iconic harbour bridge and chunks of the city skyline. Security and street lights, as well as those at commercial port operations, stayed on.

Throughout the city of about 4 million people, residents turned off the lights for one hour in an event organised by environmentalists and supported by Sydney city officials, the New South Wales state government and thousands of businesses.

Restaurants throughout the city had announced candlelight-only specials, and families gathered in parks and other public places to take part in a countdown to lights out sending up a cheer when the switch was flicked at 7:30 p.m.

Today’s event kicked off a campaign to encourage Sydney residents to conserve energy by turning off lights, computers and other electrical equipment when they are not being used ~ steps supporters say could cut Sydney’s greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent a year. "Tonight is really important because it’s a call to action," Sydney Mayor Clover Moore told Sky News. "We are asking people to think about the action they can take to fight global warming. We all have to act to reduce out ecological footprint." Australia, a nation of around 21 million people, is ranked as the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitter per capita, largely because of its heavy reliance on coal-fired power stations.

Leaked excerpts of the latest report bye the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN network of 2,000 scientists, says average temperatures in Australia could rise 6.7 degrees by 2080, bringing more wildfires, floods, drought and storms.

Climate change and the catastrophe that can follow is already showing up. It is estimated that in 20 years since 1981, there had been an annual loss of about $5 billion for the major cereal crops in the world.

Response to this slow but devastating change is on two fronts: Mitigation, a global effort to reduce greenhouse gases that leads to temperature rise and climate change, and local adaptation by finding new delivery systems, plant varieties and planting materials.

The Indian Council for Agricultural Research is already acting on this by undertaking long-term climate change impact studies.

The Chennai-based MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) is implementing a project on vulnerability assessment and enhancing adaptive capacity to climate change (V & A Programme) in semi-arid India.

The first study on the impact of climate change on global food production by researchers of a US university estimates that during 1981-2002, fields of wheat, corn and barely throughout the world have produced a combined 40 million tonne less a year because of the increase in temperatures caused by human activities.

Annual global temperatures increased by about 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit between 180 and 2002, with even larger changes observed in several regions.

David Lobell, from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, California, the lead author of the study on climate change impact, said, "There is clearly a negative response of global yields to increase temperatures.

Though the impacts are relatively small compared to the technological yield gains over the same period, the results demonstrate that the negative impacts of climate trends on crop yields at the global scale are already occurring."

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is managed by the University of California for the US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration.

"Most people tend to think of climate change as something that will impact the future, but this study shows that warming over the past two decades has already had real effects on the global food supply," said Christopher Field, co-author of the study and Director of Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology.

The importance of this study, the authors say, was that it demonstrated a clear and simple relationship at the global scale, with yields dropping by approximately 3 per cent to 5 per cent for one-degree fahrenheit increase.

"A key to moving forward is how well cropping systems can adapt to a warmer world," Lobell said. "Investments in this area could potentially save billions of dollars and millions of lives."

The stagnation in Indian cereal production is not entirely attributed to climate change.

However, the Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, said in Chennai last week that a one degree rise in temperature in northern India would reduce wheat production by 10 per cent.

Northern nations such as Russia or Canada may be celebrating better harvests and less icy winters in coming decades even as rising seas, also caused by global warming, are washing away Pacific island states.

A draft UN report to be issued in Brussels on April 6 foresees unequal impacts from warming: tropical nations from Africa to the Pacific, mostly poor, are likely to bear the brunt but those nearer the poles, mostly rich, may briefly benefit.

"At least for a few decades there will be a few winners," said Rajendra Pachauri, head of UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of 2,500 experts which will release the report outlining regional impacts of warming.

But he said most scenarios foresee an extended rise in temperatures this century, stoked by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. "Clearly there would be no winners left anywhere," he said. Pachauri declined to give details of the report but a draft seen by Reuters project heat-waves, droughts and floods that could cause more hunger for millions of people, mainly in Asia and Africa, and water shortages for up to 3.2 billion.

India is one of the most vulnerable parts of Asia that will face the brunt of the havoc caused by global warming. Not just water scarcity, floods drought and loss of species, India and other vulnerable countries will face malnutrition, spurt in diarroheal and cardio-respiratory diseases as part of projected change related to global warming. In India and China, excess mortality due to heat stress and risk of dengue fever has been projected as very high.

The latest report on climate change, Climate Change 2007: Climate Change impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, by United Nations’ Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change states that climate change poses substantial risks to human health in Asia, with the relative risks for these conditions expected to be the largest by 2030.

"India is one of the most vulnerable countries along with some of the neighbouring countries in term of global warming. Upto 50 percent of Asia’s total biodiversity is at risk and natural grassland coverage is projected to decline," IPCC Chairman R.K. Pachauri.

The report has projected that Asian mega-deltas, including Brahmaputra, will be badly affected. Fresh water availability in Central, South, East and Southeast Asia, particularly in large river basins including that in Indian subcontinent, will decrease causing major water scarcity in region.

With increase in temperatures, glaciers are melting in Himalayas and that will increase the chances of regular flooding and rock avalanches with next two to three decades.

The region will also witness a decrease in crop production, forest area and arable land, with more frequent and prolonged droughts, causing desertification in Asia.

"Food insecurity and loss of livelihood will be further exacerbated by loss of cultivated land and nursery areas for fisheries by inundation and coastal erosion in low-lying areas of tropical Asian countries," said Dr. Pachauri.

The report states that climate change related melting of glaciers could seriously affect half-a- billion people in the Himalyan Hindu Kush region.

India, China and Bangladesh are especially susceptible to increasing salinity of ground water and surface water resources, especially along the coast due to increase in the sea levels.

If you are worried about the rising prices of cereals and wheat, here is more unsetting news: R.K. Pachauri, chairperson of Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change, predicts steep fall in food grain production in India, thanks to rising global temperature.

In case winter temperature rises by just 0.5 degrees Celsius, the per heactare wheat production will fall by 0.45 tons. In India, the average per hectare production is 2.6 tons. Similarly the production of cereals and may other agricultural crops will see a substantial fall, he said.

Worse, he said, was that the total agricultural land would reduce and land may not remain suitable to grow the present crops.

"Farmers will have to look at scenario for changing crop suitable to weather," he said, while pointing that the climate change could lead to major food security issues for country like India. "The loss of livelihood in rural Indian can lead to more slums in the cities," he said.

The UN’s second working report, released last Friday, also predicts huge coastal erosion by rising sea level (about 40 cm) resulting from faster melting of glaciers in Himalayan Hindu-Kush ranges. "It can adversely affect half a million people in India because of excessive flooding in coastal areas and it will also can increase in salinity of groundwater in the Sunderbans and on surface water in coastal areas," Pachauri said.

Shyamal Mandal lives at the edge of ruin. In front of his small mud house lies the wreckage of what was once his village on this fragile delta island near the Bay of Bengal. Half of it has sunk into the river.

Only a handful of families still hang on so close to the water, and those that do are surrounded by reminders of inexorable destruction – an abandoned half-broken canoe, a coconut palm teetering on a cliff, the gouged-out remnants of a family’s fish pond.

All that stands between Mandal’s home and the water is a rudimentary mud embankment, and there is no telling, he confessed, when it, too, may fall away. What will happen next, we don’t know, he said, summing up his only certainty. The sinking of Ghoramara can be attributed to a confluence of disasters, natural and human, not least the rising sea. The rivers that pour down from the Himalayas and empty into the bay have swelled and shifted in recent decades, placing this and the rest of the delicate islands known as the Sundarbans in the mouth of daily danger.

Certainly, nature would have forced these island to shift size and shape, drowning some, giving rise to others. But there is little doubt, scientist say, that human-induced climate change has made them particularly vulnerable.

A recent study by Sugata Hazra, an oceanographer at Jadavpur University in nearby Kolkata, found that in the last 30 years, nearly 31 square miles of the Sundarbans have vanished entirely. More than 600 families have been displaced, according to local government authorities. Fields and ponds have been submerged. Ghoramara alone has shrunk to less than two square miles, about half of its size in 1969, Hazra’s study concluded. Two other lands have vanished entirely.

The Sundarbans are among the world’s largest collection of river delta islands. In geological terms they are young and still under formation, cut by an intricate network of streams and tributaries that straddle the border between India and Bangladesh. Ever since the British settled them 150 years ago in pursuit of timber, the mangroves have been steadily depleted, half of the islands have lost their forest cover, and the population has multiplied.

Today, the rising sea and destruction of forests threaten Sundarbans’s most legendary inhabitant, the royal Bengal tiger, which drinks these salty waters and has an appetite for human flesh. Environmental degradation also threatens the unsung human residents – four million people live here on the Indian side of the border alone.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that global warming, spurred by the buildup of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere, could raise the oceans’ surface as much as 23 inches by 2100. According to the panel’s latest report released in early April, the ecology and people of this river delta system are among the most vulnerable in the world.

It hardly seems to matter that Mandal and his neighbour, farmers and fishermen, are far too poor to produce much in the way of carbon emissions. They feel the assault already. Mandal stood in his yard and pointed to the water. In his mind’s eye, he could still see the two islands that have already sunk into the sea. And there, he said, on what was then the outer edge of Ghoramara, was his old house, and the paddies and the vegetable patch he had cultivated with his own hands. Now there is only water.

Over the years, as the earth cracked and fell into the water, people on Ghoramara began moving farther inland. Mandal was among them. He built himself a new house in what was then the safe mid-section of the island. He wonders where he will move now.

Hundreds of families have already been forced into a displaced people’s camp on Sagar a neighbouring island, which itself has shrunk by one and a half square miles in the last five years, according to the Jadavpur Universtiy study.

Even as India prospers, the Sunderbans have been left with little to no protection, and certainly none of the measures that wealthy low-lying countries like the Netherlands have undertaken to deal with the ravages of the sea. Every year at least two cyclones pound the islands; scientists say the storms have grown increasingly intense, though less frequent.

The mud embankments built over the years around these young, fragile islands are too feeble to keep away the tide. One storm, and one breach, can destroy a lifetime’s labour on the land. Nature didn’t create this place for humans to cut the forests and chase out the tigers and wildlife, said Tushar Kanjilal, founder of the Tagore Society for Rural Development. "We are killing the Sunderbans. Our government, the people themselves, we are all together killing it. After 50 years, will they exist?" he asks in anguish.

Yudisthir Bhuiyan fled to Sagar one day during the equinoctial high tide, when the river surged and broke through the mud embankment that was expected to shield his village. His house collapsed. Cows and chickens were washed away. For a time they lived like refugees on the roadside, until the government settled them on a small patch of land on Sagar, far from the water.

India is ill – prepared for fresh scarcity, sea-level rise, crop damage and heat waves that global warming portends for the subcontinent, the head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has warned.

"We have resilient communities, but we’ll need to anticipate and adapt to address the impact of climate change," said Rajendra Pachauri, the IPPC chairman who is also the head of the Tata Energy Research Institute in New Delhi.

Outlining the anticipated impact of global warming in Asia, Pachauri said, while higher temperatures are expected to reduce grain yields, food insecurity may also be exacerbated by the loss of cultivated land and nursery areas for fisheries by inundation and coastal erosion of low-lying areas.

India and Bangladesh are especially susceptible to increasing levels of salt in groundwater and surface water along the coastal regions because of the rise in sea level. The IPCC has earlier this year predicted that global temperature may rise between 1.8 degrees Celsius to 4 degrees Celsius in the coming decades.

"Calcutta and Mumbai are particularly vulnerable," Pachauri said. "The mangrove forest in the Sunderbans – a frontline defence for Calcutta – are among the Asian mega deltas which are threatened."

If British politics were a dinner party then Tony Blair would be that guest who got up to say goodbye an hour ago, insisting he had to be off — only to hang around by the front door, his coat on and car keys jangling, chatting about this and that, and never actually leaving. The result is a strange sense of limbo, where the old period has not quite ended and the new one has not yet begun. A sense of drift has hovered over the British government since the attempt to push the Prime Minister from office last September. It feels like nothing is happening.

So it's heartening to hear of one area, at least, where the British government has taken a lead. On Tuesday, the United Nations Security Council discussed climate change for the very first time. Not some environmental subcommittee, not a platitudinous exchange of slogans in the General Assembly, nor even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but the Security Council. It was debating carbon emissions and the danger they pose to the Earth.

The Security Council had never talked about global warming before — and it was not keen to start on Tuesday.

Of the permanent members, the United States, Russia, and China had all objected, Moscow's Ambassador to the U.N. admitting he was "lukewarm because of where it is discussed." Translation: the Security Council is meant for grown-up stuff involving bombs and bullets, not airy-fairy talk about trees and polar bears. Unluckily for Washington, Beijing and Moscow, the presidency of the Security Council rotates, and this month it's Britain's turn. Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett insisted this was what she wanted the Council to discuss, and on Tuesday it did.

Despite the misgivings of those big three, it turned out to be quite an event: a record turnout for a debate of this kind, not confined to the 15 members of the Council but with speeches from 52 different countries. By the end, a strong majority agreed that climate change posed a clear threat to international security.

Pragmatic reasoning
That was the entire point of the exercise, to reframe the way people think about this problem. There's good, pragmatic reasoning behind that. The glum reality is that governments tend to take security threats more seriously than any other kind. Just think of what Washington has spent on the "war on terror." If George W. Bush gets his latest budget through Congress, he will have spent $750 billion of American taxpayers' money on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in a little over five years. Environmentalists drool when they imagine what they could have done with a fraction of that money. Even a quarter of the total, say a meagre $200 billion, could have paid for enormous strides towards a low carbon economy. It could, for instance, have paid to transform the way we generate electricity, by capturing carbon and storing it in the ground, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.

That, when it happens, will be a massive, international infrastructure project. But if governments approached it with the degree of urgency, will, and wherewithal they apply to traditional national security threats — with the seriousness and money-no-object commitment Mr. Bush and Mr. Blair showed to the "war on terror" — then suddenly it would look eminently possible.

In the most direct way, the overheating of the Earth promises danger — including threats the Security Council would immediately recognise. If land becomes uninhabitable through flooding as glaciers melt and sea levels rise, or through drought as things get hotter, the people now living on that land will move. Credible forecasts speak of 200 million people displaced by the middle of the century. Some of that movement will be within countries, but some will be across international borders — and we all know the strains that can produce. There will be clashes over limited resources as people compete over fertile land and drinkable water.

That is not entirely in the future. Already the issue is acquiring the more familiar shape of an international relations problem. Note the description by Uganda's President Museveni of rising emissions as "an act of aggression" by the rich nations against the poor. We pollute for decades; they pay the price in lost landscapes and lost lives.

As the consequences of global warming become more visible, and more felt, that sentiment will grow — along with the conflict, or even international terrorism, that it might bring.

Tuesday's debate is a sign that the penny is beginning to drop. May be not in Russia, whose U.N. Ambassador warned against overdramatising the problem of global warming, nor in the White House, which offered the Security Council an empty statement on Tuesday, in keeping with the Bush administration's shaming record of denial.

Still, and in defiance of all that, two U.S. Senators, Republican Chuck Hagel and Democrat Dick Durbin, have tabled a bill that would demand all U.S. agencies come together to produce a national intelligence estimate of the threat of climate change. Such exercises were once reserved for the Soviet nuclear arsenal or the state of the Middle East.

If films and publications can warm up a public issue, global warming is a clear frontrunner. First came Al Gore's documentary "An Inconvenient Truth", then a book with the same title early last year. The U.K. government's Stern Report arrived in September, the Fourth Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came in February 2007, and its latest report on April 6.

The film and the reports are unequivocal in their message that a warming-induced apocalypse is well on the way and that humans are responsible for as much as 90 per cent of the observed warming of 0.6 degree Celsius over 150 years. The release of carbon dioxide by the burning of coal and oil for power generation, transportation, and other purposes, and of methane from paddy fields, large water storages, and enteric fermentation of cattle, have been identified as the main contributing factors. If business goes on as usual then global temperatures may rise by 3 to 5 degrees this century. This will result in the sea-level rise inundating large coastal tracts, erratic precipitation, water stress, poor crop yields, and a rise in the incidence of vector-borne diseases such as malaria.

If the anticipated consequences are so dire, then one should expect those responsible for the damage caused (read developed countries) to act with appropriate urgency and seriousness of purpose to atone for it. In fact, they should have done so since June 1992 when the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was adopted at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The adjunct to the Convention, the Kyoto Protocol, was hammered out in December 1997, setting individual targets for these countries to reduce yearly emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) to a minimum of 5 per cent below their 1990 levels in the first commitment period, 2008-2012. Thirty-five industrialised countries and the members of the European Union (EU) were thus covered by mandatory cuts. Developing countries such as China, India, and Brazil were exempted, though they bore a "common but differentiated responsibility" to take steps to mitigate global warming.

An assessment of the GHG reductions made by those who were given targets to do so makes poor reading and holds out little promise of their being able to live up to expectations. According to the UNFCCC secretariat (October 31, 2006) the overall emissions of the parties with targets dropped by only 3.3 per cent from 1990 to 2004. And even this reduction was rendered possible by a 36.8 per cent decrease in the Economies in Transition (EITs), namely the countries of eastern and central Europe, which were under the socialist fold earlier. East Germany (the German Democratic Republic), after its reunification with the Federal Republic of Germany, saw the closure of its carbon dioxide-spewing lignite-fired power stations, enabling the unified Germany to record a massive fall in GHG emissions. But the EITs have seen a reversal of the trend from 2000 to 2004: during this period their emissions went up by 4.1 per cent. The U.K., aided greatly since the 1970s by North Sea gas, saw significant reductions by 1995, a good two years before Kyoto.

The original 15 members of the EU, who have to cut their collective emissions by 8 per cent by 2008-2012, recorded a poor progress of 0.9 per cent by 2004. Despite this, the EU is sanguine about achieving the target for the community as a whole by 2010. This has to be viewed against the backdrop of seven member-states — Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Ireland, Italy, Portugal, and Spain — expressing their inability to meet the targets.

Outside the EU, Canada has made public its inability to meet its stipulated 6 per cent GHG reduction. Canada's emissions have risen by 29 per cent over 1990 levels. It is unwilling to pass up the prospect of its Alberta tar sands yielding oil commercially. The opposition of the biggest emitter of GHGs, the U.S., to become a party to the UNFCCC and Kyoto is well known. Australia, blessed with huge coal reserves that form the backbone of its exports, is undeterred by its forest fires to subscribe to the Convention or the Protocol.

Softening up offensive
Realising that Kyoto will end in a whimper lest the U.S. and the growing economies of China and India are brought on board to accept mandatory cuts, the chief proponents of Kyoto have begun a softening up offensive. Urgency is lent by the fact that evidence of some of the adverse effects of global warming such as longer and hotter summers, shorter autumns, warmer winters, and early arrival of spring is visible in Europe.

First, the G8 club has been inviting Brazil, Russia, India, China, and Mexico to its summit meetings to evolve G8+5 strategies to mitigate global warming. Secondly, delegates from G8+5 and the U.S. Congress met on Capitol Hill in February 2007 to discuss future climate policy. According to New Scientist, they agreed to limit global carbon dioxide emissions to "somewhere between 450 and 550 parts per million compared to the present level of 379 parts per million," in order to frame emission targets "according to historical responsibility and development needs," establish a "carbon market, linking the European emissions trading scheme with others emerging across the globe" and give "a focus on research and development, energy efficiency, and means of adapting to the unavoidable effects of climate change."

The G8 summit scheduled for June will "arrive at a blueprint of the post-Kyoto framework which would serve as the background paper for global negotiations to begin under U.N. auspices in December 2007 and to conclude by 2009."

What is in store for India? What are the options available to it to limit its GHG emissions? Should India emphasise mitigation measures, or adaptation strategies, or both? And most important, how is it to guard the growth of the Indian economy from the adverse impact of GHG reductions — which boils down to less energy generation and consumption? Such questions will confront the expert advisory committee to be set up by the Government of India on global warming. The proposal to set up such a committee was announced by the Finance Minister in his budget speech.

Baseline information on India's GHG emissions was gathered during an exercise undertaken in the mid-1990s to make an inventory of sources of emissions and their volumes, for submission to the Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC. India's predominantly coal-based power industry, its oil-intensive transportation systems, large areas under paddy cultivation, and 440-million cattle population are its principal sources.

The implications of GHG reductions on energy generation and hence on the economy can be gauged from the report of the Integrated Energy Policy Committee released by the Planning Commission in December 2005. The report said: "To deliver a sustained growth of 8 per cent through 2031, India would, in the very least, need to grow its primary energy supply by three to four times and electricity supply by five to seven times of today's consumption."

Currently, coal accounts for over 50 per cent of the country's commercial energy consumption and almost 60 per cent of its electricity generation. Even in the most optimistic scenario of maximising the development of all clean energy sources, coal will account for 42 per cent of the fuel-mix by 2031-32. Under the least optimistic projections, coal will account for 65 per cent. Carbon dioxide emissions will go up from the present one billion tonnes a year to 4.1 or 5.9 billion tonnes, depending on the fuel-mix option that may prevail then.

Cataclysmic volcanic eruptions in Greenland and the British Isles brought on a destructive bout of global warming 55 million years ago, an international study revealed. The eruptions also separated Greenland from Europe by giving birth to the North Atlantic Ocean, said the study .

The world's leading climate change experts will this week outline highly controversial plans to save the world from global warming. Their proposals - which include a major expansion in nuclear power, the use of GM crops to boost biofuel production, and reliance on unproven technologies, including the underground storage of carbon dioxide - will put the UN's climate group on a collision course with a host of environmental groups.

The proposals for saving the planet are outlined in a draft version of 'Mitigation of Climate Change' by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). This is the third part of the panel's 2007 analysis of global warming. Previous reports have focused on the science of climate change and its likely impacts. The third and final report concentrates on measures that can be taken to save the Earth from the worst, most catastrophic effects of rising temperatures triggered by the pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

Crucially the IPCC panel insists that it is 'technically and economically' feasible to stabilise greenhouse emissions - but only if countries are prepared to pay the extra costs of transforming everything from energy supply networks to agriculture to waste. By 2030, the report estimates that the cost of stabilising greenhouse gases at levels that are considered the maximum for avoiding catastrophic climate change would cost between 0.2 and 0.6 per cent of global wealth.

As well as plans for more nuclear power, genetically modified biofuels and carbon capture and storage, the report sets out a vision of the future that is a mixture of existing policies, such as energy efficiency and renewable energy from wind and wave farms, and more futuristic ideas for hydrogen car fleets and 'intelligent' buildings which can control energy use.

On Saturday night Tony Juniper, Executive Director of the environmental pressure group Friends of the Earth, said far more fundamental lifestyle changes were needed than had been considered by the UN group. 'Simply replacing one set of technologies with another set of technologies won't work, especially when there are such big downsides with some of them,' he said. Nuclear reactors are dangerous and land clearance and chemical pesticides and fertilisers used to grow fuel crops can cause huge environmental damage, he added. 'Structural change to the economy, behaviour change and culture change - those have to be elements in a world of decarbonisation,' said Mr. Juniper.

However, other groups criticised the IPCC for not being sufficiently robust in its support for technological fixes to the world's climate problems.

After two gloomy UN reports on global warming. Scientists and governments on Monday begin looking at how to fight climate change with green groups saying the time for bickering is over.

As experts meet in Bangkok to review the latest UN report, a draft of solutions to be issued on Friday after review by more than 100 nations warns that time for inexpensive fixes is running out because of a surge in greenhouse gas emissions.

The survey is the third year by the UN climate panel after one in February saying it was at least 90 per cent certain that mankind was to blame for warming and another on April 6 warning of more hunger, droughts, heatwaves and rising seas. The report estimates that stabilishing greenhouse gas emissions will cost between 0.2 per cent and 3 per cent of world gross domestic product by 2030, depending on the stiffness of curbs on rising emissions of greenhouse gases.

The conclusions broadly back those by former World Bank Chief Economist Nicholas Stern, who estimated last year that costs of acting now to slow warming were about 1 per cent global output, 5-20 per cent if the world delayed action.

More than 1,000 amendments have been proposed to the draft 24-page summary for policy makers. The report lays out solutions such as capturing and burying emissions from coal-fired power plants, a shift to renewable energies such as solar and wind power, more use of nuclear power, more efficient lighting and insulation of buildings.

As if reports of a fast-receding Gangotri glacier and its impact on fertile land in the Ganga basin were not worrying enough, here is one more reason for environmentalists to get alarmed.The Central Empowered Committee (CEC), after an on-the spot inspection, said in its report to the Supreme Court that the entire area was under intense biotic pressure. CEC carried out the inspection after the Army sought permission to widen roads at the border, which passes through the Gangotri National Park, for strategic reasons.

The Committee described the national park as a extremely fragile mountain eco-system and a veritable store house of rare and endangered aromatic and medicinal plants as well as rare wild animals like brown bear and snow leopard. However, there are just three foresters and a forest guard to protect the park spread over 1,553 sq km.

"This is totally inadequate as the park is under intense biotic pressure because of the huge number of pilgrims, including ‘kawarias’ who visit Gangotri and Gaumukh," it said. The massive quantity of filth and garbage which accumulates at the source of the Ganga is ecologically and environmentally disastrous, CEC said.

CEC has recommended that the Uttarakhand government deploy adequate number of officials to protect the Ganga basin area. On the advice of the Wildlife Institute of India, the state government had mulled over a proposal to stop pilgrims at the temple area and to provide water from Gaumukh for rituals at the site instead of letting thousands of people into the fragile alpine region. The government, however, developed cold feet.

Heavy snowfall on February 7 across the United Kingdom caused a £400 million damage to the British economy. Even London city where snowfall is rare, experienced almost three inches of snowfall. Closure of ski resorts from Chacaltaya, Bolivia to French and Swiss Alps, polar bears losing their habitats in Arctic wilderness, deluge in Mumbai, Chennai and in the desert towns of Rajasthan, low winter temperatures in UAE, were all caused by climate change, damaging the basic economics of the world. This being the situation, Indians are amazed at the UPA government’s deafening silence on climate issues.

A major global warming issue that directly concerns more than one billion Indians is the fast receding Himalayan glaciers. This is threatening their agriculture and habitats. Snow cover varies from the Western to the Eastern Himalayas and determines the hydrological regimes of the rivers. In the Western Himalayas, monsoon rainfall component is less as compared to snowmelt component. Therefore, deglaciation has a profound impact on the water resources of the Western Himalayan rivers. However, in the Central and Eastern Himalayas, melting of the seasonal snow cover peaks by the last week of June, whereas monsoon rains between July and mid-September sustain the flows in the rivers. Hence, a time series of snow-cover extent in the Himalayas and discharge patterns are important components for evaluating the future of snow and glacier resources in the Himalayas. Data sets on snowfall distribution, river flows and climate parameters are not available as no monitoring system is in place for collecting such basic information. Basic data on climate variables and stream and river flows are usually collected by the state or local authorities all over the world and made available to universities and researchers for analysis. Unfortunately, this culture was not established in India, because state and Central level organisations dealing with water, climate and environment are headed by the babus of the Indian Administrative Service, a class that is not aware of the importance of time series.

Glaciers in the Himalayas are fast retreating like other ice mountains the world over. A recent study showed that the last three decades of 20^th century have been the hottest period in 1,000 years. The melting of the Gangotri glacier is accelerating, with the glacier retreating at an average rate of 1 km annually. The Khumbu glacier from which Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay set out to conquer Mount Everest more than 50 years ago, has retreated 7 km due to global warming.

The direct effect of greenhouse gas emission and the resultant global warming on glaciers is melting. Moreover, deglaciation has far reaching implications on both our biological and ecological systems. Ice melts for different reasons, and its repercussions are also different, depending on regional and climatic variables. Floods, a rise in sea levels, scarcity of fresh water, threat to fauna and flora are major security implications of deglaciation.

Any negative ecological effect on the Himalayas will have wider impacts on the lives of millions of people in South Asia. If the Himalayan glaciers that feed Asia’s seven greatest rivers – Ganga, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Huang Ho – and ensure year-round water supply to two billion people, vanish because of melting, it will be catastrophic for the entire South and East Asia. It will create fresh water shortage, wipe out glacier feeding rivers and for a while will give rise to floods.

At present, rivers are showing a 3-4 per cent surplus of Water due to a 10 per cent increase in the melting of the glaciers of the Western Himalayas, and a 30 per cent increase in the Eastern Himalayan glaciers. But after 40 years, most of these glaciers will be wiped out and Asia will have water problems.

UK’s Department of International Development (DFID) funded a project in 2002 in which I was one of the participants. The project was called Sagarmatha (Snow and Glacier Aspects of Water Resources Management in the Himalayas) to assess the impact of deglaciation on the seasonal and long term water resources in snow-fed Himalayan rivers. The results were obtained Keeping in mind four climate change scenarios. This information is vital for policy makers in Yojana Bhavan, if they care, as the flows available in rivers are likely to change dramatically over the decades depending on the region.

The study which reveals some major facts about melting mountain majesties and warming glaciers are an eye-opener for us. In the Upper Indus, the study sites show initial increases of 14 per cent and 90 per cent in mean flows over next few decades which will be followed by a decrease in flows by 30 per cent and 90 per cent of baseline in the subsequent decades of a 100-year scenario.

As for the Ganges, the way the river responds near the glaciers in Uttarkashi is different from the way it does downstream in Allahabad. In Uttarkashi, flows peak between 20 per cent and 33 per cent of baseline within the first few decades and then recede to 50 per cent of baseline after 50 years. Near the source of the Brahmaputra, there has been a general decrease in decadal mean flows for all temperature scenarios, as there are few glaciers in the area and flows recede as the permanent snow cover reduces with increasing temperature.

The catchments in the Eastern Himalayas, which benefit from high precipitation of the summer monsoon every year, are more vulnerable to impacts of deglaciation than those in the West, where the monsoon is weaker.

In short, deglaciation in the Himalayas is influenced by regional and global factors. However, the main underlying factor is ever increasing warming on the mountains, chiefly because of excess emission of greenhouse gases and absorbing aerosols (dust and black carbon) which stack up against the southern slopes of the Himalayas, spur an upper tropospheric heating anomaly over the Tibetan Plateau in late springs and early summers, leading to an advancement in the rainy season and subsequently an intensification of the Indian monsoon system. A combination of regional and global factors is causing liquid precipitation at higher elevations which normally used to receive solid precipitation during monsoons. The glaciers have negative mass as accumulation is less than the ablation.

The ongoing melting of ice is only the tip of the iceberg. The need of the hour is to sensitise the states sharing the Himalayas to initiate immediate measures to collect data in all glacierised valleys. Creating research institutes for glacier studies will not help policy planners and researchers without bringing state governments or local bodies in the loop for regularly collecting data on discharge and climate both at micro and macro levels.

The Gangotri glacier receded at the rate of 17.15 metres per year between 1971 and 2004, says a study conducted by the Department of Science and Technology. One more study has estimated that the glacier retreated 12.10 metres during 2004-05, another clear example of global warming and climate change in the region.

Regular monitoring of several glaciers during the past 100 years in major basins of the Himalayas from Shyok in the West to Changme Khangpu (Tista) in the East has revealed that a majority of the glaciers in the Himalayan region are passing through a phase of recession.

The DST started an all-India coordinated programme on Himalayan glaciers in 1988 to study glaciers of the western and central Himalayas, Gangotri and its tributary glaciers and Chhota Sigri glaciers in the central Himalayas.

While the glacier recession rate varies from glacier to glacier, preliminary analysis suggests that the recession rate was of the order of about 10 to 15 metres per year for some glaciers. Recession has also been observed in the case of the Pindari glacier, which went back by 9.41 metres during 1958-2001.

While recession may cause a marginal rise in the discharge of Himalayan rivers due to enhanced melting because of global warming, in the long term it spells disaster, particularly for areas dependent on perennial rivers like the Ganga.

In fact, a recently-released WWF report, "World’s top 10 rivers at risk", also points out that the world’s top 10 rivers, including the Ganga and the Indus, are dying. Citing over-extraction of water for agriculture, pollution and climate change as the main reasons, the report says that these top 10 rivers are in the clear danger zone. A recent report by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also warns that India should gear up to face challenges of rising sea level, melting glaciers, vanishing mangroves and more severe droughts and floods.

All this will be caused by a rise in global temperature between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius due to increasing human-induced concentration of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Temperatures rose about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the 20th century. In India, observations have revealed that during the past 100 years, mean temperatures increased by 0.5 Celsius.

Global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide have increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750 and far exceed pre-industrial values determined from ice cores spanning many thousands of years.

A Texas-sized piece of the Antarctic ice sheet is thinning, possibly due to global warming, and could cause the world's oceans to rise significantly, polar ice experts said on Wednesday.

They said "surprisingly rapid changes" were occurring in Antarctica's Amundsen Sea Embayment, which faces the southern Pacific Ocean, but that more study was needed to know how fast it was melting and how much it could cause the sea level to rise.

The warning came in a joint statement issued at the end of a conference of US and European polar ice experts at the University of Texas in Austin. The scientists blamed the melting ice on changing winds around Antarctica that they said were causing warmer waters to flow beneath ice shelves.

The wind change, they said, appeared to be the result of several factors, including global warming, ozone depletion in the atmosphere and natural variability. The thinning in the 3.2-km-thick ice shelf is being observed mostly from satellites, but it is not known how much ice has been lost because data is difficult to obtain on the remote ice shelves.

Study is focussing on the Amundsen Sea Embayment because it has been melting quickly and holds enough water to raise world sea levels six meters, or close to 20 feet, the scientists said.

"The place where the biggest change is occurring is the Amundsen Sea Embayment," said Donald Blankenship of the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics.

Global warming may melt 80 per cent of Himalayan glacial cover and leave India thirsting for freshwater by 2030, according to a draft UN climate panel report slated for release on Friday.

The draft – which is yet to be approved – from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) describes regional impacts of rising temperatures, widely blamed on emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels.

"If current warming rates are maintained, Himalayan glaciers could decay at very rapid rates, shrinking from the present 500,000 sq km to 100,000 sq km by the 2030s," the draft’s technical summary said.

The annual per capita availability of freshwater in India is expected to drop from around 1,900 cubic metres to 1,000 cubic metres by 2025 due to population growth and climate change, according to the draft.

Scientists and officials from more than 100 countries will meet in Brussels from tomorrow to review and approve a 21-page summary amid disputes on some findings, including how far the rising temperatures may contribute to spreading disease.

The chairman of the IPCC, India’s Rajendra Pachauri, declined comment on the contents of the report today. "It’s still in a draft stage. This is not an authorised release," Pachauri told The Telegraph on phone from Europe.

But a senior Indian scientist who has been tracking the fate of Himalayan glaciers for several year said some "dramatic impacts" within the next 20 or 30 year would be consistent with trends already visible in the Himalayas.

"Some glaciers are clearly at an extremely critical juncture," said Anil Kulkarni, coordinator with the snow and
glacier project at the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad. "Even a half-a-degree
increase in average temperature could lead to a situation in which there’s no formation of fresh ice on some glaciers."

The loss of glaciers will change water flow patterns in streams and rivers – an initial increase as more snow melts, followed by a steady decrease within a few decades as not enough snow is retained, Kulkarni said. "This can threaten our water security."

His studies have already shown a rise in winter-time stream water flow in the Baspa basin in Kinnaur district of Himachal Pradesh. "The changes in stream runoff patterns are substantial," Kulkarni said.

The IPCC draft also predicts a fall in crop yields in parts of Asia.

An Indian scientist at the Brussels meeting told The Telegraph that studies indicate that with progressive warming grain yields are likely to decline, although initially there may be a mixed signal – increase in some areas and decrease in others.

According to the IPCC draft, disruptions from climate change are likely to be felt hardest in poor nations such as in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia where millions could go hungry because of damage to farming and water supplies.

But some countries may benefit from global warming, according to the draft report which says that, as temperatures rise, crops might grow better in nations far from the tropics such as Canada, Russia or New Zealand.

Don't dismiss it as one of the favourite whines of environmental campaigners. The result of the melting of most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2030, as predicted by the UN panel on climate change, could be truly catastrophic for India and its neighbours.

Rivers 'mothered' by the Himalayan glaciers are the lifeline of hundreds of millions of people in the Indian subcontinent and China, most of whom live far from the Himalayas. As much as 70 per cent of the world's fresh water is frozen in glaciers. The Himalayan glaciers are the largest store of water outside the polar ice caps, and feed seven great Asian rivers — Ganga, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Salween, Yangtze and Huang Ho (Yellow River). The glaciers are believed to be retreating at a rate of about 10-15 metres a year.

The first danger of the meltdown could be widespread flooding. In a few decades, it could be followed by irreversible droughts, threatening the livelihood of millions of people. This would not only mean unprecedented food shortages but also a massive water crisis. The Gangetic basin alone is home to more than 500 million people. Nearly 70 per cent of the discharge into the Ganga is from rivers in Nepal, which means that if the Himalayan glaciers dry up so will the Ganga downstream in India.

In some rivers, the flow may go down by as much as 90 per cent, according to glaciologist Syed Iqbal Hosnain, who has conducted extensive studies on Himalayan glaciers. Studies have predicted that in the Ganga, the loss of glacier melt water would reduce July-September flows by two thirds, causing water shortages for 37 per cent of India’s irrigated land.

As water flows from glaciers dry up, the energy potential of hydroelectric power will decrease, causing problems for industry, while reduced irrigation means lower crop production.

In a report in 2005, the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) warned that "in the long term, the glaciers could disappear altogether, causing several rivers to shrink and threatening the survival of those who depend on them". What was forecast to happen "in the long term" two years ago, appears imminent now.

All is not lost, though. Experts say immediate action against climate change could slow the rate of melting.

The Himalayan glaciers have been found to be in a state of general retreat since 1850. But the retreat has been alarming since the 1970s. The Himalayan region, called the 'Water Tower of Asia', has a glacier coverage of 33,000 sq km. It provides around 8.6

million cubic metres of water annually. FResearchers have estimated that about 17 per cent of the Himalayas and 37 per cent of Karakorum is currently under permanent ice cover. The main glaciers of this region are Siachen (72 km); Gangotri (26 km); Zemu (26 km); Milam (19 km) and Kedarnath (14.5 km).

Global warming may already be having an effect on the Arctic, says NASA in a recent study. The US space agency found that in 2005, the Arctic replaced only a little of the thick sea ice it loses and usually replenishes annually.

NASA scientists used satellite images to analyse six annual cycles of Arctic sea ice from 2000 to 2006.

Sea ice is essential to maintaining and stabilising the Arctic’s ice cover during its warmer summer months. But "recent studies indicate Arctic perennial ice is declining seven to 10 per cent each decade," said Ron Kwok from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.

"Our study gives the first reliable estimates of how perennial ice replenishment varies each year at the end of the summer," he said yesterday. "The amount of first year ice that survives the summer directly influences how thick the ice cover will be at the start of the next melt season."

The team observed that only 4 per cent, which means about 2.5 million square km of thin ice survived the 2005 summer melt to replenish the perennial cover.

This was the weakest ice cover since 2000, and so here was 14 per cent less permanent ice cover in January 2006 that in the corresponding period the year before.

"The winters and summers before fall 2005 were unusually warm," Kwok said. "The low replenishment seen in 2005 is potentially a cumulative effect of these trends."

As the world warms inexorably, glaciers in the Himalayas are melting away, putting at risk freshwater supplies for millions of people in Asia.

The 33,000 sq km of glaciers amidst some of the world's highest mountains form the largest concentration of glaciers outside the polar ice caps. These glaciers, which release an estimated 8.6 million cubic metres of water annually, have nourished seven great rivers of Asia — Ganga, Indus, Brahmaputra, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze, and Huang Ho. Ancient civilisations sprang up and thrived along the shores of these rivers.

But now the pace of global warming is threatening the very existence of the Himalayan glaciers. Since the mid-1970s, the average air temperature measured at 49 stations of the Himalayan region rose by one degree Celsius, with high elevation sites warming the most, noted a report compiled in 2005 by WWF, the global conservancy organisation. "This is twice as fast as the 0.6 degrees Celsius average warming for the mid-latitudinal northern hemisphere over the same period and illustrates the high sensitivity of mountain regions to climate change," added the report.

The Himalayan glaciers could disappear in the coming decades and the once perennial rivers turn into seasonal ones, noted the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the final draft of its report on the impact, adaptation and vulnerability produced by global warming.

"In the course of the century, water supplies stored in glaciers and snow cover are projected to decline, reducing water availability in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges, where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives," according to a summary of the report that the IPCC released on April 6. Waters from the melting glaciers would also contribute to rising sea levels, which the IPCC warns would devastate many coastal areas and affect millions of people around the world by 2080.

Longer ablation periods
Himalayan glaciers are very vulnerable to climate change, says Syed Iqbal Hasnain, a leading glaciologist who is currently with the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi. It is not just that higher temperatures lead to more ice turning to water. The "ablation period" when the glaciers melt in summer has lengthened. Earlier, by October-November it would start snowing. In recent years, it is still often quite warm during those months and the snows set in only later in winter, he remarked.

The late snows produce another problem. The snowflakes need several months to turn into hard ice crystals. Without the time needed for such transformation, more of the glacier is liable to melt when summer comes, Dr. Hasnain told this correspondent.

The south-west monsoon that brings torrents of rain to the plains of India deposits snow on the upper reaches of mountains in central and eastern Himalayas. But climatic changes have led to rain, rather snow, falling even at higher elevations during the monsoon and this could accelerate the melting of glaciers, he added.

In the face of these threats, the Himalayan glaciers are receding alarmingly. Several studies have indicated that the rate at which these glaciers are retreating has accelerated in recent decades. The Gangotri glacier, whose melted waters feed the river Ganga, has, for instance, been receding since 1780 but its rate of retreat has tripled in the last three decades.

Anil Kulkarni of the Indian Space Research Organisation's Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad and fellow researchers used satellite pictures to study 466 glaciers in the Chenab, Parbati, and Baspa basins. These glaciers had covered 2,077 sq. km in 1962. But by 2001-2004, the area occupied by these glaciers had shrunk by 21 per cent, reported the scientists in a paper published earlier this year. As the glaciers retreated, they also became more fragmented and therefore more vulnerable to the affects of global warming.

French and Indian scientists have been studying glaciers in the Spiti-Lahaul region of Himachal Pradesh. In a paper published recently, the scientists found that the glaciers, which occupied some 900-odd sq. km., had experienced "significant thinning at low elevations" between the fall of 1999 and November 2004. Worse still, the rate of ice loss in the glaciers during that time was about double the average for the Himalayas between 1977 and 1999. This indicated "an increase in the pace of glacier wastage," observed the scientists in their paper. However, in an email, Etienne Berthier, the first author of the paper, noted that the survey period had been short and further monitoring was required to assess a long-term trend.

A modelling exercise carried out by the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology in Britain found that as the Himalayan glaciers melted in the face of global warming, there would initially be an increase in river discharges, which could produce widespread flooding, and then the river flows would decline. The model studies indicated that flows in rivers originating in the western

Himalayas could peak in 2050 and in 2070 for rivers originating in eastern Himalayas, according to Rajesh Kumar of the Birla Institute of Technology extension centre in Jaipur, who was involved in the study.

"Glacier melt in the Himalayas is projected to increase flooding, rock avalanches from destabilised slopes and affect water resources within the next two to three
decades," according to the latest IPCC summary report. This would be followed by decreased river flows as the glaciers receded, it added.

Scientists have estimated that melting snow and glaciers provides up to 80 per cent of the dry season flows of the Indus, Ganga, and Brahmaputra rivers in the lowlands. As these river flows fall, agriculture, water supplies on which millions of people depend, and power generation will be badly affected.

Millions of people around the world, including in fast-growing Asian cities such as Shanghai and Mumbai, are likely to be affected by rising sea levels and stronger storm surges caused by global warming, according to a study that has just been released.

The study found that over 630 million people, accounting for a tenth of the world's population, live within 10 metres above the current sea level. The research was carried out by Gordon McGranahan of the International Institute for Environment and Development, a London-based non-governmental policy research body, Deborah Balk at the City University of New York, and Bridget Anderson of Columbia University in New York.

In order to identify places that would be affected by climate change-induced rises in sea level and bigger storm surges, the researchers combined terrain height information derived from radar observations during a Space Shuttle mission in February 2000 with databases giving the global spatial distribution of population and urban areas. This made it possible to identify vulnerable human settlements and estimate the number of people in the "low elevation coastal zone (LECZ)," which the scientists defined as coastal areas within an elevation of 10 metres.

The study, to be published in April in the journal Environment and Urbanization, found that Asia, with its high population densities and countries having large populations, was particularly at risk from increases in sea level. Almost three-quarters of the people currently living in the low elevation coastal zone are Asian. China with an estimated 144 million people, India with more than 63 million, and Bangladesh with more than 62 million lead the ranking of countries with the largest populations in the zone.

About 13 per cent of urban dwellers are in the zone compared to 10 per cent of the global population. Once again, Asia accounts for two-thirds of the 360 million city residents in the zone. Globally, 65 per cent of the cities with populations of over 5 million are at least partially in the zone and in Asia that proportion rises to 70 per cent. "The world average share of the population of cities over 5 million in the zone is a very high 21 per cent, but this average is highly influenced by the coastal location of large Asian cities, in which 32 per cent of the population of cities over 5 million resides in the LECZ," according to the journal paper. The study estimates that three per cent of India's land area would fall in the vulnerable zone. Among the cities, the study suggests that, apart from Mumbai, parts of Kolkata and Chennai too could be affected.

The study also found that a higher proportion of people in the world's poorest countries were living in the vulnerable zone compared to the number in the prosperous nations.

Double disadvantage
"From an environmental perspective, there is a double disadvantage to excessive [and potentially rapid] coastal settlement," the scientists pointed out in the paper. "First, uncontrolled coastal development is likely to damage sensitive and important ecosystems and other resources. Second, coastal settlement, particularly in the lowlands, is likely to expose residents to seaward hazards such as sea-level rise and tropical storms, both of which are likely to become more serious with climate change. Unfortunately, such environmental considerations do not have the influence on settlement patterns that they deserve."

"It is too late to rely solely on a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions to mitigate climate, although this is clearly an imperative," said Dr. McGranahan in a press statement. "Migration away from the zone at risk will be necessary but costly and hard to implement, so coastal settlements will also need to be modified to protect residents."

In the paper, Dr. McGranahan and fellow researchers noted that "measures to support previously disfavoured inland urban settlements, away from the large cities on the coast, could not only reduce risks from climate change but also support a more balanced and equitable pattern of urban development."

"In cities like Mumbai, locally-driven efforts will be needed to evaluate and respond to the changing risks," Dr. McGranahan told this correspondent in an email. One of the key ingredients of successful adaptation will be efficient and equitable negotiation between local authorities and the groups of, often low-income, residents living in vulnerable locations, he added.

However, as the paper itself points out, sea-level rise was not expected to reach anything like 10 metres in the foreseeable future. The summary report issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in February had estimated the sea level rise that was likely by the end of this century was 0.59 metres. But other experts have indicated that sea level rises of over one metre could be expected by the end of the century for strong global warming scenarios.

The 10-metre level was chosen because adequate estimates could not be prepared for lower elevations, explains Dr. McGranahan. Besides, storm surges and tides would increase any flooding that occurred, many river delta areas were subject to subsidence and saline intrusions could impact areas further inland. In addition, disruptions to the local economy and related social problems would affect people living in areas where a significant share of the population faced increased flooding.

One in 10 people in the world, mostly in Asia, live in coastal areas at risk from rising seas and more powerful storms that may be caused by global warming, an international study showed on Wednesday.

The researchers urged governments to make billion-dollar policy shifts to encourage more settlements inland rather than in coastal regions from China to Florida that may suffer ever more storm surges and erosion.

A zone less than 10 metres (33 ft) above sea level "contains some 2 percent of the world's land and 10 percent of its population," according to the study to be published in the April edition of the journal Environment and Urbanization.

"Settlements in coastal lowlands are especially vulnerable to risks resulting from climate change, yet these lowlands are densely settled and growing rapidly," the researchers in the United States and Britain said in the article.

Based on new computer population models and NASA satellite data, it estimated that 634 million people lived in the coastal zone in 2000, including 360 million in towns and cities.

More than 75 percent were in Asia. Globalisation is promoting a shift towards coasts in countries including China and India by fostering a world trade largely dependent on shipping.

Wednesday's report said even people living up to 10 metres above sea level could be vulnerable to cyclones, subsidence, erosion of river deltas or intrusion of salty sea water onto cropland. "If you are in that zone you need to take the issues of sea level rise seriously," said Gordon McGranahan, lead author at the London-based International Institute for the Environment and Development.

Ranked by population, China is most at risk with 143 million people living by the coast, followed by India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Japan, Egypt and the United States.

By another measure, small island states will be hardest hit. More than 90 percent of the Maldives, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, the Cayman Islands and the Turk and Caicos Islands are less than 10 metres above sea level. "Relatively small shifts in settlement location, out of a coastal plain onto more elevated ground, can make a major difference," according to the authors, also from the City University of New York and Columbia University.

The dismal future predicted by some, in which wars will be fought over water, seems to be inching closer to the present. Even if human beings do not pick up guns to kill each other for the precious fluid, the nature itself might protest against its indiscriminate use in such a violent manner that lives of millions may be under threat. That is the sum total of the predictions being made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its fourth assessment report. On the one hand, the per capita water availability might drop to barely half of the current levels within 18 years. And, on the other, climate change might also hit India hard. Many coastal areas of the country, including the densely populated Mumbai, might be inundated due to rising sea levels. While the coastline may face up to 20 per cent higher risk of cyclonic storms, the cereal production elsewhere might fall by as much as 30 per cent by the year 2050. The overall impact on the country would be nothing less than catastrophic.

While the climate change is being precipitated because of the collective follies of the entire human race, the depleting water table all over the country is entirely the handiwork of people like us. We draw on ground water maniacally, little realising that deep aquifers take centuries to replenish. Just because water comes fairly cheap, it is wasted without any guilt pangs. Whether it is because of ignorance, or because of political sparring, precious river water is allowed to go unutilised to the sea. The schemes to harvest rainwater are never implemented fully.

From the Himalayas to the Amazon, eleven of the world's greatest natural wonders face destruction if the climate continues to warm up at the current rate, warns World Wide Fund for Nature in its latest release on the devastating impacts of global warming and the damage it can cause to the world's natural wonders.

And two of the eleven wonders -- the Himalayas and Sunderbans in the Indian subcontinent -- too figure on the list.

The list released by WWF also details the work being undertaken in each of the regions to reduce the damaging impacts of climate change.

Himalayas under threat
According to WWF, the Himalayas -- which contribute to the water supply of millions of people, feeding seven of Asia's great rivers -- are threatened due to melting glaciers that are receding at an average of 10 to 15 metres per year while the Sunderbans, on the other hand, face threats from the increase in sea levels. The Sunderbans are the only mangrove tiger habitat and support the largest tiger population in the world.

"We continue to put pressure on the government to make meaningful cuts in heat-trapping greenhouse gas emissions. We are also working on adaptation strategies to offer protection to some of the world's natural wonders as well as the livelihoods of the people who live there,'' says Ravi Singh, Secretary-General and Chief Executive Officer of WWF-India.

WWF, he adds, is actively working in both the Himalayas and the Sunderbans with local communities, policy makers and other stakeholders to study and assess the impact of climate change in the region through climate witness and impact assessment programmes.

Regional initiative to study climate change
"We are also looking at a regional initiative along with China and Nepal to study the impact of climate change on a larger scale,'' says Mr. Singh.

Global worming may seriously affect the future of India’s most important river, the Ganga, by the end of this century. This was the dire warning issued by the head of the Indian science Congress, Prof. Harsh Gupta , during a UN-sponsored seminar organized by the Madhya Pradesh Science and Technology Council at Hoshangabad.

Mr. Gupta later told mediapersons in the state capital that the prospect of the Ganga drying up cannot be ignored anymore. Especially if worldwide temperatures rise five degrees Celsius, as widely predicted by 2100. The blame, he said, could be put squarely at the door of runaway industrialisation, urbanization, population growth and inhuman disregard for environmental norms. Slow but steady glacial meltdown in the Himalayas would bring about frequent flash floods in the terrain around the Ganga and its tributaries, And the moment the meltdown was complete, the river may well become history.

Mr. Gupta said predications that world temperatures would rise bye half-a-degree Celsius in the 20^th century had turned out to be correct. Which is why there is every likehood that the second forecast would also prove accurate in case emergency measures to check global warming were not taken at the earliest. A former Director of the National Geographic Research Institute, who was involved in setting up the Indian weather station in the Antarctica in the eighties, Mr. Gupta said the surest piece of evidence that environmental disaster was staring mother earth in the face were the changes wrought in the glacier nicknamed "South Gangori" during their formative stay in the continent. When they visited the station again in 2004, he was disappointed to see that the same glacier had shrunk by as much as 20 metres.

Europe’s big polluters pumped more climate changing gases into the atmosphere in 2006 than during the previous year, according to new figures that show the EU’s flagship carbon trading system failing to deliver curbs.

Critics said the data released on Monday underlined the gap between the rhetoric of European leaders, who have promised to cut CO₂ emissions by one-fifth by 2020, and the reality of delivering reductions.

Monday’s figures relate to the carbon produced in 22 nations by big industrial user that accounted for almost 93 per cent of emissions reported in 2005. The European Commission said that carbon output from these sources rose between 1-1.5 per cent in 2006 over the previous year, the equivalent of at least 18m tons.

The statistics suggest that the EU is still allocating too many carbon permits to enable the system to work properly.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh wants the Ministry of Urban Development to identify government-sponsored public transport projects which could earn carbon credits for the country.

As a first step, his office has identified the Mass Bus Rapid Transport projects in Bhopal and Indore which could earn carbon credits under the Clean Development Mechanism. (Clean Development Mechanism is an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol that allows developed countries