Forget the fable of Chicken Little — the sky is indeed falling. The upper zone of Earth’s atmosphere is cooling and shrinking, an international team of scientists said today. The researchers, including an atmospheric physicist from India, said that while carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are warming the surface of Earth, they are simultaneously cooling its upper atmosphere.

"The evidence is very clear. It’s based on direct observations of temperatures in the atmosphere," said Gufran Beig, a team member and deputy director at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) in Pune. "The upper atmosphere is cooling fast, much faster than the surface of the Earth is warming," he said. In a report in the US journal Science today, Beig and his colleagues said temperatures have dropped by 2 to 3 degrees Celsius per decade in the region of the atmosphere 50 km to 100 km above Earth’s surface.

The cooling of the upper atmosphere may change the life spans of satellites with orbits within 500 km and even disrupt long distance short wave radio communication, Beig said. Geostationary satellites, which are used in communication and relaying television signals and parked much higher — about 36,000 km — will remain unaffected. "When you cool something, it shrinks. The upper region of the atmosphere is contracting. The upper level of the atmosphere has fallen by 8 to 10 kilometres over the past three decades," Beig said. Earlier studies have shown that temperatures in the upper atmosphere over India have dropped by about 10 degrees over the past 30 years.

The temperatures in the region higher than 100 km are falling even faster.

Carbon dioxide and other so-called greenhouse gases such as methane and an oxide of nitrogen are responsible for global warming. These gases are released during the burning of fossil fuels and other human activity. While carbon dioxide near Earth’s surface absorbs solar radiation and traps heat from the sun, higher up it behaves differently. It interacts with solar radiation and emits heat, leading to cooling.

"Our findings show human activities on Earth’s surface can have significant changes on even the uppermost regions of the atmosphere," Jan Lastovicka, a scientist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics in Prague, Czech Republic, told The Telegraph.

Over the past three decades, the temperature on Earth’s surface has increased by about 0.2 to 0.4 degrees Celsius, but the decrease in the upper atmosphere has ranged from 5 to 10 degrees Celsius, the scientists said. The cooling region of the atmosphere is called the ionosphere and is used in long-distance radio communication.

For all the enthusiasm about alternatives to coal and oil, the challenge of limiting emissions of carbon dioxide, which traps heat, will be immense in a world likely to add 2.5 billion people by mid-century, a host of experts say. Moreover, most of those people will live in countries like China and India, which are just beginning to enjoy an electrified, air-conditioned mobile society.

The challenge is all the more daunting because research into energy technologies by both government and industry has not been rising, but rather falling.

In the United States, annual federal spending for all energy research and development – not just the research aimed at climate-friendly technologies is less than half what it was a quarter-century ago. It has sunk to $3 billion a year in the current budget from an inflation adjusted peak of $7.7 billion in 1979, according to several different studies.

Britain, for one, has sounded a loud alarm about the need for prompt action on the climate issue, including more research. (A recent report commissioned by the British government calls for spending to be doubled worldwide on research into low-carbon technologies; without it, the report says, coastal flooding and a shortage of drinking water could turn 200 million people into refugees).

President Bush has sought an increase to $4.2 billion for 2007, but that would still be a small fraction of what most climate and energy experts say would be needed.

Federal spending on medical research, by contrast, has nearly quadrupled, to $28 billion annually, since 1979. military research has increased 260 percent, and at more than $75 billion a year is 20 times the amount spent on energy research.

Internationally, government energy research trends are little different from those in the United States. Japan is the only economic power that increased research spending in recent decades, with growth focused on efficiency and solar technology, according to the International Energy Agency.

In the private sector, studies show that energy companies have a long tradition of eschewing long-term technology quests because of the lack of short term payoffs.

Still, more than four dozen scientists, economists, engineers and entrepreneurs interviewed by The New York Times said that unless the search for abundant non-polluting energy sources and systems became far more aggressive, the world would probably face dangerous warming and international strife as nations with growing energy demands compete for increasingly inadequate resources.

Most of these experts also say existing energy alternatives and improvements in energy efficiency are simply not enough.

"We cannot come close to stabilizing temperatures" unless humans, by the end of the century, stop adding more CO2 to the atmosphere than it can absorb, said W.David Montgomery of Charles River Associates, a consulting group, "and that will be an economic impossibility without a major R.&D. investment."

A sustained push is needed not just to refine, test and deploy known low-carbon technologies, but also to find "energy technologies that don’t have a name yet," said James A. Edmonds, a chief scientist at the Joint Global Change Research Institute of the University of Maryland and the Energy Department.

At the same time, many energy experts and economists agree on another daunting point: To make any resulting "alternative" energy options the new norm will require attaching a significant cost to the carbon emissions from coal, oil and gas.

"A price incentive stirs people to look at a thousand different things," said Henry D. Jacoby, a climate and energy expert at the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology.

For now, a carbon cap or tax is opposed by President Bush, most American lawmakers and many industries. And there are scant signs of consensus on a long-term successor to the Kyoto Protocol, the first treaty obligating participating industrial countries to cut warming emissions. (The United States has not ratified the pact).

The next round of talks on Kyoto and an underlying voluntary treaty will take place this month in Nairobi, Kenya.

Environmental campaigners, focused on promptly establishing binding limits on emissions of heat-trapping gases, have tended to play down the need for big investments seeking energy break throughs. At the end of "An Inconvenient Truth," former Vice President AI Gore’s documentary film on climate change, he concluded: "We already know everything we need to know to effectively address this problem."

While applauding Mr. Gore’s enthusiasm, many energy experts said this stance was counterproductive because there was no way, given global growth in energy demand, that existing technology could avert a doubling or more of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide in this century.

Mr. Gore has since adjusted his stance, saying existing technology is sufficient to start on the path to a stable climate.

Other researchers say the chances of success are so low, unless something breaks the societal impasse, that any technology quest should also include work on increasing the resilience to climate extreme – through actions like developing more drought-tolerant crops as well as last-minute climate fixes, like testing ways to block some incoming sunlight to counter warming.

Without big reductions in emissions, the midrange projections of most scenarios envision a rise of 4 degrees or so in this century, four times the warming in the last 100 years.

That could, among other effects, produce a disruptive mix of intensified flooding and withering droughts in the world’s prime agricultural regions.

Sir Nicholas Stern, the chief of Britain’s economic service and author of the new government report on climate options, has summarized the cumulative nature of the threat succinctly: "The sting is in the tail."

Ultimately, a big increase in government spending on basic energy research will happen only if scientists can persuade the public and politicians that it is an essential hedge against potential calamity.

That may be the biggest hurdle of all, given the unfamiliar nature of the slowly building problem – the antithesis of epochal events like Pearl Harbor, Sputnik and 9/11 that triggered sweeping enterprises.

Traditional sceptics on global warming are becoming believers. Al Gore’s film "An Inconvenient Truth" has convinced many waverers. The Stern report in Britain has just called for urgent action to check global warming.

So, the current UN conference on climate change is putting unprecedented pressure on the US to join the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Developing countries like India and China, which earlier refused to cap emissions on the ground that they were just starting up the development path, are under pressure to accept commitments too. I have always been a qualified sceptic.

Global warming is a plausible hypothesis. But it is not a proved scientific fact, as claimed by greens. The history of science is replete with plausible hypothesis that proved to be wrong. Yes, the globe has warmed up in the last 30 years. But the world cooled down in the preceding 30 years (1945-75).

Newsweek ran a cover story in 1975 declaring that the next ice age was coming. There can be no more salient warning of how dangerous it is to project 30-year trends forward for another 100 years. Climatologists today declare that there will be droughts and agricultural calamities if the world warms up.

Funnily enough, exactly the same warnings were issued in the 1970s about global cooling. Can it really be true that we will have an agricultural disaster whether the world cools or warms up? Or are worst-case scenarios parading as immutable truths? We are told that the majority of climate scientists are of the opinion that global warming will reach catastrophic proportions by 2100. But science is not, and never has been, about collecting the opinion of scientists. That would be an opinion poll, not science.

Scientific method is very clear about the procedure to move from hypothesis to theory or fact. An experiment has to be devised which will conclusively prove or disprove the hypothesis. Only after passing such a test can a hypothesis rise to the status of a theory. And if the theory remains intact against rival theories for long enough, it will become a scientific law (like Newton’s Laws of Motion).

However, this standard scientific methodology is not being followed in the case of global warming. Sundry computer projections on warming are being publicised by climatologists as scientific facts. Layfolk may think that computer modelling is high-tech proof. In fact computer modelling is rubbish-in and rubbish-out: by changing a model’s specifications you can produce almost any result you want.

Wassily Leontief, who won the Nobel Prize for statistical modelling, gave an immortal description of the process. "We move from more or less plausible but really arbitrary assumptions, to elegantly demonstrated but irrelevant conclusions." Neither Al Gore nor any green wants to follow standard scientific method to move from hypothesis to proof. Why? Because if we tested various global warming models for a century to see whether they worked, the predicted disaster would already have happened, or not happened.

So, many experts want us to take a decision without concrete proof. If we wait decades for conclusive proof, they say, it may be too late to take preventive action. This is altogether a more respectable argument than the claim that global warming is a scientific fact. There is a case for viewing emission curbs as an insurance premium worth paying just in case the disaster hypothesis, though unproven, is correct. Rational people buy insurance against events that may never happen. Homeowners in Delhi buy earthquake insurance, although no major earthquake may ever hit the city.

Is the Kyoto insurance premium commensurate with the insurance benefits promised? Only if it is small (as in the Delhi earthquake example). Experts now estimate that checking emissions to safe levels will cost around 1% of GDP. That may not sound excessive. However, it translates into a whopping $500 billion a year at today’s global GDP level.

I would strongly oppose India paying anything like 1% of its GDP as a premium, given the many uncertainties about global warming. The US refuses to join Kyoto, saying it has to pay an unacceptably high premium. It also insists that it will not join until India and China, whose emissions are small but rising fast, make some commitments.

Our political systems and global politics are largely unequipped for the real challenges of today’s world. Global economic growth and rising populations are putting unprecedented stresses on the physical environment, and these stresses in turn are causing unprecedented challenges for our societies. Yet politicians are largely ignorant of these trends. Governments are not organised to meet them. And crises that are fundamentally ecological in nature are managed by outdated strategies of war and diplomacy.

Consider, for example, the situation in Darfur, Sudan. This horrible conflict is being addressed through threats of military force, sanctions, and generally the language of war and peacekeeping. Yet the undoubted origin of the conflict is the region’s extreme poverty, which was made disastrously worse in the 1980s by a drought that has essentially lasted until today. It appears that long-term climate change is leading to lower rainfall not only in Sudan, but also in much of Africa just south of the Sahara Desert — an area where life depends on the rains, and where drought means death.

Darfur has been caught in a drought-induced death trap, but nobody has seen fit to approach the Darfur crisis from the perspective of long-term development rather than the perspective of war. Darfur needs a water strategy more than a military strategy. Its seven million people cannot survive without a new approach that gives them a chance to grow crops and water their animals. Yet all of the talk at the United Nations is about sanctions and armies, with no path to peace in sight.

Water stress is becoming a major obstacle to economic development in many parts of the world. The water crisis in Gaza is a cause of disease and suffering among Palestinians, and is a major source of underlying tensions between Palestine and Israel. Yet again, billions of dollars are spent on bombing and destruction in the region, while virtually nothing is done about the growing water crisis.

China and India, too, will face growing water crises in the coming years, with potentially horrendous consequences. The economic takeoff of these two giants started 40 years ago with the introduction of higher agricultural output and an end to famines. Yet part of that increased agricultural output resulted from millions of wells that were sunk to tap underground water supplies for irrigation. Now the water table is falling at a dangerous pace, as the underground water is being pumped much faster than the rains are recharging it.

Moreover, aside from rainfall patterns, climate change is upsetting the flow of rivers, as glaciers, which provide a huge amount of water for irrigation and household use are rapidly receding due to global warming. Snow pack in the mountains is melting earlier in the season, so that river water is less available during summer growing seasons. For all of these reasons, India and China are experiencing serious water crises that are likely to intensify in the future.

The US faces risks as well. Midwestern and southwestern states have been in a prolonged drought that might well be the result of long-term warming, and the farm states rely heavily on water from a huge underground reservoir that is being depleted by over-pumping.

Just as pressures on oil and gas supplies have driven up energy prices, environmental stresses may now push up food and water prices in many parts of the world. Given the heat waves, droughts, and other climate stresses across the US, Europe, Australia, and elsewhere this year, wheat prices are now shooting up to their highest levels in decades. Thus, environmental pressures are now hitting the bottom line — affecting incomes and livelihoods around the world.

With rising populations, economic growth, and climate change, we will face intensifying droughts, hurricanes and typhoons, powerful El Niño’s, water stress, heat waves, species extinctions, and more. The "soft" issues of environment and climate will become the hard and strategic issues of the twenty-first century.

Yet there is almost no recognition of this basic truth in our governments or our global politics. People who speak about hunger and environmental crises are viewed as muddle-headed "moralists," as opposed to the hard-headed "realists" who deal with war and peace. This is nonsense. The so-called realists just don’t understand the sources of tensions and stresses that are leading to a growing number of crises around the world.

Our governments should all establish ministries of sustainable development, devoted full-time to managing the linkages between environmental change and human well-being. Agriculture ministers by themselves will not be able to cope with water shortages that farmers will face. Health ministers will not be able to cope with an increase in infectious diseases due to global warming.

Environment ministers will not be able to cope with the pressures on oceans and forests, or the consequences of increasing extreme weather events like last year’s Hurricane Katrina or this year’s Typhoon Saomai — China’s worst in many decades. A new powerful ministry should be charged with coordinating the responses to climate change, water stress, and other ecosystem crises.

Emissions Could Trade Globally Using Kyoto Protocol Credits

Emissions trading systems from around the world could be linked using a pool of credits created under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, creating a global carbon price, said a report commissioned by the UK Treasury.

"One-way linking could occur through access to a common pool of offset credits from the Kyoto project mechanism," a treasury economist, Nicholas Stern, said in a report titled the Economics of Climate Change, released on Tuesday to reporters in London.

Linking via credits such as Kyoto’s Clean Development Mechanism would allow the European Union to connect indirectly to proposed US systems, such as California’s, before the end of the protocol’s first compliance period in 2012, Stern said. That would enable US utilities to buy credits during the next few years, lowering the risk prices will rise further, increasing costs.

"The CDM is an international currency that can be traded without undermining the Kyoto targets," said Kate Hampton, an adviser at Climate Change Capital, a London based investment bank that sells advice on global warming and emissions trading.

The EU’s compulsory carbon dioxide emissions trading system can’t connect now to proposed systems in countries that have not ratified Kyoto, including the US, Stern said.

Kyoto is based on a system of credits known as assigned amount units and measured in metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent. Importing a credit directly from a non Kyoto nation would increase the volume of units, undermining the Kyoto limits.

The clean development mechanism allows Kyoto nations and some EU-based companies to comply with targets by curbing emissions in developing nations. It often costs less to cut emissions in developing nations than in those with mature economies.

The average price of CDM credits this year through September 30 was $10.50, 48% more than the $7.10 a ton in the whole of last year, the World Bank said last week in a report. EU allowances for 2006 averaged 20.30 euros ($26) a tonne in the same period, according to the European Climate Exchange in Amsterdam.

Industrialised nations may spend as much as $100 billion a year in developing- nations by 2050, helping ensure poorer economies use less fossil fuel per dollar of economic output, the UN said last month. That’s if industrialised countries agree to emission reductions of as much as 80 percent by mid-century and agree to buy developing nation credits instead when they can’t meet those reductions.

The EU and US, Japan and Australia each might link with Kyoto credits, providing an indirect mechanism among their systems regimes and a more global emissions-permit price, Stern said.

The ongoing global climate change is one of the key issues scientists around the world are grappling to resolve in their endeavour to make the world a better place to live. Several multilateral environmental pacts have been signed aimed at mitigating the factors responsible for the emerging phenomena, but no major results are forthcoming.

Nevertheless, the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer adopted way back in 1987 has shown some encouraging results to the extent that parties to the treaty have been sincere in meeting their commitments. As many as 191 countries have expressed their desire to move forward in phasing out ozone-depleting substances (ODS). The process is saving millions of people from skin cancer and other illness and protecting the world’s ecosystems that are sensitive to increased ultraviolet radiations.

Despite joint efforts put forth by countries since past 20 years, the precarious scenario fails to disappear. Early this year, the Antarctic ozone hole was the largest ever recorded, both in extent and volume of ozone loss. The science journal Nature has reported that in the winter 2004-05, the biggest ozone loss ever recorded over the Arctic. A 30% reduction in ozone levels occurred during the winter and early spring, including a 50% reduction in ozone levels at an altitude of 18 km.

A recent study done in the National Academy of Sciences says that the last few decades of the 20^th century were the warmest in the past 400 years and likely in the past 1,000 years.

The recently concluded 18^th Meeting of Parties to the Montreal Protocol (MoP 18) in Delhi expressed concerns over these developments and at the same time reaffirmed commitments to save the planet from the impending disaster. Not that the Montreal Protocol has not achieved anything. The situation could have been worse if the commitments under the protocol were not implemented seriously.

Concurrent with the MoP-18 session was the 14^th Session of the World Meteorological Organisation’s Commission for Agricultural Meteorology. It expressed concerns over the ongoing global climate change and deliberated on ways of rendering real-time warning to farmers. The WMO secretary-general M. Jarraud said that warning systems should not be based on a single indicator – climate index. There is a need for bio-climatic index for drought monitoring and early warning incorporating new methodologies.

One of the main reasons for the successful implementation of the Protocol is that the treaty was preceded by a strong scientific consensus about the cause of the problem, clarity about the responsibility to be undertaken, availability of mitigation technologies at reasonable costs and near accurate estimate of resources to be deployed to mitigate the problem.

Technologies did have the role in the reduction of ozone depleting substances. In tune with the identification of newer and newer factors responsible for depletion of ozone, the Protocol has been amended from time to time to include new ozone depleting substances and commitments sought from countries for its time bound reductions. The amendments to the Protocol made in the London meeting was significant and it spelt out commitments for implementation of legally binding commitments on the basis of ‘common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities’ by developed and developing countries.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said today that India was against the trade restrictions on countries to ensure compliance with the Montreal Protocol on ozone depleting substances (ODSs). He cautioned that any such restrictions would adversely impact economic growth and poverty alleviation efforts being undertaken by developing countries.

"We need to be more creative and less adversial in our approach to compliance," Dr.Manmohan Singh said while addressing a high-level segment of the five-day 18th meeting of parties to Montreal Protocol in the Capital, being attended by delegates from 189 countries across the world.

The Prime Minister said India was against the use of restrictions on countries to ensure compliance with the Montreal Protocol on ODSs. Provision in the Protocol that enable use of trade restrictions was a source of concern, he said, adding "Let us not seek trade advantages through the instrument of environmental treaties ... while fulfillment of commitments in multilateral environmental agreements by all parties should be ensured, the use of trade restrictions was not advisable".

He also expressed dissatisfaction over the extend of technology transfer to phase out ODSs from developing countries around the world. The Montreal Protocol is an international treaty designed to protect the ozone layer by phasing out a number of substances responsible for the depletion of ozone.

Acting on a PIL, filed by the Himalayan Chipko Foundation, the Supreme Court has issued notice to the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests to frame guidelines on construction of roads in hilly areas.

The petition had contended that wrong practices adopted by officials and contractors in construction of roads in hilly areas especially in the Himalayan region had resulted in large scale environmental damage.

"Construction of roads in hilly terrain especially the Himalayas which are a young and fragile mountain range leads to dislocation and disruption of the delicate balance of the eco-system," said petitioner J.P. Dabral.

Since Himalayas have weak and unprotected slopes, blasting, excavation and cutting of slopes leads to landslides, which become a serious problem during rainy season leading to heavy erosion of top soil and formation of deep gullies.

The petition alleged that contractors adopt the cheapest way of disposal of excavated rock mass from road construction by pushing it down the hill causing large-scale damage to forests, pastures, and agricultural lands. The whole mountain below the constructed road at many places gets environmentally degraded and makes the land denuded. In some places not a blade of grass remains on the surface, it stated.

"Such disposal of excavated earth also results in heavy formation of silt in river basins, interruption of the natural drainage system and loss of natural springs lying beneath the alignment of the road," said Dabral.

Acting on another PIL filed by the foundation seeking a ban on resin taping from pine trees, the Supreme Court has also issued notices to Uttaranchal and Himachal Pradesh governments.

Taking note of the petition, which highlights environment damage caused to hilly areas in these states due to wrong practices in resin tapping, the SC asked both states to file replies within four weeks. The petition held that procedures regarding cutting of channels on the bark of pine trees are not followed resulting in weakening of the trees. It also stated that resin tapping was not an economically viable business since turpentine and rosin, which are made from resin, can be imported easily at much cheaper rates.

Competition over controlling the planet's water resources will increase among nations in the next decade but will not lead to war, says UNDP's policy specialist Arunabha Ghosh. Hydrologists have set 1,700 cubic metres per person as the minimum amount of water needed to grow food, support industries and maintain the environment. At present, 800 million people across the globe live below this threshold.

According to UNDP's Human Development Report 2006, by 2025, over 3 billion people would be living under water stress. Putting to rest the theory of water wars between countries who share rivers and lakes, Ghosh told TOI, "In past 50 years, 37 stray incidents of violence have taken place between countries over water, 30 of which have been in the Middle East. However, none of them were wars. The last war fought over water was 4,000 years ago. Also in the last 50 years, over 200 treaties on water were negotiated between countries. India and Pakistan, despite two wars and constant geopolitical tension, have for half a century jointly managed shared watersheds through the Permanent Indus Water Commission."

He added: "We do have evidence that there will be increased tension among nations sharing water. However, globally there is enough water for everyone. Managing shared water can be a force for peace or for conflict, but it is politics that will decide the course to be taken." Earth may be a water planet but 97% of its water is in its oceans. Most of the remainder is locked in Antarctic ice caps or deep underground, leaving less than 1% available for human use in fresh water lakes and rivers. Planet earth's hydrological system pumps and transfers about 44,000 cubic kilometers of water to the land each year, equivalent to 6,900 cubic meters for everyone on the planet.

Enough Water for All

Unlike wars and natural disasters, the global crisis in water does not galvanize concerted international action. Like hunger, deprivation in access to water is a silent crisis experienced by the poor and tolerated by those with the resources, the technology and the political power to end it. Yet this is a crisis that is holding back human progress, consigning large segments of humanity to lives of poverty, vulnerability and insecurity.

This crisis claims more lives through disease than any war claims through guns. It also reinforces the obscene inequalities in life chances that divide rich and poor nations in an increasingly prosperous and interconnected world and that divide people within countries on the basis of wealth, gender and other markers for disadvantage.

Overcoming the crisis in water and sanitation is one of the great human development challenges of the early 21st century. Success in addressing that challenge through a concerted national and international response would act as a catalyst for progress in public health, education and poverty reduction and as a source of economic dynamism.

Some commentators trace the global challenge in water to a problem of scarcity. With population rising and demands on the world’s water expanding, so the argument runs, the future points to a "gloomy arithmetic" of shortage. We reject this starting point. The availability of water is a concern for some countries. But the scarcity at the heart of the global water crisis is rooted in power, poverty and inequality, not in physical availability.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in the area of water for life. Today, some 1.1 billion people in developing countries have inadequate access to water, and 2.6 billion lack basic sanitation. Those twin deficits are rooted in institutions and political choices, not in water’s availability. Household water requirements represent a tiny fraction of water use, usually less than 5 per cent of the total, but there is tremendous inequality in access to clean water and to sanitation at a household level.

In high-income areas of cities in Asia, Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa, people enjoy access to several hundred litres of water a day delivered into their homes at low prices by public utilities. Meanwhile, slum dwellers and poor households in rural areas of the same countries have access to much less than the 20 litres of water a day per person required to meet the most basic human needs. Women and young girls carry a double burden of disadvantage, since they are the ones who sacrifice their time and their education to collect water.

Much the same applies to water for livelihoods. Across the world agriculture and industry are adjusting to tightening hydrological constraints. But while scarcity is a widespread problem, it is not experienced by all. The underlying cause of scarcity in the large majority of cases is institutional and political, not a physical deficiency of supplies. In many countries scarcity is the product of public policies that have encouraged overuse of water through subsidies and underpricing.

There is more than enough water in the world for domestic purposes, for agriculture and for industry. The problem is that some people- notably the poor-are systematically excluded from access by their poverty, by their limited legal rights or by public policies that limit access to the infrastructures that provide water for life and for livelihoods.

In short, scarcity is manufactured through political processes and institutions that disadvantage the poor. When it comes to clean water, the pattern in many countries is that the poor get less, pay more and bear the brunt of the human development costs associated with scarcity.

People living in rich countries today are only dimly aware of how clean water fostered social progress in their own countries. Just over a hundred years ago London, New York and Paris were centres of infectious disease, with diarrhoea, dysentery and typhoid fever undermining public health. Child death rates were as high then as they are now in much of Sub- Saharan Africa. The rising wealth from industrialization boosted income, but child mortality and life expectancy barely changed.

Sweeping reforms in water and sanitation changed this picture. Clean water became the vehicle for a leap forward in human progress. Driven by coalitions for social reform, by moral concern and by economic self-interest, governments placed water and sanitation at the centre of a new social contract between states and citizens. Within a generation they put in place the finance, technology and regulations needed to bring water and sanitation for all within reach.

Some 2.6 billion people-half the developing world’s population-do not have access to basic sanitation. And systemic data underreporting means that these figures understate the problem. "Not having access" to water and sanitation is a polite euphemism for a form of deprivation that threatens life, destroys opportunity and undermines human dignity. Being without access to water means that people resort to ditches, rivers and lakes polluted with human or animal excrement or used by animals. It also means not having sufficient water to meet even the most basic human needs.

While basic needs vary, the minimum threshold is about 20 litres a day. Most of the 1.1 billion people categorized as lacking access to clean water use about 5 litres a day-one tenth of the average daily amount used in rich countries to flush toilets. On average, people in Europe use more than 200 litres-in the United States more than 400 litres. When a European person flushes a toilet or an American person showers, he or she is using more water than is available to hundreds of millions of individuals living in urban slums or arid areas of the developing world. Dripping taps in rich countries lose more water than is available each day to more than 1 billion people.

Water facts — India

In some parts groundwater tables are falling by more than one metre a year…

In water-stressed parts irrigation pumps extract water from aquifers 24 hours a day for wealthy farmers, while neighbouring small-holders depend on the vagaries of rain…

Agriculture accounts for about a third of the sales of electricity boards but only three per cent of the revenue. The early withdrawal of perverse subsidies that encourage overuse of water would mark an important step in the right direction…

Caste rules that govern access to water have weakened - but they remain important, often in subtle ways

What are the prospects for the world achieving the water and sanitation Millenium Development Goals? With strong progress in high population countries such as China and India, the world is on track for halving the share of people without access to water, but off track on sanitation.

India spends eight times more of its national wealth on military budgets than on water and sanitation. Pakistan spends 47 times more.

Diarrhoea claims some 450,000 lives annually - more than in any other country. Private companies have introduced technologies that reduce water pollution and increase availability to downstream users.

Uttaranchal, the home of Himalayan rivers, is all set to lead India in river bank filtration (RBF), which is a cost-effective way of removing harmful microbes and organic material from water.

Several experiments are underway in the hill state related to riverbank filtration and a Centre of Competence for the country is coming up at IIT-Roorkee. The European Union has also identified Uttaranchal Jal Sansthan (UJS) and IIT Roorkee as its partners in an ambitious project which will serve as a model for the entire country.

Harmful contaminants often taint drinking water drawn directly from a river, but a low-cost natural filter lies just beyond the banks. Researchers have found that the soil alongside a river can remove dangerous microbes and organic materials as water flows through it. The cleaner water is then pumped to the surface through wells drilled a short distance from the river.

This technique, called riverbank filtration, has been in use in Europe for more than 50 years to improve the taste and smell of drinking water and to remove some hazardous pollutants such as industrial solvents.

In Uttaranchal, UJS chief general manager H.P. Uniyal and professor CSP Ojha are the key resource persons working on the project. An international conference was held recently at IIT Roorkee where existing efforts and future prospects of RBF in India were discussed. It was also decided that a Centre of Competence would be set up at IIT soon, which would conduct widespread training programmes on this technology. A technical center of RBF will also be opened in the Doon valley. The Centre is supported by the EU and will transfer the technology across the country, said Uniyal.

Earlier this year, American researcher Josh Weiss reported that riverbank filtration appears to significantly decrease the presence of bacteria and viruses. During RBF, surface water is subjected to a combination of physical, chemical and biological processes such as filtration, dilution and biodegradation that can significantly improve the quality of raw water. It is a low cost and efficient alternative treatment for drinking water.

New studies project that the Arctic ocean could be mostly open water during the summer by 2040- several decades earlier than previously expected – partly as a result of global warming caused by emissions of green house gases.

The projections come from computer simulations of climate and ice from direct measurements showing that the amount of ice coverage has been declining for 30 years.

The modelling study, published on Tuesday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, was led by Marika Holland of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado.

It involved seven fresh simulations on supercomputers at the atmospheric centre, as well as an analysis of simulations developed by independent groups. In simulations where emissions continue to rise, sea ice persists for long period but then abruptly gives way to open water. In the simulations, the shift seems to occur when a pulse of warm Atlantic ocean water combines with the thinning and retreating ice under the influence of the global warming trend. Scientists ascribe most of that planet-scale warming, including a warming of the shallow layers of the oceans, to the build-up of carbon dioxide and other heat- trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases in the atmosphere. After 2040 or so, ice persists in summer mainly around Canada’s Northern maze of islands and the northern coast of Greenland, a region that always tends to accumulate a clot of thick ice.

Separately, Scientists at the National Snow and Ice Data Centre in Boulder found that the normal expansion of sea ice as the Arctic chilled in fall had been extraordinarily sluggish this year, following a pattern seen in recent years. The November average ice coverage was by far the lowest since satellite measurements began in 1979, said Walt Meier, a Scientist at the ice centre.

"It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that things will be able to turn around," he said "It would take several very cold winters and cool summers, which seems unlikely under global warming conditions."

Several experts not involved with the studies said that they were significant for human affairs, as well as biology. Polar bears will struggle, these scientists said, and so will Arctic people who still go out on sea ice to hunt seals. By contrast, countries and businesses pursuing new shipping lanes, energy supplies, and fishing grounds could profit.

The melting is likely to shift weather patterns, too. More sea ice means colder winters, because frigid winds blowing over ice pick up little heat from the warmer waters below.

The change will have ramifications beyond summertime. Having open water each year would mean that almost all ice forming in winter would be freshly frozen and just a yard or so thick.

This would ease the task of maintaining shipping lanes with icebreaking vessels, said Lawson W. Brigham, deputy director of the Arctic Research Commission, which advises the White House on Arctic matters. He and other experts said the research raised the urgency of establishing common standards for protecting the Arctic environment and patrolling shipping lanes.

Rich Nations’ Green House Gases Up: UN

Greenhouse gas emissions by industrialised nations rose in 2004 to the highest levels since the early 1990s, and governments must do more to fight global warming, the UN climate change secretariat said.

Emissions by 40 nations, including backers of caps under the UN’s Kyoto Protocol and outsiders led by the United States, rose to 17.9 billion tonnes in 2004 from 17.8 billion in 2003 and 17.5 billion in 2000, it said.

Economic revival in Russia after a downturn since the collapse of the Soviet Union contributed to stoke emissions, it said in an annual report. But emissions also rose since 2000 in the European Union, Japan, the United States and Canada.

"Industrialised countries will need to intensify their efforts to implement strong policies which reduce greenhouse gas emissions," said Yvo de Boer, the head of the UN climate change secretariat in Bonn.

A British report on Monday also said that ignoring climate change could lead to an economic downturn on the scale of the 1930s Depression –far more than the costs of acting to head off the problem.

The climate change secretariat said the 2004 rise put overall emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels in power plants, factories and cars, just 3.3 per cent below 18.6 billion tones in the Kyoto benchmark year of 1990.

And 2004 emissions were the highest since just after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, defying efforts at cuts meant to avert disastrous changes such as more floods, erosion, heat waves and higher sea levels.

Thirty-five countries have agreed to cut emissions under the Kyoto Protocol by about 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. ministers will review Kyoto in Nairobi at annual climate talks from 6-17 November.

President George W. Bush pulled out of Kyoto in 2001, arguing that it was a straitjacket that would damage the U.S. economy and wrongly excluded developing nations. The United States is the world’s number one source of emissions.

Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the U.N. Conference on Climate Change on Wednesday that it's clear it would cost far less to cut greenhouse-gas emissions now ``than to deal with the consequences later''.

``Let no one say we cannot afford to act,'' Mr. Annan declared, in a reference to those, such as the Bush administration, who contend that reducing global-warming gases would set back economies too much.

The U.N. chief also lamented ``a frightening lack of leadership'' in fashioning next steps in reducing global emissions. ``Let us start being more politically courageous,'' he urged the hundreds of delegates from some 180 member-nations of the 1992 U.N. climate treaty.

Their two-week annual meeting, entering its final three days, has been working on technical issues involving the Kyoto Protocol, which obliges 35 industrial nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 5 per cent below 1990 levels by 2012.

Cutbacks

The United States and Australia are the only major industrialised countries to reject that 1997 treaty annex. U.S. President George W. Bush says it would harm the U.S. economy, and it should have required cutbacks in poorer nations as well.

Scientists attribute at least some of the past century's 0.6-degree-Celsius (1-degree-Fahrenheit) rise in global temperatures to the atmospheric accumulation of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases, byproducts of power plants, automobiles and other fossil fuel-burning sources. Continued temperature rises could seriously disrupt the climate, they say. Talks here focused on how to set emissions quotas for the post-2012 period — a regime others hope will include the United States, the biggest emitter.

Ministers from around the world were arriving here for high-level bargaining on key issues. They must ``show to the world that there is a continuation of the Kyoto Protocol,'' said Catherine Pearce, of the environmental group Friends of the Earth.

At best, however, the conference may simply set a timetable for continuing talks into next year. Many here think real negotiations must await the end of the Bush administration.

"The United States will return to the negotiating table with a serious proposal when a new President takes office in 2009," said veteran conference observer Philip Clapp.

More than a month ago, the BBC world service conducted a live programme from Mumbai on global warming. They were trying to assess how seriously people in the city viewed the dangers posed by the gradual warming up of the earth's surface and the inevitable rise in sea levels. They had presumed, one expects, that people living along the coast would be informed and concerned. If they had done a street poll, they would probably have discovered that not many people know what the term "global warming" means leave alone the impact it could have on Mumbai.

Many in India are also not aware that earlier this month an important meeting on global warming ended inconclusively in Nairobi, Kenya. Representatives from 165 countries met there to hammer out what steps needed to be taken in the next years to ensure that economies around the world reduced their dependence on fossil fuels, thereby cutting down the amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) accumulating in the atmosphere.

Although they came up with nothing new, there was little disagreement about the serious nature of the problem. Almost 15 years after the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro and the Framework Convention on Climate Change, and nine years after the Kyoto Protocol that set targets for 35 industrialised countries to reduce emissions of GHGs, the world is much clearer about both the science and the economics of global warming.

There are still some doubters; there are also countries like the United States, one of the biggest contributors to GHGs, which refuse to accept externally set targets or timetables for GHG reduction. But, by and large, industrialised and developing countries now accept that the accumulation of carbon dioxide (CO₂), one of the chief greenhouse gases, has already begun the process of global warming as evident in rising temperatures. Most countries are clear that we need action now to stem the deterioration even if it is too late to reverse the process.

Only a few countries, principally in Europe, have taken the issue seriously and have made a genuine attempt to reduce emissions of GHGs. The U.S., on the other hand, continues to follow its own agenda. The response that the former U.S. Vice President, Al Gore, is getting to his film on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, holds out a slim hope that ordinary people in the U.S. will finally get the message about what "the American way of life" has done to the world. California, the most populous American State, seems to have understood that and is the first to put a cap on GHG emissions for utilities, refineries, and manufacturing plants despite having a Governor who belongs to same party as President George W. Bush.

The 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which came into effect in February 2005, only set targets for reductions in emissions of GHGs. It did not envisage a phasing out or substitution of fossil fuels. There has also been considerable debate about whether one of the mechanisms devised as part of the effort to reduce global warming, namely the Clean Development Mechanism, is effective. Despite several billion dollars being spent by industrialised countries to provide clean technology to developing countries to compensate for their contribution to global warming, the results are disappointing. The switch to cleaner technologies is not on a scale to make a difference. Meanwhile, industrialised countries continue on their old path with only minor adjustments. In the long run, such small steps will not stave off what could be a big disaster in the decades to come. This is one of the many reasons that there has been a demand to review the Kyoto Protocol. However, there was no agreement on this in Nairobi. All that was agreed upon was to meet again in 2008.

Unfortunately, conferences and negotiations do not stop a process like global warming. The latest document to add to the mounting evidence that things are going very wrong in the world was the report by a former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, to the British government. The Stern Review stated that global temperatures have risen by half a degree Celsius as a result of carbon emissions and that if nothing is done, there is a 75 per cent chance that temperatures will rise by two to three degrees Celsius over the next 50 years. This will have a devastating effect on weather patterns resulting in floods, droughts, melting ice caps, and rising sea levels. The countries that will bear the brunt of this are the poorest. The Stern report estimated that there would be a loss of one per cent of the global gross domestic product caused by extreme weather.

Such a loss will affect everyone, including the fast growing economies of India and China. Inevitably, one of the issues that came up in Nairobi was whether India and China, because of the size of their economies, should also take some steps to limit greenhouse gas emissions. In 1992, when the problem was first addressed, there was an agreement that poorer and developing countries should not be penalised for a problem that had been created largely by the industrialised countries and their burning of fossil fuels to power their economies. The concept of "common but differentiated responsibility" was accepted. It was also argued that to ensure that the developing countries adopt cleaner technologies, the industrialised world needed to finance their efforts to "decarbonise" energy systems by providing them with the latest clean technologies.

Alternative forms

Energy is central to the growth and the cheapest form of energy is coal-based. More coal-based plants necessarily mean we are adding to the carbon dioxide accumulation in the atmosphere. Are efforts to promote alternative energy forms even as we use the cheapest forms of energy, such as coal, necessarily mutually exclusive? Is enough being done in this country to promote energy saving and efficiency as well as clean energy? It is interesting how wind energy is only just being recognised as a viable option in India when it has been promoted and used in several European countries for some years now. An Indian company producing wind turbines has shown spectacular growth because of this global demand. India comes fourth among countries using wind energy.

The argument against putting any pressure on countries like India and China at the moment is that they were not responsible for the problem, so they should not be bound to slow down or change the pattern of growth. While 15 years ago this argument had some validity, today we need to re-examine it.

Logic would suggest that it is better to start the process now rather than wait until it is too late. The country's economy need not suffer if there are fewer fossil fuel burning cars on the road and better public transport. The economy need not be affected if we use building techniques for our growing cities that are less energy intensive rather than following the Western pattern of glass-fronted high rises that require a huge amount of electricity to keep cool or warm as the case may be. And our energy requirements can be met if we work harder to minimise transmission losses, introduce energy saving at every level, and promote non-polluting forms of energy generation.

The path-breaking study by Professor A.K.N. Reddy two decades ago of Karnataka's energy scene had vividly illustrated how energy budgets could be drastically altered if such steps were taken. That approach is even more relevant today as we face the problem of generating more energy to fuel the economy and at the same time reducing the amount of carbon dioxide we generate.

Global warming could have a major effect on the health of the Chinese people and the country’s agriculture, according to a National Assessment Report on Climate Change. It threatens to intensify natural disasters and water shortages across China, driving down the country’s food out put, the Chinese government has warned, even as its seeks to tame energy consumption .

A forthcoming official assessment of the effects of global climate change on China will warn of worsening drought in northern China and increasing "extreme weather events"; according to the Ministry of Science and Technology’s website.

A deputy director of the National Climate Centre, Luo Yong, was blunt about the risks for China’s food production.

"The most direct impact of climate change will be on China’s grain production," he said on Tuesday, according to he Science Times newspaper.

"Climate change will bring intensified pressure on our country’s agriculture and grain production." The official report promises to stir debate about whether and how China can balance its ambitious goals for economic growth with steps to rein in rising greenhouse gas emissions from industry and cars, which keep heat in the atmosphere and threaten to dramatically increase the planet’s average temperatures.

Scientists have been uncertain about the effects of rising global temperatures on China’s farming, unsure whether greater average rainfall will outweigh the costs of higher temperatures and more frequent natural disasters.

The official assessment concludes that hotter weather and increased evaporation will outweigh greater rain and snowfall.

In the country’s south, heavier rainfalls could trigger more landslides and mudslides, it also warns.

Luo indicated that by 2030-2050, China’s potential grain output could fall by 10 per cent, unless crop varieties and practices adapt to the increasingly turbulent climate.

An official from the Ministry of Science and Technology said that the Government assessment was likely to be fully released in the first half of 2007.

The climate change warnings came as Chinese president Hu Jintao called for intensified efforts to save energy. China should use price, tax and other financial measures to promote energy saving and curb wasteful use, Hu told a top party meeting, according to state media today.

Industries that consume excessive energy and pollute the environment should be shut down, the official Economic Daily quoted Hu as saying.

China, the world’s fourth largest economy and second biggest energy user, has set a goal to cut energy consumption per unit of national income by 20 percent by 2010.

But with coal-fired station providing over 80 percent of China’s electricity supply, China is on course to overtake the United States by 2009 as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

Climate change is boosting business for reinsurers, as rising claims from floods and storms mean higher costs but also more scope to raise prices, the world’s biggest reinsurer Swiss Re said. Claims from natural catastrophes are rising twice as fast as those from other mishaps, and Swiss Re’s risk models show weather will become less predictable and demand for capital to cover risks from floods and hurricanes will stay strong.

"Temperatures on earth are rising. What is relevant for the industry is that claims expectations are going up because of that. We will have to put that through into pricing," Swiss Re chief economist Thomas Hess said. In general, claims to reinsurers-companies that insure other insurers are rising slightly faster than economic growth at around 5 percent per year, Hess said. But claims for natural catastrophes are growing twice as fast.

"Claims for natural catastrophe insurance are rising roughly 10%. If you’re a cynic, you could say it’s a growth market," Hess said in an interview.

So far this year, there have been no major US hurricanes – a welcome relief after last year’s triple whammy of Katrina, Rita and Wilma, which caused insured losses of some $65 billion, making it the costliest year ever for the industry.

The lack of costly natural catastrophes this year is putting some pressure on reinsurance premiums – the prices that insurers pay to reinsurers to take risks off their books they find too costly or too volatile to cover themselves.

But the rising trend in prices remained unbroken, Hess said. "If there would be no claims, capital in insurance would rise and you’d see pressure on prices. But I think that with the claims from these big catastrophes, it will take the industry more than just one year to come to terms with that," Hess said. Prices would also remain on a higher level after the 2005 disaster year because risk modeling agencies were factoring in higher claims while credit rating agencies required insurers to put more capital aside for any risk they covered.

Increasing wealth, and a tendency by wealthy people, who insure more of their assets than the less wealthy, to move to seaside locations, such as Florida, are also having an impact, Hess said. Overpopulation in already crowded areas near the sea in poor countries is also exposing more people to floods and hurricanes, he said.

Swiss Re supports the Kyoto protocol to fight the emissions of greenhouse gases – the main cause of climate change – as well as the new round of talks in Nairobi to extend the agreement taking place at present. Rising awareness means people will try to limit the damage from storms and floods by taking more precautions. "In the end, it means that things will remain insurable even if the frequency and severity of hurricanes rises. That is a good thing for policyholders as well as insurers," he said.

Some observers have noted last year’s record storms had highlighted that insurers are short of billions of dollars needed to underwrite risk and that they might lose market share to others if they fail to find the extra money.

Prices for hurricane cover in the United States have in some cases doubled after last year’s storms and some insurers refuse to underwrite such risks in certain areas at all. But there was no overall shortage of insurance cover, Hess said.

Climate change has been made the world's biggest priority, with the publication of a stark report showing that the planet faces catastrophe unless urgent measures are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Future generations may come to regard the apocalyptic report by Sir Nicholas Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, as the turning point in combating global warming, or as the missed opportunity. As well as producing a catastrophic vision of hundreds of millions fleeing flooding and drought. Sir Nicholas suggests that the cost of inaction could be a permanent loss of 20 per cent of global output. That equates to a figure of £3.68 trillion - while to act quickly would cost the equivalent of £184bn annually, 1 per cent of world GDP.

Across the world, environmental groups hailed the report as the beginning of a new era on climate change, but the White House maintained an ominous silence. However, the report laid down a challenge to the US, and other major emerging economies including China and India, that British ministers said cannot be ignored.

Its recommendations are based on stabilising carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere at between 450 and 550 parts per million - which would still require a cut of at least 25 per cent in global emissions, rising to 60 per cent for the wealthy nations.

It accepts that even with a very strong expansion of renewable energy sources, fossil fuels could still account for more than half of global energy supplies by 2050. Presenting the findings in London, Tony Blair said the 700-page document was the "most important report on the future" published by his Government. Green campaigners said that at last the world had woken up to the dangers they had been warning about for years.

Gordon Brown, the Chancellor, and likely next Prime Minister, assumed the task of leading the world in persuading the sceptics in the US, China and India to accept the need for global co-operation to avert the threat of a global catastrophe. He has enlisted Al Gore, the former presidential candidate turned green evangelist, to sell the message in the United States, with Sir Nicholas. While the Bush administration refused to be drawn on the report, US environmental groups seized on it to demand a major change in policy. "The President needs to stop hiding behind his opposition to the Kyoto Protocol and lay a new position on the table," said the National Environmental Trust, in Washington. The Washington Post said in an editorial that it was "hard to imagine" that the "intransigence" of the administration would long survive its tenure. "Will [Mr Bush] take a hand in developing America's response to this global problem," it asked, "Or will he go down as the President who fiddled while Greenland melted?"

Sir Nicholas's report contained little that was scientifically new. But British ministers are hoping his hard-headed economic analysis will be enough to persuade the doubters in the White House to curb America's profligate use of carbon energy. In the Commons, Environment Secretary, David Miliband, confirmed that ministers were drawing up a Climate Change Bill, which would enshrine in law the Government's long-term target of reducing carbon emissions by 60 per cent by 2050. But he declined to go into any detail.

Mr. Blair said the consequences for the planet of inaction were "literally disastrous". "This disaster is not set to happen in some science fiction future many years ahead, but in our lifetime," he said. "We can't wait the five years it took to negotiate Kyoto - we simply don't have the time. We accept we have to go further [than Kyoto]." Sir Nicholas told BBC radio: "Unless it's international, we will not make the reductions on the scale
which will be required." Pia Hansen, of the European Commission, said the report "clearly makes a case for action".

The report on the economics of climate change prepared by Sir Nicholas Stern for the British government presents leaders of all countries with this important message — not doing anything to reduce global warming is no longer a valid choice. The report argues that the uncertainty surrounding the long-term impacts of green house gas emissions on climate warrant stronger, not weaker, goals to limit them before they cause permanent and dangerous climate change. Professor Stern, a former chief economist at the World Bank, has relied on economic models to show that stabilising emissions to a level of about 550 parts per million of carbon dioxide (nearly double the quantity in the atmosphere at the start of the industrial revolution) appears possible with an investment of one per cent of Gross Domestic Product by 2050. On the other hand, a business as usual approach can set the world economy back by the equivalent of a 5 per cent to 20 per cent reduction in consumption per capita. In economic and social terms, the distress could be comparable to the great wars and the depression of the 20^th century. Fortunately, collective international action has been initiated to avert such a catastrophe and most countries accept the need to curb emissions. The Stern review makes the case that the transition to a low carbon economy presents a business opportunity and a net benefit in the medium- to long-term of an estimated 2.5 trillion dollars in present value terms for measures taken today.

If there was any remaining doubt about the urgent need to combat climate change, two reports issued last week should make the world sit up and take notice. First, according to the latest data submitted to the United Nations, the greenhouse gas emissions of the major industrialised countries continue to increase. Second, a study by the former chief economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern of the United Kingdom, called climate change "the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen," with the potential to shrink the global economy by 20 per cent and to cause economic and social disruption on a par with the two World Wars and the Great Depression.

The scientific consensus, already clear and incontrovertible, is today moving towards the more alarmed end of the spectrum. Many scientists long known for their caution are now saying that warming has reached dire levels, generating feedback loops that will take us perilously close to a point of no return. A similar shift may also be taking place among economists, with some formerly circumspect analysts now saying it will cost far less to cut emissions than to adapt to the consequences later. Insurers, meanwhile, have been paying out more and more each year to compensate for extreme weather events. And growing numbers of corporate and industry leaders have been voicing concern about climate change as a business risk. The few sceptics who continue trying to sow doubt should be seen for what they are: out of step, out of arguments, and just about out of time.

A major U.N. climate change conference opened on November 6 in Nairobi. The stakes are high indeed. Climate change has profound implications for virtually all aspects of human well being, from jobs and health to food security and peace within and among nations. Yet too often, climate change is seen as an environmental problem when it should be part of the broader development and economic agenda. Until we acknowledge the all-encompassing nature of the threat, our response will fall short.

Environment ministers have been striving valiantly to mobilise international action. But too many of their counterparts — energy, finance, transport, and industry ministers, even defence and foreign secretaries — have been missing from the debate. Climate change should be their concern as well. The barriers that have kept them apart must be broken down, so that they can, in an integrated way, think about how to "green" the massive investments in energy supply that will be needed to meet burgeoning global demand over the next 30 years. Doom-and-gloom scenarios meant to shock people into action often end up having the opposite effect, and so it has been at times with climate change. We must focus not only on the perils, but also on the opportunities associated with climate change. Carbon markets have reached a volume of $30 billion this year, but their potential remains largely unexploited. The Kyoto Protocol is now fully operational, including a Clean Development Mechanism, which could generate $100 billion for developing countries. The Stern review suggests that markets for low-carbon energy products are likely to be worth at least $500 billion a year by 2050. Even today, it is baffling that readily available energy-efficient technologies and know-how are not used more often — a win-win approach that produces less pollution, less warming, more electricity and more output. Low emissions need not mean low growth or stifling a country's development aspirations. And the savings can buy time for solar, wind, and other alternative energy sources to be developed and made more cost-effective.

Efforts to prevent future emissions must not be allowed to obscure the need to adapt to climate change, which will be an enormous undertaking because of the massive carbon accumulations to date. The world's poorest countries, many of them in Africa, are least able to cope with this burden — which they had little role in creating — and will need international help if they are not to be further thwarted in their efforts to reach the Millennium Development Goals.

A United Nations Conference on Climate Change has set a rough timetable for reaching a new agreement to cut greenhouse-gas emissions, but some officials and activists warn that the world is still moving too slowly and selfishly in the fight against global warming.

China agreed on Friday to a review of the Kyoto Protocol by 2008 – crucial toward setting new quotas on carbon dioxide and other emissions – but only after being assured it and other developing countries would remain exempt from mandatory cuts in the near future.

China’s position and the continued U.S. rejection of the Kyoto pact made the 180-nation Nairobi Climate Conference one of the least productive of the annual two-week meetings. Many participants said little could be accomplished until those two giant polluters, and others such as India, agree to cut emissions.

Britain’s Environment Secretary David Miliband joined German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel in saying greater urgency was needed to prevent global warming. "The science tells us that we need faster and deeper political progress if we are to avoid the social, economic and humanitarian consequences of unchecked climate change," a joint statement said. "Every country has a part to play in the drive to prevent dangerous climate change."

The 1997 Kyoto pact obliges 35 industrial nations to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2012. The United States rejects that accord, with U.S. President George W.Bush contending it would damage the U.S. economy and should have given poorer countries obligations as well. The Nairobi conference’s results, which include a new fund to help poor countries adapt to climate change, also disappointed activists.

Nicholas Stern’s report to the British government on the economics of climate change has created quite a stir. It appears to accept broadly the warnings about carbon emissions (mostly from burning fossil fuels) and climate change, but also to bring hard economic analysis to bear in an area so far dominated by arguments among scientists and by chilling predictions of disaster, such as those rehearsed by AI Gore in his film and book "An Inconvenient Truth."

There are other and more immediate inconvenient truths to face, however.

The first is that the struggle to control the climate by far the biggest and most ambitious mission ever undertaken in human history –has to be totally global to have any effect. The biggest source now of greenhouse gases is the United States, but the biggest sources in the future will be China and India, with a third of the world’s population. Even now, if Britain closed all its power stations, the carbon emissions saved would be equivalent to no more than a year’s increase in emissions in China.

The developing countries are still relying on burning coal, of which India, China and America have about half the world’s enormous reserves – enough to last for centuries. Yet coal is the dirtiest of all energy resources.

The second awkward reality is that appeals to higher moral instincts have resonance principally among policy makers and the more comfortably off; for the vast majority of humankind, choices have to be based on hard economic considerations. The "global catastrophe" message is not nearly enough to persuade people businesses and governments to change. A much more compelling story has to be devised and such more powerful incentives have to come into play.

A third stumbling block is conflicting time scales. The outcomes of actions to cut carbon have a hugely long lead time. In the words of the Stern report, "What we do now can only have a limited effect on the climate over the next 40 or 50 years."

In the second half of the 21^st century, all the efforts now to cut carbon emissions will, so scientists increasingly agree, have some benefit. They may prevent the tipping point where the weather finally turns against humanity in a rage of destructive floods and freezes and boiling heatwaves. But energy needs are immediate, as are the threats to the world energy supply, whether from terrorism or political upheaval. Some how the motives and fears that move people and nations have to be harnessed to the longer term goals.

A fourth awkward truth is that the investment decisions required to transform the energy supply and demand patterns of the globe necessitate immensely long-term commitment and therefore a degree of both policy continuity and price predictability.

Yet not only do governments come and go, but the energy scene is fraught with extreme volatility. The oil price, which is the key to energy prices, soars and then slumps, confounding capital investment calculations. When oil prices drop, as they will in the future, people tend to give up on energy efficiency, energy saving and alternative energy investment and go gratefully back to cheap oil (and gas and coal), thus undermining the climate warming struggle.

It ought to be possible to combine the twin goals of energy security and long-term climate security to provide a truly motivating worldwide story. On their own, prophecies of disaster lack the power to persuade people to act.

Harnessing these two causes would create the kind of grand unity of purpose that the world so conspicuously lacks at present.

If schemes for pricing carbon, and thereby presenting consumers with the true cost of the energy they consume, can be established worldwide, then the process of real change could at last be triggered. Clever juggling of the taxes, although not an overall increase in the tax burden, may be part of the new policy mix. Whatever the methods consumers everywhere would start to pay the full and true cost of fuel and make their decisions accordingly.

Global warming is creating a climate time bomb by storing enormous amounts of heat in the waters of the north Atlantic, U.K. scientists have discovered.

Marine researchers at Southampton and Plymouth universities have found that the upper 1,500 metres of the ocean from western Europe to the eastern U.S. have warmed by 0.015⁰C in seven years. The capacity of the oceans to store heat means that a water temperature rise of that size is enough to warm the atmosphere above by almost 9⁰C.

Neil Wells, a scientist on the project at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton, said: ``People might think it doesn't sound like a big temperature rise, but it's very significant.'' The findings were announced in the journal Geophysical Research Letters as James Lovelock, the U.K. scientist who developed the Gaia Theory (the hypothesis that all living matter on planet Earth functions like a single organism) of life on Earth, warned that such ocean warming could stifle marine life and accelerate climate change.

Professor Lovelock said that thermal mixing of water and nutrients shuts down when the upper layer of ocean water reaches about 12⁰C. ``That's why the tropical waters are clear blue and the water in the Arctic looks like soup,'' he said. Such a change would affect marine life, which research suggests could help form clouds over the oceans. Warmer waters would receive less protection from sunlight, which would warm them further.

The study suggests heat stored in the oceans could be released into the atmosphere in future, tempering efforts to stabilise global temperatures. The scientists used 200 floats spread across more than 23 million sqkm of the north Atlantic in 1999 to measure the water's temperature profile accurately for the first time.

The floats, part of a worldwide network called Argo, sink to about 2,000 metres and return to the surface every 10 days to transmit their data. Dr Wells said the floats revealed that Atlantic waters closer to the surface between the U.K. and the U.S. had warmed much more than the average 0.015C figure.

The world's environment and finance ministers in Asia and around the world are finishing preparations for a round of United Nations-backed meetings on global climate change next month in Africa. This time, the sense is palpable that something different is required for substantive action to occur. A new realism about global warming policy is emerging.

This month, the head of UN efforts on climate change, Yvo de Boer, called for a new framework to address global warming concerns. The United Nations acknowledged that despite the multilateral commitment to combat climate change, "it was also clear that poverty eradication and economic growth were the overriding concerns for developing countries". Growth will be high on the agenda at the upcoming meeting in Nairobi. That's in part because of the interests of developing countries, but also because of the realities that have hit home over the last year for developed countries as well.

This summer, reports emerged that European countries were having difficulty meeting their greenhouse gas target reductions. The carbon trading market created to put downward pressure on emissions was in chaos.

The problems are being felt in Asia too. The Associated Press reported last month that "Japan is still far from its target" under the Kyoto Protocol. "If no additional measures are taken," it reported, "UN forecasts show Japan's emissions will grow by 6 per cent, instead of shrink by the same rate as mandated by the treaty."

Research by the Australian Apec Centre at Monash University last year showed that increasing the cost of electricity to achieve these mandated cuts in greenhouse gas emissions would significantly impair the capacity of economies in Asia to grow and tackle poverty.

The problem of squaring the environmental need for reduced emissions with the social and political need to ensure economic growth has proved more difficult than some had originally thought. This has triggered new thinking on the issue. It has prompted some of the major parties in the climate change dialogue to begin focusing more on technology transfer and adaptation to future climate changes. The good news in this new direction is likely to yield concrete results. Last year, several Pacific rim countries, seeing the writing on the wall, took additional steps outside of the UN framework to address climate change. The United States, Japan, Australia, China, India and South Korea formed the Asia-Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate (called AP6).

The Asia Pacific Partnership on Clean Development and Climate, an agreement signed in 2005, offers an approach to climate change policy that can reconcile the objectives of economic growth and environmental improvement for developing countries. Together, the partners have 45 per cent of the world's population and emit 50 per cent of manmade carbon dioxide emissions. Projections of very strong growth in greenhouse gases in developing countries over the next 20 years means that there is enormous potential for reducing emissions through market-based mechanisms for technology transfer.

The strategy of the partnership is to develop and transfer new low-emission technologies. Eight working groups have been established and each one is co-chaired by two members of the group. Some address general matters like altering governance to promote investment in new technologies. Others focus on technologies and practices in industries where emissions are significant, like power generation, mining and production of cement, steel and aluminum.

Research shows this strategy can deliver tangible results. A study released in July by the Australian Bureau of Agriculture and Resource Economics showed global adoption of the AP6 could reduce emissions of carbon dioxide by about 14 per cent by 2050. These reductions are comparable to those achievable by Kyoto, but avoid the disadvantage of impairing economic growth. A new report by International Council for Capital Formation (ICCF) reaches similar conclusions.

India’s climate is headed for change over the next 50 years, warns the United Nations Development Programme’s Human Development Report 2006. Global warming will change monsoon patterns by as much as 25 to 100 per cent and affect India’s climate to peculiar ways.

The good news is that the country is expected to get more rain as a whole, with some parts getting as many as 10 extra days of rain each year. But the bad news is: it is the wet areas of the country such as the Northeast and Terai region that will get the extra rain. The rest of the country will have fewer rainy days and get dryer.

"Fluctuations of just 10 per cent are known to cause severe flooding or draught. Heavy rains have devastating consequences, as the flooding in Mumbai in 2005 demonstrated: 500 people perished," states the report.

More rain, however, does not necessarily translate into agricultural productivity. Areas may get more water through rain but lose even more through evaporation as temperatures rise. Even if the annual rainfall rises, reduced moisture retention in the soil due to global warming would lower soil fertility and raise the risk of crop failure.

"Projections for India highlight the complexity of climate change patterns. Most modeling points to an increase in rainfall for the country as a whole. However, an increased proportion of rain will fall during intensive monsoon episodes in parts of the country that are already well endowed with rainfall. Meanwhile, two thirds of the country – including semi-arid areas in Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra and Rajasthan – will have fewer rainy days. This will translate into a net loss for water security, placing a premium on water harvesting and storage," says the report.

The famous old quip about the weather – everyone talks about it but nobody does anything about it – is not as true as it once was. Alarmed by the threat of global warming, lots of people are actively trying to change human behaviours in order to change the weather.

Even economists are getting into the weather business. Olivier Deschjnes of the University of California at Santa Barbara and Michael Greenstone of Massachusetts Institute of Technology have written a pair of papers that assess some effects of climate change. In the first, they use long-run climatological models – year by year temperature and precipitation predictions from 2070 to 2099 – to examine the future of agriculture in the US.

Their findings? The expected rises in temperature and precipitation would increase annual agricultural production, and therefore agricultural profits, by about 4 per cent, or $1.3 billion. This hardly fulfils the doomsday fears conjured by most conversations about global warming.

For other economists, the weather itself has proved useful in measuring wholly unrelated human behaviours. From an economist’s perspective, the great thing about the weather is that there is nothing humans can do to affect it (at least until recently).

Contrast this with social changes that people enact: a new set of laws, for instance. Very often, new laws come about when there is a perception that a big social problem – think violent crime or corporate fraud – is growing worse. After a while, and after the laws have been enacted, the problem diminishes. So did the new laws fix the problem, or would it have improved on its own? Politicians will surely claim that it was their laws that fixed the problem, but it’s hard to know for sure.

Systemic shock

The weather, however, is different; the beauty of weather is that it does its own thing, and whether the weather is good or bad, you can be pretty sure that it didn’t come about in response to some human desire to fix a problem. Weather is a pure shock to the system, which means that it is a valuable tool to help economists make sense of the world.

Consider 19^th century Bavaria. The problem there was rain –too much of it. As Halvor Mehlum, Edward Miguel and Ragnar Torvik explained in a recent paper, excessive rain damaged the rye crop by interfering with the planting and the harvest. Using a historical rainfall database from the UN, they found that the price of rye was higher in rainy years, and since rye was a major staple of the Bavarian diet, food prices across the board were considerably higher in those years, too.

This was a big problem, since a poor family at the time would have been likely to spend as much as 80 per cent of its money on food. The economists went looking for other effects of this weather shock.

It turns out that Bavaria kept remarkably comprehensive crime statistics – the most meticulous in all of Germany – and when laid out one atop the other, there was a startlingly robust correlation between the amount of rain, the price of rye and the rate of property crime: they rose and fell together in lockstep. Rain raised food prices, and those prices, in turn, led hungry families to steal in order to feed themselves.

But violent crime fell during the rainy years, at the same time property crimes were on the rise. Why should that be? Because, the economists contend, rye was also used to make beer. "Ten per cent of Bavarian household income went to beer purchases alone," they write. So as a price spike in rye led to a price spike in beer, there was less beer consumed – which in turn led to fewer assaults and murders.

It turns out that rainfall often has a surprisingly strong effect on violence. In a paper on the economic aftermath of the hundreds of riots in American cities during the 1960s, William Collins and Robert Margo used rainfall as a variable to compare the cities where riots took place with cities where riots probably would have taken place had it not rained. Few things can dampen a rioter’s spirit more than soaking rain, they learned. After two days of rioting in Miami in the summer of 1968 were quelled by rain, they write, the Dade County sheriff joked to The New York Times that he had ordered his off-duty officers to pray for more rain.

Economists Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath and Ernest Sergenti have written a paper that uses rainfall to explore the issue of civil war in Africa. Twenty-nine of 43 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, they note, experienced some kind of civil war during the 1980s or 1990s.

The causes of any war are of course incredibly complex – or are they? The economists discovered that one of the most reliable predictors of civil war is lack of rain. Using monthly rainfall data from many different African countries (most of which, significantly, are largely agricultural), they found that a shortage of rain in a given growing season led inevitably to a short-term economic decline and that short-term economic declines led all too easily to civil war.

The causal effect of a drought, they argue, was frighteningly strong: "a 5-percentage-point negative growth shock" – a drop in the economy, that is –"increases the likelihood of civil war the following year by nearly one-half."

Future tense

Since the weather yields such interesting findings about the past, it makes sense that economists are also tempted to use it to anticipate the future. In their second paper on the potential effects of global warming, Deschjnes and Greenstone try to predict mortality rates in the US in the last quarter of the current century.

Unlike in their paper on agriculture, the news in this one isn’t good. They estimate, using one of the latest (and most dire) climatological models, that the predicted rise in temperature will increase the death rate for American men by 1.7 per cent (about 21,000 extra fatalities per year) and for American women by 0.4 per cent (about 8,000 deaths a year). Most of these excess deaths, they write, will be caused by hot weather that worsens cardiovascular and respiratory conditions. These deaths will translate into an economic loss of roughly $31 billion per year.

Deschjnes and Greenstone caution that their paper is in a preliminary stage and that the increased mortality rate may well be offset by such simple (if costly) measures as migration to the Northern states – a repopulation that, even a decade ago, might have seemed unimaginable.

The debate is over. Those who have argued that the causality of global climate change is still empirically inconclusive must now not only drop the charge but also lend their weight to those who are calling for immediate and concerted international and national action. The last thousand scientific papers published on this subject have all confirmed a rise in carbon emissions and, in consequence, in global temperatures. Recently, the Stern review of the economics of climate change was submitted to the British Prime Minister.

A summary of the report was published in these columns (‘A climate for investment’, IE, October 31). It stated that 45 billion tons of greenhouse gases were leaching into the environment annually and that the concentration of carbon dioxide has increased from 280 ppm (parts per million) prior to the industrial revolution to around 430 ppm today. It emphasised that these increases were the result of human activity. Earlier in the year, I heard Sir John Houghton, one of the world’s foremost meteorological scientists, present an equally stark picture. "Business as usual" he said would swamp low lying areas like Bangladesh because of the rise in sea levels, devastate cropping patterns caused by the extremes in weather conditions and displace millions from their natural habitats. Stern and Houghton, among others, have the same message: if action is delayed the consequences will be irremediable and the price of inaction will be paid by our children. But if there is a coordinated response, emission can be stabilised at sustainable levels of 450-550 pm.

I often ask whether this message is getting through to our decisionmakers in government and industry. I know that the ministry of environment is cognisant of the threat. Their reported involvement in a ‘Pan Asian Eco Plan’ is testament of their intent. I know that questions are being debated across different levels of government. What should government do to find a substitute for oil as transportation fuel? What steps need to be taken to drive down the costs of renewable energy sources? What initiatives should government provide for industry towards the development of appropriate technologies? But these questions are not catalysing concerted government action.

There is the all-encompassing explanation: government does not walk the talk. In addition, there are two specific reasons. One, officials do not see climate change as a vital strategic ingredient of public policy. It does not receive the same attention as does energy security. This may be because of lack of knowledge or underestimation of the costs, or simply because of terminology. Two, the current institutional structure does not lend itself to holistic decision-making. We have seven separate central government ministries directly or indirectly involved with energy — the ministries of petroleum and natural gas, power, coal, non-conventional energy, atomic energy, the Planning Commission and the PMO. The latter two have no functional responsibility. There are therefore five cabinet ministers; five distinct bureaucracies; five constituencies and at least five groups of vested interests that have a direct bearing on energy policy.

Each ministry has an understandably narrow perspective. Its interest is in protecting its constituents and in pursuing its particular agenda. Thus, the ministry of power and/or coal will press for thermal power generation and given the current relatively high price of oil/gas and the abundance of coal reserves, it does make a compelling economic argument. The question is whether someone in government is also reviewing these arguments against the potential longer term costs of carbon emissions. Who has both the mandate and the authority to take an integrated view? Certainly the prime minister’s office, but then given other priorities it can hardly be expected to don the mantle of executive responsibility for all energy related matters. The Planning Commission has the mandate to review but not the authority to enforce. The ministry of environment has neither the mandate nor the authority nor the expertise. This institutional ambiguity works against bridging the gap.

National governments will indeed approach it from their own economic and energy position but the consequence of their policies will be ultimately global. It is therefore imperative that this subject be tackled at several levels — national and international. A few years ago I had argued for the creation of a South Asian Forum for Energy Development (SAFED). One, to draw attention to the opportunity cost of "energy nationalism" and, two, to ask whether the pursuit of economic self-interest could help lower the political hurdles to regional cooperation. Such a forum should be contemplated today to heighten awareness of the costs of carbon emissions and to catalyse a subcontinental approach to climate change.

Ultimately, it is a matter of political will and legislative priority. In the absence of legislation, energy companies will not be incentivised to accept a renewable obligation; car manufacturers will not be encouraged to reduce CO₂ emissions from new cars; builders will not improve the energy efficiency in buildings and there will be limited effort to develop the mix of technologies and energy sources to durably reduce emissions.

Climate Summit

An alarming picture of the consequences of global warming being painted here all week has upped pressure on 80 ministers, expected here from Wednesday at an international conference on climate change, to take urgent action.

Oceans are rising, threatening coastal populations, drought is recurring, cultural sites are under threat and economic development in Africa risks being restricted, non-governmental organisations have warned. Delegates at the conference are focusing on looking to the future after the Kyoto Protocol, an effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions that lead to the depletion of the ozone layer and global warming, expires in 2012.

Climate predictions based on varied scenarios of global trends on climate change and its impact has led climate experts and policy makers to come up with the solution of integrating climate adaptation strategies into core response mechanisms.

With the recently-concluded Conference to the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change stressing on adaptation to climate change, an International Conference on Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change will be held in the capital.

The two-day-long conference, starting on December 7, will be attended by global experts on climate change, policy makers and academicians.

Jointly organised by the Union Ministry of Environment and Forests the conference will deal with evolving a broad scientific consensus that human induced climate change is taking place at a significant rate and poses a threat to global development efforts. The conference will act as a common platform for exchanging information, challenges faced and strengthening commitment to future strategies and programmes.

As predicted by global experts, an increase in the mean annual temperature of 2-5 degree Celsius is projected by the end of the century.

According to the model results, north India and eastern parts of the peninsular region will get warmer than other parts of the country.

इस सदी में हिमालय पर सबसे बड़ा संकट इसके ग्लेशियरों का लगातार पीछे खिसकना है। इन ग्लेशियरों के सिकुड़ने की गति लगातार बढ़ती जा रही है। वैज्ञानिकों का मानना है कि इसे रोकने के लिए उपाय नहीं किए गए, तो इसके दुष्प्रभाव पूरे देश में दिखाई देंगे। अलकनंदा में विष्णु प्रयाग और भागीरथी में टिहरी जल विद्युत परियोजनाओं के लिए बने बैराजों में पानी की कमी जैसे दुष्प्रभाव अभी से दिखने लगे हैं।

हिमालय से निकलनेवाली अधिकतर नदियां इन्हीं ग्लेशियरों से जल संग्रह कर पूरे देश की पानी की जरूरतों को पूरा करती हैं। ये ग्लेशियर देश में शुद्ध पानी का सबसे बड़ा जरिया है। सर्दियों में हिमालय की चोटियों में बर्फ गिरने से साल भर इनसे पानी रिसता रहता है और यहां से निकलने वाली गंगा, यमुना, सतलुज, ब्रह्मपुत्र आदि नदियों के जरिए पूरे देश में वितरित होता है। कोलकाता के भूविज्ञानी डा. एम. के. बंदोपाध्याय ने इन ग्लेशियरों पर कई साल तक रिसर्च करने के बाद पाया कि हिमालय के अधिकतर ग्लेशियर तेजी से घटते जा रहे हैं। उन्होंने पाया कि हिमालय में पश्चिम से पूरब तक जितने भी बड़े ग्लेशियर है, सब में सिकुड़ने की गति इस वक्त सबसे ज्यादा है। हिमाचल प्रदेश में लाहौल स्फीति क्षेत्र के चंदा घाटी स्थित बारा सिंगरी ग्लेशियर सालाना 44 मीटर पीछे खिसक रहा है। उत्तरांचल के गौरीगंगा घाटी स्थित संकल्पा ग्लेशियर सालाना 22 मीटर खिसक रहा है। इस सूची में तीसरे स्थान पर गोमुख ग्लेशियर है, जो हर साल 15 मीटर सिकुड़ रहा है। बंदोपाध्याय ने लद्दाख से लेकर सिक्किम व अरुणाचल प्रदेश तक फैले हिमालय के ग्लेशियरों की स्टडी के बाद अपनी रिसर्च तैयार की है। उन्होंने पाया कि जम्मू कश्मीर में तेजीवन मर और स्टाक ग्लेशियर क्रमशः पांच और छह मीटर सालाना सिकुड़ रहे हैं। उत्तरांचल में चमोली जिले के नंदा देवी क्षेत्र स्थित त्रिशूल ग्लेशियर 10 मीटर, मिटारतोली ग्लेशियर 8 मीटर, ईस्ट कामेट ग्लेशियर 5 मीटर सालाना खिसकता जा रहा है। सिक्किम में तीस्ता नदी के बेसिल स्थित जेमू ग्लेशियर और तीस्ता खाग्से ग्लेशियर 8 मीटर सालाना घट रहे हैं।

ये ग्लेशियर सिंधु, सतलुज, भागीरथी, अलकनंदा, गौरीगंगा और तीस्ता नदियों के जल प्रवाह का मुख्य जरिया है। इन नदियों पर इस समय बड़ी संख्या में जल विद्युत परियोजना निर्माणाधीन हैं, जबकि कई तैयार हो चुकी हैं। नदियों में जल प्रवाह के इन स्रोतों के संकट में पड़ जाने से इन परियोजनाओं के भविष्य पर भी संकट के बादल मंडराने लगे हैं।
नवभारत टाइम्स (नई दिल्ली), 10 Nov. 2006

न तो हिमालय बढेगा और न ही माउंट एवरेस्ट चोटी बढ़ेगी और न ही हिमालय के ग्लेशियर पिघलने जा रहे हैं। यह कहना है चीन के भूगर्भ वैज्ञानिकों का। उनका यह भी कहना है कि हिमालय पर्वत ने अपनी लंबाई बढ़ाना बंद कर दिया है।

गौरतलब है कि हिमालय पर्वत की श्रृंखलाएं भारतीय व यूरेशियाई पठार के बीच घर्षण और संघर्ष का नतीजा है। जिसकी प्रक्रिया छह करोड़ 50 लाख साल पहले शुरू हुई थी। यहां के मीडिया में छपी खबरों के मुताबिक चीन के जाने-माने भूगर्भ वैज्ञानिक बियान क्वांताओं ने कहा कि अभी तक हमारा ऐसा मानना था कि घर्षण जारी रहने तक इसकी ऊंचाई बढ़ती रहेगी। लेकिन हाल ही में वहां एक अभियान के दौरान हमें कई ऐसी घाटियों का पता चला जो खुद यूरेशियन पठार में तनाव बल को दर्शाती है।

यह अकसर कहा जाता है कि अगला विश्व युद्ध पानी के मसले पर लड़ा जाएगा। हम यह नहीं जानते कि यह आशंका वाकई सच है। लेकिन हम सभी यह अच्छी तरह से जानते हैं कि पानी को लेकर हमारे देश में जबरदस्त संग्राम छिड़ा है और इन संग्रामों की भूमिका हमारी सरकारों और उनकी नीतियों ने जान बूझकर लिखी है। याद कीजिए, वर्ष 2004 की श्रीगंगानगर की उस घटना को, जब अपने खेतों की सिंचाई के लिए नहर के पानी पर अधिकार जताते चार किसान पुलिस की गोलियों के शिकार हुए थे। अब यह सिलसिला बढ़ता जा रहा है। पिछले महीने राजस्थान के ही घड़साना में पानी के लिए प्रशासन और किसानों के बीच हिंसक संघर्ष हुआ एवं इलाके में कर्फ्यू लगाने तक की नौबत आई।

Thousands of dead fish have been floating along the banks of the Yamuna between Mathura and Agra due to the increased water pollution.

With dissolved oxygen content in the river being reduced to zero as a result of sudden discharge of untreated effluents upstream from open drains and barrages, the quality of water has deteriorated drastically, sources said. This is the third time that such a tragedy has struck the river’s aquatic life in recent times.

In fact, discharge has affected supply to domestic users. On Friday, nearly half the city of the Taj went without water. The water supplied on Saturday was pale yellow and not fit for drinking.

Agra Water Works has used a record quantity of chemicals to clean the water, "but there’s a limit to which you can use these harmful cleaning agents like bleaching powder and chlorine," said an official.

Officials of Uttar Pradesh State Pollution Control Board and Central Pollution Control Board have been investigating the cause of the sudden rise in pollution levels. A few open drains in the city and heavy discharges from Hindon and Okhla barrages have been identified as the culprits.

Jawahar Ram, general manager of Agra Water Works, was hopeful of restoring normalcy within a day as efforts were being made to release some fresh water into the river to dilute the pollutants.

Officials have also outlined urgent steps to contain the discharge of industrial effluents into the river and to ensure that the sewage treatment plants run efficiently.

During Friday’s survey, one treatment plant was found closed

Cleaning Yamuna on the Thames pattern requires constant investment for building and maintaining infrastructure, a committee appointed by the Supreme Court has said in its interim report. The cost should be recovered from users, it said. The apex court will hear the case on Tuesday.

The committee which was constituted to monitor Yamuna cleaning up operation has said that the sewage treatment plants that were built for cleaning up of the river were not utilised. This is because the sewage/drainage system does not exist. Wherever, it exists, it is often choked and need refurbishment and repair.

Zeroing in on such prevailing ground realities, the report said: "The approach of laying sewage lines and connecting sewerage networks to treatment plants requires constant investment in building and maintaining infrastructure."

"If the cost of infrastructure cannot be met from users the system will become unsustainable – the money is needed for capital investment and for operation and maintenance," the report said.

Saying that there are huge costs involved in the project, the committee has said a rethink on sewage technology management should be considered.

The committee has submitted to the apex court that the strategy of setting up of treatment facility at the drain outfalls needs a techno-economic evaluation by a technology neutral consultant. It is therefore necessary that the Delhi Jal Board should consult the committee in framing the terms of reference (TOR) of the consultants so that a suitable answer can be found, said the report.

If you ever wondered why the Yamuna resembles a drain most of the time, here is what the Supreme Court-appointed committee has to say: For nine months in a year, the river – in its journey through Delhi – receives only drain water and no fresh water supply.

"The city withdraws clean water from the Yamuna at Wazirabad for its use and returns only waste. In other words, the river in Delhi has no fresh water flow for nine months in a year and hence has lost its assimilative capacity," the committee informed the SC through its interim report. The only time the river receives fresh water is during the monsoons.

This has been identified as one of the root causes because of which the river remains as polluted as it was more than 10 years ago, when the court had suo motu taken on itself the task of cleaning up the river, terming it lifeline of Delhi.

A Bench comprising Chief Justice Y.K. Sabharwal and Justices C.K. Thakker and L.S. Panta was informed on Tuesday by advocate A.D.N. Rao, the convener of the committee, that urban development secretary M. Ramachandran has become the new member of the committee in place of Anil Baijal, who has retired. Environment activist Sunita Narain is the other member.

When the Bench adjourned hearing on the matter till December 5, Rao said the committee would examine further options to speed up work under the Yamuna Action Plan to clean the river and would submit another report before the next date of hearing. The report said large parts of the city remained unserved due to sewerage network leading to direct discharge of drain water into the river. "Drainage is often choked and is in urgent need of refurbishment and repair," the report said.

The setting up of sewerage treatment plants (STPs) have not served their purpose as treated effluent from the STPs is discharged into open drains that lead to the river, it said.

Delhi Jal Board, in charge of the city’s sewerage system, has informed the committee that it is exploring innovative solutions for sewerage management.