UN climate talks are going nowhere, as politicians dither or bicker while the pace of warming dangerously speeds up, one of the architects of the Kyoto Protocol said.
‘It seems to me that negotiations are returning to square one,’ said Raul Estrada, the ‘father’ of the world’s only treaty to specify curbs in greenhouse gases, as the first talks for a new global pact took place in Bonn.
In a telephone interview from Buenos Aires this week, Estrada defended his beleaguered accord and said efforts to engineer a replacement were in trouble.

Green and rights organisations on Wednesday demanded adequate allocation in the upcoming national budget keeping climate change adaptation activities in consideration.
The organisations working on climate change made the demand at a press conference at the National Press Club to press home their 11-point charter of demands.

20-year master plan has been formulated for the development of the country’s road communication network.
The Roads Department secretary, MAN Siddique, handed over a copy of the first-ever master plan to the communications minister, Obaidul Quader, on Tuesday.
Experts of the master plan formulation committee, including the chief engineer of Roads and Highway Department, Aminur Rahman Laskar, were present on the occasion.

Scientists have identified thousands of sites in the Arctic where methane that has been stored for many millennia is bubbling into the atmosphere.
The methane has been trapped by ice, but is able to escape as the ice melts.
Writing in the journal Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this ancient gas could have a significant impact on climate change.
Methane is the second most important greenhouse gas after CO2 and levels are rising after a few years of stability.

The Philippine fisheries chief on Sunday said he had ordered a study into a foreign species called the ‘knife fish’ that was posing a threat to the local fishing industry at the country’s largest lake.
The knife-shaped fish are reported to be multiplying in Laguna Lake where they are displacing the native species, said Asis Perez, head of the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources.
‘It is carnivorous. It will compete with our existing natural fish. We have yet to get a full appreciation of the damage caused by this fish,’ he told AFP.

Most of the smokers feel encouraged to keep on this bad habit because of easy availability and comparatively lower prices of tobacco products, says a survey report.
The government’s present and former officials, who attended the launch of the report, however, said it was not always possible to reduce the rate of smoking only by increasing prices of cigarettes while awareness was much more necessary in this regard.
The programme was organised by the Campaign for Clean Air at the BIAM Foundation auditorium in the capital on Friday.

Tiger (Panthera tigris) populations, on average, have declined 70 per cent across the world, including Bangladesh, in the last 30 years, according to the Living Planet Report 2012.
The Living Planet Index for tigers in the Report said that forced to compete for space in some of the most densely populated regions on the earth, the tiger’s range has also declined to just 7 per cent of its former extent.

Two ICDDR,B doctors, also experts in cholera management, returned home Wednesday after a two-week visit to the Horn of African countries —Somalia and Kenya — where they trained more than 50 health professionals, including doctors and nurses, in cholera case management.
Heavy rainfall caused increased fears of a wide- scale cholera outbreak in an already volatile region marred by warfare and subsequent breakdown in basic infrastructure and services.

Japan will put a commercial satellite into space on Friday, officials said, in its first foray into the European-and-Russian-dominated world of contract launches.
The H-IIA rocket, which was developed by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) and has been launched 20 times since 2001, will carry a South Korean payload, a JAXA official said.
The satellite, the KOMPSAT-3, was developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute of South Korea to carry out earth observation, officials said.

The Chittagong Water and Sewerage Authority is embarking upon four mega projects at a cost of Tk 4143 crore to mitigate water crises for next 50 years which were shelved for a decade, official sources said on Thursday.
The construction work of the Karnaphuli water supply projects had already started in June 2011 which would be completed in December 2013, the sources said.
CWASA is formally going to implement its other three mega-schemes by June 2015 targeting to meet the demand of water consumption for next five decades in view of rapid urbanisation and industrialisation.