Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is likely to veto some controversial aspects of a forest bill passed by the Congress last month as pressure mounts against the text days before the country hosts a large UN conference on sustainable development.

The bill, a revision of Brazil's Forest Code, grants partial amnesty to landowners who had illegally cleared some of their forests until as recently as 2008, relaxing the legal requirements for reforestation of these areas.

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.

Europe yesterday warned at climate talks in Bonn that efforts to forge a new global pact to avert environmental disaster were in danger of floundering, and some pointed fingers at China.

Nine days into talks meant to set the stage for a United Nations gathering in Qatar in December, where countries must adopt an amendment to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, negotiators complained that procedural bickering was quashing progress hopes.

President Dilma Rousseff is facing one of the defining moments of her presidency as pressure builds on her to veto a bill that would open vast protected areas of forests to ranching and farming, potentially reversing Brazil’s major gains in slowing Amazon deforestation.

The Maharashtra Government is planning to adopt the ‘Brazil pattern’ for boosting cotton yield in the State.

“It wants to boost productivity from 475 kg per hectare to 600 kg per hectare,” a senior Maharashtra Government official said.

Brazil, in spite of having just 14 lakh hectares of rain-fed land for cotton cultivation, produces about 1,495 kg of cotton per hectare. The global average is 745 kg per hectare.

The model is based on high density cultivation practices where, at times, about one lakh shrubs are planted in a one acre area, the official said.

While its Latin American neighbors move forward with national climate laws, Argentina is backsliding on actions to tackle its greenhouse gas emissions as the country struggles to meet energy demand from a fast-growing middle class.

Argentina's GDP grew 7.3 percent last year, driving demand for energy that is overwhelmingly derived from fossil fuels. According to Argentine Institute of Petroleum and Gas (IAPG), energy demand rose 5.1 percent in 2011.