Coal India Ltd (CIL) has said its focus, for now, would be on raising output, not on diversification.

The government-owned company, the country’s near-monopoly producer, had diversification plans on coal liquefaction (CTL) and gasification. Last year, Partha S Bhattacharya, former chairman and managing director (CMD), had indicated CIL might foray into production of shale gas.

UN members yesterday took their first steps in a marathon to negotiate a new global pact by 2015 that for the first time will place rich and poor under a common legal regime to tackle climate change.

Meeting in Bonn, the 195 parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) began wrangling over how to work towards the target enshrined at their landmark conference in Durban, South Africa, last December.

India needs to take lessons from the killing of rhinos in South Africa in order to take pre-emptive lessons in protecting its tigers.

Three rhinos are being killed every day in South Africa for their horns, which outrival the price of gold in the black market. Rhino poaching is being carried out by sophisticated criminal syndicates who are smuggling these horns to Asia.

New Delhi: The surge of poaching of rhinoceros in South Africa could lead to threats to the one-horned Indian rhino in Assam and West Bengal if the African country decides to go ahead and demand opening the international trade in rhino horns. Speaking at the first stock taking meeting of the World Bank-led Global Tiger Recovery Programme in Delhi, Keshav Varma, programme director of the Global Tiger Initiative, warned that South Africa, unable to contain poaching, was inclined towards opening the trade in rhino horns.

Scientists from 15 countries are calling for a better political response to the provision of water and energy to meet the challenge of feeding a world of 9 billion people within 30 years.

The joint statement by some of the world's leading science academies was issued on Thursday ahead of the G8 summit in the United States. It is part of the annual lobbying effort aimed at focusing the attention of world leaders on issues the scientific community regards as crucial.

Petty hunters, corrupt wildlife officials and Asian traffickers have all been snared in South Africa’s crackdown on rhino poaching as special prosecutors battle syndicates feeding the trade in horns.
More than 160 people are currently before the courts, exposing the complex supply chain stretching from South African parks to Southeast Asian consumers, said Joanie Spies, a prosecutor with the Rhino Project.
‘Slowly but surely we’re moving upwards and getting higher people who did not pull the trigger,’ Spies said.