Even as drought persists in parts of Kenya's arid north, intense rains are claiming lives in other parts of the country – flooding slums in the capital Nairobi, sweeping away hikers in the Rift Valley, and destroying crops.

Many Kenyans shake their heads in dismay at the increasingly extreme and volatile weather, which is costing money as well as lives in east Africa's economic powerhouse.

Reluctance to raise ambitions to cut greenhouse gas emissions due to economic constraints is threatening progress towards limiting global warming, delegates at United Nations' climate talks in Germany warned on Monday.

The talks in Bonn, which end on May 25, are partly to discuss ways of raising the level of ambition on cuts but the worsening eurozone crisis and battered global economy have increased reluctance to commit to more financially onerous cuts by the end of the decade, delegates told Reuters.

The government has got a commitment of $8.3 million (around Rs 720.93 million) grant under the Global Environment Facility (GEF).

"Nepal has received a commitment of $2.7 million grant for biodiversity, $4 grant for climate change and $1.6 million grant for land degradation," chief of foreign assistance division

under the finance ministry Lal Shankar Ghimire briefed the Global Environment Facility's sixth constituency meeting of South Asia held in Maldives.

The 6th South Asia Constituency Meeting of Global Environmental Facility (GEF) was conducted in Maldives. The meeting was inaugurated by Dr. Mohamed Ali, Chief of staff of president’s office in a ceremony held in Nasandhura Palace Hotel on 15 May 2012.. Abdullahi Majeed, Deputy Minister for Housing and Environment welcomed the participants to the meeting and wished them a pleasant stay in Maldives. Speaking at the inaugural ceremony Dr.

There's garbage in your greens. That fresh cucumber in your salad or your dose of green leafy veggies could well have been grown using raw sewage discharge.

As water scarcity mounts, farmers in the semi-urban areas are increasingly using sewage or waste water to grow veggies, cereals and fodder. The big concern is a large part of the sewage discharge from the urban centres is untreated, thereby triggering contamination risks on health and environmental issues.

Irked By Comments On Inclusive Growth
The government has taken exception to the ‘biases’ in the United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Asia Pacific Human Development report, titled, One Planet, which was released on Thursday.

UNDP, required to play a neutral role in international governance, has recommended that India and other countries in the Asia Pacific region take greater responsibility to reduce emissions and warned that ‘inclusive growth’ would increase emissions, a trade-off that India cannot afford.

The World Bank urged global governments Thursday to heed the environment when pursuing prosperity, rejecting what it called a myth that green growth is a luxury most countries cannot afford.

The bank in a report said political considerations, entrenched behaviour and a lack of appropriate financing systems are the chief obstacles to environmentally friendly development.

It urged governments to rethink their approach to growth, measuring not only what is being produced but what is being used up and polluted in the process.

The vast swirl of plastic waste floating in the North Pacific has grown 100-fold over the last 40 years, according to a research paper published Wednesday.
And scientists warned the killer soup of microplastic — particles smaller than five millimetres – threatened to alter the open ocean’s natural environment.
In the period 1972 to 1987, no microplastic was found in the majority of samples taken for testing, said the paper in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters.

Rising carbon dioxide emissions will cause a global average temperature rise of 2 degrees Celsius by 2052 and a 2.8 degree rise by 2080, as governments and markets are unlikely to do enough against climate change, the Club of Rome think tank said.

Failing to tackle climate change in the first half of this century will put the world on a dangerous track to warming in the second half, even though global population should peak in 2042 at 8.1 billion and economic growth will be much slower than expected in mature economies, the Switzerland-based body said in a report on Tuesday.

Huge reserves of underground water in some of the driest parts of Africa could provide a buffer against the effects of climate change for years to come, scientists said on Friday.

Researchers from the British Geological Survey and University College London have for the first time mapped the aquifers, or groundwater, across the continent and the amount they hold.

"The largest groundwater volumes are found in the large sedimentary aquifers in the North African countries Libya, Algeria, Egypt and Sudan," the scientists said in their paper.