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CLAUDE ARPI | Wednesday, February 8, 2012

03 February, 2012
Countercurrents.org
National and state governments in India are well bracing up for climate change vagaries under national disaster management policy and programmes. Various government agencies and NGOs are building up their efficiencies in dealing with crisis situations. Even farmers’ organizations and civil society organization are ready to come forward to put their helping hands in such disaster situations. However yet there are some critical missing links that we need to address.

What can Japan learn from the devastation wrought on the southernmost Indian state in 2004?

IMD claims its radars chased ‘Thane' to the wire

India Meteorological
Department (IMD) has had a mostly successful outing tracking the very
severe cyclone ‘Thane' to its logical conclusion.

Cyclone Thane was a little out of season. However, for those living in Tamil Nadu, it just added a little more to the weather uncertainties that we have been experiencing in recent times. It crossed the coast on 30th December bringing with it large scale devastation in Puducherry and Cuddalore. This article deals with the impact of the cyclone and some useful lessons learnt right from day one.

Stockholm, Sweden forty years ago. The UN Conference on Human Environment. It pushed ‘environment’ into the international agenda when it declared that there was ‘a need for a common outlook and for common principles to inspire and guide the peoples of the world in the preservation and enhancement of the human environment’. Right at the beginning, the statement refers to man’s power to transform his environment on an unprecedented scale. The statement also talks about globalization and the growing number of problems that affect the common international resources.

ICT is both energy saver and energy guzzler rolled into one. On the
saving side, we have intelligent devices and applications that have
brought about revolutionary energy saving in almost all sectors and our
lifestyles. According to consulting firm McKinsey, boosting the use of
intelligent devices and applications could reduce global CO2 emissions
by as much as 15% by 2020.

Read more..

Oceans at Risk, say Scientists...

 
 ... While Indian pelagic fisheries seem to thrive

The future of marine life in the oceans is bleak and marine
degradation is happening at an unprecedented rate, if we believe a

Friends,

This month we have the story so far on the controversial pesticide Endosulfan; how military debris threatens our oceans; about new digital maps of the Indian coast; a look at Vedanta and POSCO; nuclear tipping points; how India's new mineral policy is letting down adivasis; about sanitation in cities; a talk on the ancient ingenuity of water harvesting; open sourced blueprints for civilisation; a BBC Horizon documentary on What Darwin didn't know and much more.