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The ruling Awami League and its front organisations are observing the historic March 7 on Monday through elaborate programmes in the capital and across the country. In the city, party chief and prime minister Sheikh Hasina, along with the party leaders and activists, placed wreaths before the mural of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman at Bangabandhu Museum at Dhanmondi around 7am. To mark the occasion, Awami League will hold a discussion meeting at Bangabandhu International Conference Centre at 3pm. Prime minister Sheikh Hasina is due to address the meeting as chief guest. Bangladesh Betar (radio), Bangladesh Television and other private television channels will air special programmes highlighting the significance of the day. The historic significance of the day dates back to 1971 when Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, addressing a huge rally at Suhrawardy Udyan, had called for the liberation movement. Responding to his call, people of the then East Pakistan had taken up arms to fight the Pakistani occupation army through a nine-month bloody war that finally heralded the birth of Bangladesh as an independent nation. President Mohammad Zillur Rahman and prime minister Sheikh Hasina delivered in separate statement underlined the historic significance of the day. The president in his statement said: "March 7 is an unforgettable day in the history of Bengali nation. On this day, I, with profound respect, remember the father of the nation Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman who led struggle for establishing the independent and sovereign Bangladesh." He also said that the 'Golden Bengal', the long cherished dream of Bangabandhu, is yet to be built. The nation has to fight against hunger, poverty, superstitions and the adverse effects of climate change to bring into reality the dream of Golden Bengal. The prime minister in her statement said, "That historic speech of March 7 echoed the wish of the nation ahead of the liberation war after years of oppression by the colonial power of West Pakistan." She also said, "The magic speech had united the entire nation and led to the liberation war."

OTTAWA, Oct 14 - bdnews24.com/Reuters) Canadians voted on Tuesday in an election that was likely to produce the third minority government in four years and give Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper a renewed mandate. The 37-day campaign focus on who would be the best manager in troubled economic times intensified with the global turmoil, and polls showed voters sticking with Harper though his support came off the highs it reached a few weeks ago. The last poll of the campaign, by Ekos, projected that he would increase his seat count in Parliament at the expense of the main opposition Liberal Party but would still be almost 20 short of the 155 needed for a majority. Harper had offered only modest tax breaks and spending initiatives, arguing that a steady hand would get Canada through the turbulence that has hit world markets. Liberal leader Stephane Dion, a bookish francophone who hesitates in English, found it difficult at a time of relatively high energy prices to sell his plan for a new carbon tax to fight climate change, accompanied by income tax cuts and subsidies for the poor. He started to cut into Harper's lead as he charged the prime minister was not doing enough to prevent financial contagion from spreading into Canada. But the Conservative lead over the Liberals widened again in parallel with specific action taken to improve Canadian bank liquidity, and analysts said the market rebound this week will make voters more optimistic. One of Dion's problems is that he is competing with two other parties on the left nationally -- the New Democrats and the Greens -- and a fourth party, the separatist Bloc Quebecois in the province of Quebec. "If we pool our votes together, we will win this election," he said in a last-minute pitch on Monday. The trouble is that the other parties are making similar pitches that they are the best one to deny Harper a second term. As a split on the right guaranteed Liberal rule from 1993-2006, a split on the left now helps the Conservatives. The careers of at least Harper and Dion are potentially on the line. Dion was just named Liberal leader in December 2006 and if he loses, his party will be required to decide whether to replace him. Harper said on the weekend that whichever leader loses will likely be replaced. He also said that even if he only gets a second minority rather than a parliamentary majority, he will be in a stronger position than he had been 2 1/2 years into a minority mandate. Harper had called the election in September on the grounds that the Parliament was deadlocked and that the others were threatening to topple him this autumn. Opposition parties usually give new governments a pass at the start of their mandates. Canada has staggered voting hours across the country, running for 12 hours in each province and ending at 7 p.m. EDT (2300 GMT) in Newfoundland, 7:30 p.m. in Maritime provinces, 9:30 p.m. EDT from Quebec through Alberta and 10 p.m. EDT in British Columbia.

“Growing up in Oklahoma, wearing the hijab, I had to come to terms with being visibly Muslim,” the Iranian American organizer and activist said. “People would call me a terrorist or pretend to run me over.” And when policymakers held up the hijab and women’s rights as part of the rationale for military action in Afghanistan or economic sanctions on Iran, she said, “that’s when I started really thinking about clothes.” A decade and a half later, Katebi, 27, has become a leading critic of the global garment industry, particularly its fast-fashion sector. Where many of us might avoid peering too closely at our wardrobe’s iffy provenance, Katebi has devoted herself to that hidden world — and to ultimately tearing it down. “Rather than just, say, campaigning to get garment workers paid a dollar more,” she said, “we’re calling for an end to the system that puts workers in these positions to begin with.” The “we” there is Blue Tin Production, a small apparel manufacturing workers’ cooperative in Chicago run by working-class women of colour, which Katebi founded in 2019. Blue Tin executes clothing contracts in ways that are antithetical to the contemporary sweatshop: full equity and transparency, no exploitation, abuse or greenwashing (a term applied when a company exaggerates its eco-consciousness). The goal is to produce high-quality luxury apparel while shining a light on systemic issues stitched into fashion. In addition to running Blue Tin, Katebi works as a community organiser, speaker and writer, all while attending law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “I run on saffron ice cream and coloniser tears,” she said. (The following interview has been condensed and edited.) Q: What does abolitionism mean in the context of your work? A: Fast fashion is a very specific type of manufacturing, basically focused on speed and output. While the rest of the fashion industry usually works on a four-season year, fast fashion works on 52: There’s a new season every week. There’s no way that amount of product can be created in a way that’s ethical or sustainable. The system requires violence in order to function. Assaults on workers by managers are common, on top of the general subjugation and enforced poverty that give people little choice but to do this work. That violence can’t be reformed away. An easy analogy is slavery — you can ask slave owners to be nicer, but the institution is inherently violent. So Blue Tin is an abolitionist response to the fast-fashion industry. Q: How did fashion become your focus? A: I discovered fashion blogs just before college. It was a fun outlet. But some of my favourite people were working with brands on the BDS list, (a list of companies and individuals that support Israel). They weren’t thinking about the politics behind the aesthetics. When I created my first website, it was to push people to think about their clothes in a more complex and nuanced way. Everything relates to fashion. Fashion is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, for example — it contributes more greenhouse gases than all of maritime shipping and air travel combined, (according to figures from the United Nations Environment Program and the Ellen MacArthur Foundation). Then there’s the connection between sustainability and policing, which upholds the ability for cheap labour to exist. That, in turn, allows certain neighbourhoods to be disproportionately impacted by, say, a coal power plant that pollutes the air, which in turn keeps the community there from thriving. Any issue that you care about, you can find in fashion. On top of that, 1 in 6 people in the world works in the fashion industry. No one knows this because the majority of them are working-class women of colour and farmers. Q: Can you provide an example of how this system resists change? A: In Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, factories will intentionally hire undocumented workers and then not pay them for months. When the workers get upset, management calls (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) and has a self-reported raid of their own factory. Some of our former Blue Tin members have gone through that process. Q: What are your biggest challenges at Blue Tin? A: Abolition means putting an end to this industry, and it also means thinking about the world we want to create in its place. How can we create clothes in a way that’s not violent? That feels like a low bar, but it’s extremely complicated and stressful. I cry about once a week. Q: How does that play out on a day-to-day basis? A: At Blue Tin we try to prioritise people who are “unhirable” by the labour industry’s standards. That means people who may not speak English, or who have child care needs, or maybe they need to sit and process the trauma that they’ve been through because they’re domestic violence survivors. People who our systems have harmed in different ways. The year we started, one of our members got a call that her uncle and his 8-year-old son were killed in bombings in Damascus, Syria. We asked her, “What do you need in this moment?” We stopped production to go on a walk with her and to build care around her. So we were very behind on our production, and we lost that client. At the end of the day, we live in a capitalist world. We can’t create a utopia — so the question is, how can we create the best of what this can be, even if it’s flawed? Q: I’ve noticed that you tend not to use the word “refugees” when describing the Blue Tin team, though others do. A: For me, the class part is more important than the identity part because I hate identity politics. And “immigrant” and “refugee” have become catchphrases in the fashion industry. People are like, “Aw, a cute sewing circle of immigrant women.” The team didn’t want to be framed by their trauma. We’re trying to completely reimagine the fashion industry and build garment worker power, so brands should work with us because of these incredible skill sets and backgrounds, not because they feel bad. Oh, sure, go for the PR; I don’t care. But really it’s the beautiful clothes, and them bringing art and craftsmanship back to fashion where it belongs. Q: What’s everyone working on now? A: Right now they’re in “panty purgatory,” as they call it. They’ve been making underwear nonstop, for a big client. I think that’s finally done, but we’re basically panty entrepreneurs now. Q: How did your consciousness around these issues take shape? A: A lot of my values come from Islamic values of divine compassion and divine mercy. Those don’t sound radical, but it actually is a radical demand that we instead live in a world of compassion and mercy. So I’m all for an assault on empire and capitalism. But some nurturing is required, too. You have to hold both at the same time. I guess you throw your Molotov, but you also give someone a hug. ©2022 The New York Times Company

The installation of Scott Pruitt, who sued the agency he intends to lead more than a dozen times as Oklahoma attorney general, reinforces expectations on both sides of the political divide that America will cede its position as a leader in the global fight on climate change. Senators voted 52-46 to approve Pruitt, who was to be sworn in later on Friday afternoon at the White House. Only one Republican, Senator Susan Collins of Maine, voted against him. Two Democrats from energy-producing states, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, voted for his confirmation. "I have no doubt that Scott will return the EPA to its core objectives,” said Republican Senator James Inhofe, also of Oklahoma, adding the agency had been guilty of “federal overreach, unlawful rule making, and duplicative red tape,” during President Barack Obama's presidency. The nomination of Pruitt, who sued the EPA more than a dozen times on behalf of his oil-producing state and has doubted the science of climate change, upset many former and current agency employees. Nearly 800 former EPA staff urged the Senate to reject Pruitt in a letter this week, saying he had "shown no interest in enforcing environmental laws." Earlier this month, about 30 current employees at an EPA regional office in Chicago joined a protest against Pruitt held by green groups. Trump is likely to issue executive orders as soon as next week to reshape the EPA, sources said. The Republican president has promised to kill Obama's Clean Power Plan, currently held up in the courts, that aims to slash carbon emissions from coal and natural gas fired power plants. Trump also wants to give states more authority over environmental issues by striking down federal regulations on drilling technologies and getting rid of an Obama rule that sought to clarify the EPA's jurisdiction over streams and rivers. 'Overzealous' agency Conservatives warmly welcomed Pruitt's confirmation. "For far too long the EPA has acted in an overzealous manner, ignoring the separation of powers, the role of states and the rights of property owners," said Nick Loris, an economist at the Heritage Foundation. Democratic Senator Ben Cardin, however, said he was concerned that if the administration does not enforce emissions cuts such as outlined in the Clean Power Plan, it would increase US pollution and harm the country's leadership in international efforts to curb climate change. Opponents of Pruitt also protested his ties to the energy industry. Republicans have the majority in the Senate, but Democrats spoke through Thursday night and Friday morning on the Senate floor, trying to extend debate on Pruitt until later in February when 3,000 emails between him and energy companies will likely be revealed by a judge. An Oklahoma judge ruled this week that Pruitt will have to turn over the emails between his office and energy companies by Tuesday after a watchdog group, the Center for Media and Democracy, sued for their release. The judge will review and perhaps hold back some of the emails before releasing them, a court clerk said. Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer told reporters that Majority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell had moved to "strap blinders" on his fellow Republicans by not waiting for the release of Pruitt's emails. Environmentalists decried the approval. "If you don’t believe in climate science, you don’t belong at the EPA," said May Boeve, the head of environmentalist group 350.org.

The long-term outlook for the world's biggest coral reef system had deteriorated and action was needed to counter the effects of climate change, said the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation committee, which sits under UNESCO. Australia's Environment Minister Sussan Ley said Canberra would challenge the recommendation, saying it went against advice given just a week ago, and defended Australia's protection of the reef. "This is a complete subversion of normal process," Ley said. Australia has for years been battling to keep the Great Barrier Reef, a major tourist attraction that supports thousands of jobs, off the "in danger" list, a step that could potentially lead towards its eventual removal as a World Heritage Site. In 2015, its lobbying included hosting UNESCO World Heritage delegates on a trip to an unspoiled stretch of the reef, but since then, scientists say, the world's largest living ecosystem has suffered three major coral bleaching events due to severe marine heatwaves. Ley said she and Australia's Minister for Foreign Affairs Marise Payne raised their concerns overnight with the Director General of UNESCO, Audrey Azoulay. "This decision was flawed. Clearly there were politics behind it," she said, without elaborating. A government source said Canberra believes China, which chairs the committee, is responsible for the move amid a souring of relations between the two countries. "We will appeal but China is in control," the source said, declining to be named as he is not authorised to talk to the media. China's embassy in Canberra did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Environmental groups, however, rejected that the recommendation was political and said it was clear Australia was not doing enough to protect the reef, especially on climate change. "There is no avenue for any government to have any input. This recommendation is reached by world renowned scientists," said Richard Leck, Head of Oceans for the World Wide Fund for Nature, Australia. Leck was part of a group of conservationists that lobbied 13 members of the UNESCO committee to reach its recommendation, which will now be considered by all 21 countries on the committee. Australia is part of the committee, but by convention it will not able to vote if a consensus is unable to be reached. Australia's reliance on coal-fired power makes it one of the world's largest carbon emitters per capita, but its conservative government has steadfastly backed the country's fossil fuel industries, arguing tougher action on emissions would cost jobs. Relations between Canberra and Beijing soured last year after Australia accused China of meddling in domestic affairs, and worsened when Prime Minister Scott Morrison sought an independent inquiry over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic.

A new report offers a glimpse of one of the effects below the surface of the ocean: the scale of microplastics building up on the ocean floor. In what researchers called the first such global estimate, Australia’s national science agency says that 9.25 million to 15.87 million tons of microplastics — fragments measuring between 5 millimeters and 1 micrometer — are embedded on the sea floor. That is far more than on the ocean’s surface, and it is the equivalent of 18 to 24 shopping bags full of small plastic fragments for every foot of coastline on every continent except for Antarctica. It is an issue that activists have long warned about, even as the fight to clean up the ocean has focused largely on the eradication of single-use plastic products like shopping bags. The findings were published Monday in a new study by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, or CSIRO. “It really points to the ubiquity of the problem. It is really everywhere, all the time and increasing,” Britta Denise Hardesty, a principal scientist for CSIRO and an author of the study, said in a phone interview Wednesday. Microplastics are not confined to the ocean. They are also found in air particles and can be spread by wind. A variety of microplastics was even detected in the human gut. Scientists believe that 4.4 million to 8.8 million tons of plastic enter the sea every year. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a gyre of refuse between California and Hawaii that is estimated to be more than twice the size of Texas, carries more than 87,000 tons of trash. In recent years, hundreds of plastic objects have been found in the bellies of dead whales around the world. While cities have banned plastic bags and straws, the use of disposable plastic packaging has surged amid the coronavirus pandemic as consumers grow more concerned about hygiene and contamination. Over time, some plastics break down into smaller pieces and sink into the ocean. More buoyant types of plastic do not sink by themselves and either wash up on beaches or end up in deepwater. Microbes and mussel colonies growing on floating plastic often cause the entire mass to sink from the added weight. Hardesty said that microplastics could be ingested by smaller plankton and fish on the seabed. Once eaten by fish, the microplastics can end up in the human food chain. The aim of the study, Hardesty said, was to put a scale to the problem. She described it as the first such accounting. Using a robotic submarine, the scientists collected 51 deepwater samples of sand and sediment in the Great Australian Bight in 2017, hundreds of miles from the shore, and determined the global estimate based on the average number and size of the particles. The study found zero plastic particles in some deep-ocean sediment but up to 13.6 particles per gram in others, a figure up to 25 times larger than what had been found in earlier deep-sea studies of microplastics. The scientists said they made conservative estimates to take into account the full range of samples. They also eliminated fibres or other materials from their count to rule out the potential contamination of the samples. Hardesty said that it was important to prevent plastic from ending up in the ocean in the first place. She said she was hopeful that awareness about the pollution would lead to more sustainable policies and shifts in behaviour. “Most of what ends up in oceans are in people’s hand,” she said. “They can see that their behaviour — their actions and purchasing power — is very powerful, and that can result in change.”   © 2020 New York Times News Service

Though raised in the Iranian capital, the civil engineer had left the country at 22 to continue his studies abroad, earning renown for his research into how climate change affects water supplies. About six months earlier, however, the Iranian government had wooed the 36-year-old away from a prestigious professorship in London to a cabinet-level post as deputy environment minister. On this day, he was finishing up a four-country trip representing Tehran at meetings on water resources and other environmental issues. After takeoff, he connected to the Wi-Fi and checked his Twitter feed. Several Twitter accounts had posted old pictures of him at a party dancing with women – considered a grave breach of decorum by ultra-conservatives in Iran's cleric-dominated government. The more he scrolled, the more alarmed he grew. "Kaveh Madani, deputy head of the department of environment, gets drunk and dances in a building that belongs to the government of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Malaysia," read one Tweet, written in Farsi. "He is laughing at the Iranian nation." Madani suspected that Islamist hard-liners were behind the post, and he worried that intelligence officers might be waiting to arrest him at the Tehran airport. It wasn't idle speculation. A feud was playing out between ultraconservatives and the relatively moderate government of his boss, President Hassan Rouhani, and Madani had already been caught up in it. Agents had arrested him when he landed in Tehran to take the job as a cabinet official the year before, and had subjected him to several days of interrogation on suspicion of being a Western spy – a common slur against internationalists. In the next few months, he was questioned and sometimes detained several more times. This time, however, it felt different. This time, they had attacked him publicly. This time, he feared, he wouldn't be freed. "The way the Islamic Republic intelligence works, they don't manage risk," he said. "They remove risk." Kaveh Madani is photographed at his home in Toronto, Canada, September 14, 2019. Reuters On that day, however, fortune favoured Madani: He'd missed his direct flight to Tehran because of an unplanned meeting and was booked on a connection through Istanbul. When he landed in Turkey, he never boarded the plane to Tehran, and instead went into hiding. Kaveh Madani is photographed at his home in Toronto, Canada, September 14, 2019. Reuters Kaveh Madani's career path, though tinged with perilous intrigue, speaks to the particular challenges faced by scientists and environmentalists in the developing world – both politically and practically. Climate science has been politicised in rich nations, too, of course, including the United States and Australia. In Iran, climate change is political, but not in the same way. Iranian officials don't reject climate change. Instead, they blame the country's chronic water shortages and desertification on the Western industrial nations that have caused the lion's share of carbon emissions. Yes, that's a problem, Madani says, but he also believes it's a fig leaf. He says his research has found that the government mismanaged water for decades, allowing it to be overused by developers and farmers and diverting it away from its source to cities. There's another difference between Iran and countries such as America and Australia: They don't put scientists and policymakers in jail. An even more fundamental problem for scientists in the developing world is a paucity of funding for all sorts of basic research. That's clear from the rankings of the Hot List, a Reuters tally of the world's 1,000 most influential climate scientists. Although the developing world accounts for about 70% of the world's population, scientists working in those countries make up just one in 20 of the Hot List's membership. To win research opportunities, many bright young researchers go abroad to more affluent nations. That's what Madani did, leaving for Sweden and then California for graduate school. Some never return. "There's very, very little opportunity to get funded," said Saleemul Huq, a climate-adaptation researcher from Bangladesh whose son studied under Madani at Imperial College London. "So, we spend almost 100% of our time teaching and very little of our time doing research because the potential for getting funding to do that is very limited." Madani's political troubles have had another impact. He took refuge in Toronto, disrupting his research. He was still occasionally publishing, but his output went down and he fell off the Hot List. Reuters made numerous attempts to contact the Iranian government for this story. Reporters contacted officials at the Iranian mission to the United Nations in New York and attempted to reach officials in Tehran by telephone and email from Dubai. No one with the Iranian government responded. Several of Madani's friends and colleagues, in both the United States and in Iran, corroborated much of his version of events. Reuters also reviewed and translated tweets from the period immediately before he went into hiding, which confirmed he was a target of intimidation, as well as contemporaneous news reports of his detentions. "WATER IS A BIG DEAL" Madani, now 39, was born in Tehran soon after the 1979 Islamic Revolution, growing up with parents who lectured him on the importance of managing and preserving water. They both worked for a government agency that manages water resources in Iran, a nation that includes arid and dusty grasslands, snowy mountains, hot and humid coastal plains and lush, rainy forests. He took their passion with him to university, making it his focus while other students were still trying to find their path. "He was always explaining to people that … water is a big deal," said Ali Mirchi, a fellow civil engineering student at the University of Tabriz who now teaches at Oklahoma State University. "And it's already a big deal" in Iran. "It's going to be a big deal around the world." Residents salvage their belongings from the rubble of a damaged house in the aftermath of Cyclone Amphan, in South 24 Parganas district in the eastern state of West Bengal, India, May 22, 2020. Reuters After earning his undergraduate civil engineering degree in 2003, Madani left Iran to continue his studies in Sweden. From there, Madani went to America, where he earned a doctorate at the University of California, Davis. He later joined Imperial College London, teaching water management and game theory – a method of analysing problems based on the available choices that each participant in the game has. Residents salvage their belongings from the rubble of a damaged house in the aftermath of Cyclone Amphan, in South 24 Parganas district in the eastern state of West Bengal, India, May 22, 2020. Reuters In several papers, Madani has taken those principles and applied them to water use problems. A simple example would be a farmer who needs water for irrigation and a developer who needs water for new homes. Both have water needs, and there's enough for both if they take moderate steps to reduce their use. But if they distrust each other, they'll grab more water than they need, depleting the supply for everyone. Madani says these are the type of problems that governments are most qualified to equitably resolve by ensuring everyone keeps to the deal. And it's this type of work where he feels he can make the biggest difference, bridging the gap between science, communities, government policy and climate change. He said game theory is not a hammer for all nails. But it is a technique that helps him find solutions. "It's the mathematics of cooperation and conflict," he said. "You can use it to either project the likely outcomes of conflict situations or decision-making situations, or to consult and advise and come up with strategies to get the result that you want." His primary area of study is managing freshwater, without which most life on land couldn't exist. But as the planet warms with climate change, some parts of the Earth are seeing less rainfall, and water has become more precious. Iran is one of those places. Water resources are a tricky subject in Iran given the government's role in their management. But Madani has not been shy about publicly criticising the government. In 2016, before his return, he and his old roommate at the University of Tabriz, Mirchi, and another scientist wrote a paper – a follow-up to one Madani published in 2014 – that blamed the Department of the Environment and other agencies for what they described as "water bankruptcy." Mismanagement had caused lakes, rivers and wetlands to dry up and resulted in desertification and more frequent dust storms, they said. Madani says the Iranian government hides those failures behind the excuse of climate change, which has indeed led to hotter summers and less rainfall. "This makes the problem very tricky, especially for people like me who work in developing countries," Madani said. "Because we have to warn about climate change and make sure climate change is recognised as a serious threat, but at the same time make sure that governments don't misuse climate change." The 2016 paper was a direct challenge to the government. But some reform-minded officials at the Department of the Environment still wanted him to return to the fold, despite objections from hard-liners, he said. In September 2017, he left his burgeoning academic career behind and returned home to take the job as deputy vice president with responsibilities that included international affairs, social engagement and innovation. CONTROVERSIAL RETURN Madani was one of the most visible members of the Iranian diaspora to return to work with the government. It was a big deal. Here was a Western-educated, YouTube-posting, Twitter-cognoscenti member of the post-revolution generation coming home to help the country. He was appointed as Iran's delegate to various climate negotiations and was given a diplomatic passport. In November 2017, he represented Iran at the COP23 climate-change implementation meetings in Bonn, Germany. The next month, he traveled to Paris for the anniversary of the 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change. Many countries were represented by prime ministers and presidents at both gatherings. Madani represented Iran. At home, Madani quickly made an impact, said a water specialist colleague in Iran. He used social media to recruit actors, politicians and even some clerics to environmental causes, most notably to discourage single-use plastic containers. People make their way to a safer place before the cyclone Amphan makes its landfall in Gabura outskirts of Satkhira district, Bangladesh May 20, 2020. Reuters The water specialist said Madani also confronted officials over projects that moved water from one area of the country to another, which Madani says was damaging the environment where the water was drawn. People make their way to a safer place before the cyclone Amphan makes its landfall in Gabura outskirts of Satkhira district, Bangladesh May 20, 2020. Reuters "In conferences, as a speaker, he was very outspoken," said the specialist, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "He criticised people and officials. He tried to change their behaviour." At the time, the colleague was hopeful that Madani's return signalled that Iran was ready to deal with some of its chronic water problems. Madani and his associates, he said, had plans to create a centre for monitoring water resources and forecasting droughts. But trouble was brewing. "The system had not handled a case like me," Madani said. "There were so many stories about reversing the brain drain and bringing the young generation back that they had a hard time getting rid of me or fully trusting me." When he first arrived in Iran, intelligence officers with the Revolutionary Guard detained and interrogated him for several hours about his time overseas and accused him of conspiring with other countries, including Israel, he said. The officers also confiscated his computer and phone, Madani said. He suspects they hacked into his Gmail account and downloaded 14 years of emails – later using them on the day of his flight to Istanbul. Reuters was unable to determine who hacked Madani's photographs and posted the denunciations on Twitter. Madani said he knows it was them because he couldn't get into his email and had to ask his interrogators for his new password. There was another arrest and several interrogations in the intervening months between his return to Iran in September 2017 and his decision to flee, but he was released each time. When he was last arrested, in February 2018, authorities also detained eight Iranian environmentalists working to protect the endangered Asiatic cheetah. One of the eight died in custody. Iranian officials said Kavous Seyed Emami, a Canadian-Iranian who was one of the founders of the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation, had killed himself. His family doubts that. The rest of the group have since been sentenced to prison on charges of conspiring with a foreign country or spying. On his flight to Istanbul a little later that same year, Madani decided that his patrons had lost the internal battle. His colleagues in Iran were crushed. Their plans for a water-resources centre were scrapped when Madani left. "The day he went from Iran, it was so dark a day for me," the water specialist said. Suzanne Maloney, an Iran scholar now at the Brookings Institution, was at the US State Department when Madani worked for the Iranian government and followed his efforts and difficulties through news accounts and other sources. Like Madani, Emami and others, expatriate Iranians have returned to Iran to serve their country only to find themselves locked up, she said. "I think Kaveh Madani was very lucky to get out of Iran without a worse outcome than he suffered," she said. "And I'm sure it was a very harrowing experience." Bangladesh scientist Huq, who ranks 208th on the Hot List, said he and Madani had seen each other episodically through the years. Still, Huq didn't know what happened to Madani in Iran until September 2019, 18 months after Madani went into hiding, when the two bumped into each other at a UN summit on climate change in New York. Madani's fate, he said, wasn't surprising, given the limits on criticism of the government. "If the space for critics is very limited, it's almost impossible for us to function." CHALLENGES IN THE DEVELOPING WORLD Huq said a bigger problem for climate scientists in the developing world is the lack of funding for research. For example, the 2014 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment report mentioned Bangladesh more than 100 times, citing scores of academic papers, Huq said. But only a quarter of the lead authors of those papers were working in his country. Climate change causes acute problems for those living in the developing world, whether water shortages or failed crops. Individual governments must focus on practical and immediate solutions – by digging new, deeper wells, limiting irrigation or reusing sewerage to make potable water. After all, Madani argues, most of those countries can do little to meaningfully reduce emissions anyway. With the exception of richer developing countries, including India, Saudi Arabia and even Iran, most developing nations are tiny emitters of greenhouse gases, so even if they eliminated all fossil fuels, it would do little to help deal with the consequences of climate change. In Iran, Madani says that combating the effects of climate change and other environmental problems is complicated by Iran's volatile relationship with the United States and some of its neighbours, such as archrival Saudi Arabia. Consider the international sanctions against Iran, put in place at various times by the United States, its allies and the United Nations to punish Iran for shipping attacks in the Persian Gulf, supporting international terrorism and its pursuit of nuclear weapons. In November, Madani published a paper examining how the sanctions are hitting the Iranian environment particularly hard. Kaveh Madani, a Rice Senior Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, walks through campus at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US, January 28, 2020. Reuters For example, exporting refined petroleum products to Iran has been illegal for decades. So, Iran developed its own crude oil refineries. The result is dirty, polluting fuels that run dirty, polluting electrical power plants. Kaveh Madani, a Rice Senior Fellow at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies, walks through campus at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, US, January 28, 2020. Reuters Likewise, exporting cars to Iran is also illegal. So, Iran developed its own car industry. The result is inefficient cars. The sanctions also allow the Iranian government to blame the West reflexively for Iran's problems, said Maloney, the Iran scholar, when internal factors such as corruption or mismanagement are at play. "I think that's symptomatic of the Islamic Republic's approach to all of its internal problems, to find some external party to blame for them," she said. RICH VS. POOR Like Madani, Huq studied and taught overseas. Today, he heads up the International Centre for Climate Change and Development at the Independent University in Dhaka, Bangladesh. He says there's a distinct difference between climate change research in Europe and North America and the work being done in developing countries, such as Bangladesh. Scientists in the West are good at working on technological solutions to climate change, such as solar technology or carbon-dioxide scrubbing systems. He said scientists in poor countries such as Bangladesh rarely have enough money or expertise to do that kind of research. Besides, some of the worst effects of climate change, including longer droughts, dangerous heat waves, rising sea levels and more dangerous tropical cyclones, will almost certainly hit the developing world harder. "The richer countries have the ability to develop and then bring hardware to countries like ours and install it with just a screwdriver," he said, referring to devices such as modern windmills and solar panels. And that's all well and good, he said, "but I would argue that the poor actually know a lot more about how to deal with problems of poverty and climatic impacts than the rich do." Bangladesh, for example, has adapted to the growing threat of tropical cyclones. "In the past decades, we have had super cyclones which have killed hundreds of thousands. We had one in 1970 that killed half a million people." Last year, Super Cyclone Amphan developed over the Bay of Bengal and rapidly developed into one of the region's largest recorded storms. But when it struck the Indian and Bangladeshi coast on May 20, only 128 people died, including 26 in Bangladesh. "In the last decade, we have built the world's best cyclone warning and shelter system," he said. "Instead of hundreds of thousands of people dying, the number was in the dozens. "The cyclone still happened. It still did a lot of damage. Houses, infrastructure, people lost their homes and their farms. But they didn't die." It happened that way because scientists persuaded the nation's leaders that the threat from cyclones was growing and then helped create a warning, evacuation and shelter plan, based on the best available research. Lives were also saved by children knocking on doors. "Kids went to different households and brought the widows and the mothers who don't have anybody to help them," Huq said. "The kids made sure that their own grandparents go to the shelter." Sometimes so-called solutions to climate change are less effective – and can even exacerbate the problem, Madani said. When he was in Florida, Madani teamed up with one of his students, Saeed Hadian, a fellow Iranian, to examine the consequences of using alternative energy sources as demand for electricity increases and countries move away from fossil fuels. Where there is plenty of unused land, acres of solar panels might make sense. In other places, where agriculture needs the land, nuclear power or offshore wind farms might be a better solution, Hadian argued. California, for example, gets nearly a fifth of its power from hydroelectric dams. But those dams lose massive amounts of water from evaporation that could otherwise be used for farming and drinking. By comparison, less water is used or polluted when extracting natural gas and coal from the ground and used in power plants than is lost to evaporation. Madani isn't advocating the burning of coal, of course; his point is that some low- or zero-carbon choices – such as dams – can have unintended consequences for climate change, the environment and ecosystems. For some countries, the threat to water supplies posed by a hydroelectric dam might mean a natural-gas or nuclear power plant makes more sense. Madani says it's worse in North Africa and the Middle East, where governments have been building dams for decades as a cheap and clean source of electricity. "Hydropower is not a good idea, but most politicians love it," he said. "You sell it as renewable; you sell it as clean. And it comes with a lot of concrete. And it's really good for the local economy, in the short run." In the long run, vast amounts of water are lost to evaporation. Demand for water around the dam almost always increases, and in regions seeing less rain because of climate change, it also starves downstream farmers, sometimes thousands of miles away in different countries, of water needed for irrigation. "Beware of unintended consequences," Madani said. DROPPING OFF THE HOT LIST In the months after he stepped off that plane in Istanbul, Madani was officially listed as a visiting professor at Imperial College London. In reality, he had gone into hiding. Relying on old friends for help, he made his way from Turkey through Europe to North America. But even after Madani made it across the Atlantic, he didn't feel safe. He spent about eight months bouncing between the United States, where he's a permanent resident, and Toronto, where his wife had lived before they married. He did interviews and spoke at conferences, but no place was home. In January 2020, he felt safer. He took a job as a visiting professor at Yale University's MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies and split his time between the New Haven campus and Toronto. Madani ranked 684th on the Reuters Hot List in mid-2019. By December 2020, however, he had dropped off the list. That's because he was publishing less as he sought a haven. Even since joining Yale, he hasn't published as much as he once did. "There have been a lot of papers and invitations to join teams that I've said no to, because I was doing other things or I thought that what they're saying is too theoretical and has no major policy implications or impact," he said. Madani plans to stay in academia but wants to do more in the lay world, where he can talk to the public, both in the West and Iran. He remains a prolific Farsi tweeter, sometimes criticising, sometimes defending Iran. He's also published opinion pieces, on subjects including smog in his hometown of Tehran, in publications such as the Guardian newspaper and online journals. The COVID-19 pandemic has clipped his wings too. He was already worried about traveling because of threats from Iran, but his travel is now nonexistent, and he's reduced to streaming video presentations. He keeps in touch with his aging parents back in Iran, now in their 70s, via WhatsApp. His father recently suffered serious health problems, and the separation is particularly hard to bear. So his mother was excited when UCLA's Center for Near East Studies streamed a conversation in Farsi with Madani in October on how Iran struggles with drought, water shortages and other environmental problems resulting from climate change, mismanagement, development and politics. But during the presentation, which was carried on an Instagram live feed, his mother scrolled through the comments. The organised Madani haters were back, some of them attacking him by crudely insulting her. "My mom was heartbroken," Madani said.

More weather disasters and economic recovery could bring a "tipping point" that jolts governments into far tougher action to combat climate change, the UN climate chief said on Wednesday. Christiana Figueres also told Reuters that government efforts so far to combat global warming were nowhere near enough to avert heatwaves, droughts, mudslides and rising sea levels projected by the UN panel of climate scientists. "I do remain confident that at some point we will have a tipping point at which countries will be able to move faster, much more," she told the Reuters Global Energy and Climate Summit during June 6-17 climate talks in Bonn. She declined to say when but said she could not rule out that it happened "very soon". Asked about possible triggers, she mentioned extreme weather, new technology and economic revival. "More weather disasters -- if there is one thing we can count on we can count on that. We will definitely get more weather disasters," she said. Clean technologies could help cut costs of fighting climate change, she added. "And then of course the financial crisis that many economies are barely coming out of. We need to move beyond that to a more stable financial situation." "All of these things need to come together at the same time," said Figueres, a Costa Rican who is head of the Bonn-based UN Climate Change Secretariat. "CREATIVE THINKING" For the time being, however, she said that progress in addressing climate change was too slow. "It's very clear that the political process is not working at the pace or the scale that is required by science," she said. And she noted that data from the International Energy Agency showed carbon dioxide emissions rose 5.9 percent last year to a record high despite promised cuts. She said governments in Bonn were having "creative thinking" about the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the existing UN pact that obliges almost 40 developed nations to cut emissions by at least 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. Japan, Russia and Canada say they will not take part in an extension beyond 2012, arguing that all countries should instead sign up for a new, binding global deal. Developing nations say Kyoto countries must take the lead and extend the pact. Asked how the standoff would be broken, Figueres said: "It is way too early to identify what path is going to be taken here because they are not at the point of establishing a path. They are opening up the menu of possibilities." She also said that it was impossible to say when a binding UN climate deal might be reached. Negotiations have lost momentum since the Copenhagen summit in 2009 failed to reach a binding UN deal as planned. She also said that she "pretty confident" that governments would put up cash to arrange another meeting before environment ministers meet for annual talks in Durban in late November. Many governments have been reluctant to put up new cash with so scant progress in 2011. Last year, they agreed to a goal of limiting global warming to a maximum of below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial times, but have yet to decide sufficient cuts in emissions. Figueres said that governments were working as planned to design a green climate fund, due to channel $100 billion a year to developing nations from 2020, a new mechanism to share clean technologies and a system to aid the poor adapt to impacts of climate change. "I expect that in Durban countries will be able to adopt the designs of all of these mechanisms," she said. "Having said that, despite all of these huge advances, we are nowhere where we should be in the context of the scientific information we have."

REUTERS Dec 7- (bdnews24.com/Reuters)---The head of the UN climate panel painted a stark picture of the future unless nations agree tough emissions curbs to control global warming. Following are some of the key points from Rajendra Pachauri's speech on Monday to delegates from nearly 200 countries gathered in Copenhagen for Dec 7-18 talks aimed at sealing the outlines of a climate pact. Pachauri, drawing on the work of the panel's 2007 Fourth Assessment report, said climate change, without steps to curb the rapid growth of planet-warming carbon emissions and deforestation, would in all likelihood threaten the livelihoods of billions of people. He told delegates the world faced: -- More heat waves and heavy rainfall events; -- Increase in tropical cyclone intensity; -- Possible disappearance of Arctic sea ice by the latter part of the 21st century; -- Decrease in water resources in semi-arid areas, such as the Mediterranean Basin, western United States, southern Africa and north-eastern Brazil; -- Possible elimination of the Greenland ice sheet and a resulting contribution to sea level rise of about 7 metres; -- Approximately 20 to 30 percent of species at increased risk of extinction if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius; -- Greater stress on water resources from population growth and economic and land use change, including urbanisation; -- Significant future increase in heavy rainfall in many regions as well as some in which the mean rainfall is likely to drop. Greater flood risk threatens infrastructure and water quality; -- Likelihood that 20 percent of the world population, or more than two billion people, will live in areas where river flood potential could increase by the 2080s; -- Increasing threat to low-lying island nations and coastal cities and deltas from rising seas. Seas are already rising because of melting glaciers and icesheets as well as expansion of the oceans as they warm; -- Even keeping global average temperatures to within 2 degrees C would likely lead to sea level rise of between 0.4 and 1.4 metres because of thermal expansion of the oceans; -- In Africa, by 2020, between 75 and 250 million people are projected to be exposed to water stress due to climate change and in some African countries, agricultural yields could be cut by half. -- To limit the average global rise in temperatures to between 2 and 2.4 deg C, the cost of curbing emissions by 2030 would not exceed 3 percent of global GDP, the climate panel says. -- Global emissions need to peak by 2015 to ensure that the temperature rise stays within 2 to 2.4 deg C.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon sought increased backing on Sunday for efforts to impose peace and order in Afghanistan from representatives of key countries involved there. Afghan President Hamid Karzai and foreign ministers and UN envoys from 17 other nations gathered at UN headquarters in the latest of a series of meetings before Tuesday's opening of the annual General Assembly gathering of world leaders. Since US-backed forces overthrew Afghanistan's Taliban rulers in late 2001, Karzai's government has struggled to keep control, faced with a resurgent Taliban, independent-minded warlords and rising drug production. About 50,000 foreign troops are deployed there, including a NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, and separately led US forces. A UN mission supports and advises the Afghan authorities on economic and political development, justice reform, humanitarian aid and anti-drug programs. "If I expect one thing to come out of this meeting, it is that they reinforce the commitment to Afghanistan," UN Afghanistan envoy Tom Koenigs said of the session attended by the country's neighbors and key NATO states. "We need more troops, we need more money and we need a sustainable commitment in Afghanistan," he said on Friday Diplomats, however, said Sunday's meeting was not expected to result in specific pledges. Western countries have been pressing for the United Nations to boost its profile in Afghanistan after Koenigs quits at the end of this year. U.N. officials said, however, that Ban would say he would not expand the U.N. mission until there were sufficient security guarantees -- a reference to continuing fighting in the south. Koenigs said the Taliban insurgency could not be defeated by military means alone. "There must be a comprehensive strategy which comprises civilian and military action, so we come to a political offensive against the insurgency," he said. An Afghan presidential spokesman said last week Kabul was ready for peace talks with the Taliban but would not accept preconditions demanded by the Islamist rebels, such as the withdrawal of all foreign troops. The Afghan meeting is the latest of several Ban has convened to underscore the central UN role. Ministers discussed Darfur on Friday and Iraq on Saturday. A meeting of Middle East mediators was scheduled for later on Sunday and a major conference on climate change will be held on Monday.

Addressing the One Planet Summit in the French capital, she has also announced that her administration will initiate measures to increase tree coverage by two percent in Bangladesh within the next five years. “I would like to urge the developed countries to fulfil their commitments in bringing climate justice and meeting historical responsibility. We can secure the world only through shared responsibility.” The summit at the Elysee Palace in Paris on Tuesday brought together local, regional and national leaders, as well as those working in public and private finance to chalk out ways to boost support global efforts to fight climate change. The prime minister said Bangladesh spends more than one percent of its GDP on combating climate change despite being a developing nation. “Bangladesh is one of the most vulnerable countries to the impact of climate change although we are not responsible for this threat. Yet, with our limited resources, we are addressing the consequences of climate change by mitigation and adaptation.” French President Emmanuel Macron received Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina upon her arrival at the Elysse Place in Paris, where the One Planet Summit was held on Tuesday. Photo: PID During her speech at the summit hosted by French President Emmanuel Macron, the Bangladesh leader said Bangladesh faces a huge challenge because of the influx of more than a million of Rohingya people from Myanmar. French President Emmanuel Macron received Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina upon her arrival at the Elysse Place in Paris, where the One Planet Summit was held on Tuesday. Photo: PID “On humanitarian ground, we have given them shelter on 1, 783 hectares of our forest land in Cox’s Bazar. This crisis has severely affected our forest and environment in that area. In this situation, climate adaptation has become a major challenge.”  Emphasising afforestation as a key factor to address environment degradation, she said a $50.76 million project is under way for conservation of the Sundarbans— the world’s largest mangrove forest. “In the coastal region, we have been creating green belt for protecting people from cyclones and tidal surges, coastal erosion and saline water intrusion. Around 67,000 hectares of land has been identified for afforestation in this region,” added the prime minister. Bangladesh has stepped up efforts to make its agriculture climate resilient, she said. “We are also working on reducing dependency on ground water for urban water supply.” Appreciating Macron’s leadership on the issue, Hasina reiterated her commitment to implement the 2015 Paris climate accord. “I recall the launching of Global Pact for the Environment at the UN in September this year.” The prime minister said she strongly believed that joint efforts for resilience and adaption “would contribute in peace, stability and prosperity, and addressing inequalities across societies.”

BRUSSELS, Jan 28, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Global temperature rises due to climate change could be kept below the critical 2 degree mark by fast international action to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent by 2030, a report said on Monday. Scientists say that if temperatures increase beyond 2 degrees, humanity faces severe environmental fallout, such as melting polar ice caps and rising sealevels. Increasing numbers of scientists and politicians question whether the 2 degrees goal is achievable, given the slow progress of international negotiations so far. But it is not too late to avert dangerous climate change, said the report by consultancy McKinsey and backed by ten organizations including energy companies, Enel, Vattenfall and Royal Dutch Shell. "Achieving the deep emissions cuts required to keep global warming below the 2 degrees limit is possible but difficult," said McKinsey director Tomas Naucler. Global investment of 530 billion euros ($686 billion) would be needed by 2020, and 810 billion by 2030, the report added. Countries would offset much of the cost by simultaneously cutting their bills for oil, gas and coal, resulting in a net cost of less than 1 percent of gross domestic product. The report comes one month after the European Union agreed ambitious measures to cut carbon dioxide and amid renewed optimism US President Barack Obama will lend fresh momentum to global talks after having pledged to curb emissions at home. Obama will start reversing former President George W Bush's climate policies on Monday with steps to raise fuel efficiency standards and to grant states authority to limit emissions from cars, officials say. Keeping climate change manageable would require fast global action, said the report. A 70 percent cut in emissions by 2030 would see greenhouse gas emissions peaking at 480 parts per million (ppm), roughly the level scientists say would cause a 2 degree rise. But a 10-year delay would make it difficult to keep greenhouse gas emissions below 550 parts per million (ppm). "Every year of delay adds to the challenge, not only because emissions will continue to grow during that year, but also because it will lock the economy into high-carbon infrastructure," said the report.

Representatives of 26 of the world's small island states met in the Maldives capital Male on Tuesday to draft a resolution identifying climate change as a threat to human rights. The Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), concerned about rising sea levels, wants to present the resolution at a UN climate change conference in Bali next month. "It is time to put people back at the heart of climate change diplomacy," Maldives President Maumoon Abdul Gayoom told the conference. Ministers and diplomats met at an exclusive Maldives resort, one of more than 80 that underpin the Indian Ocean state's $1 billion economy but are directly threatened by rising sea levels. Delegates are expected to agree a declaration that climate change threatens the fundamental right to a safe, secure and sustainable environment, forcing developed countries to view rising seas through the prism of human rights. Gayoom, Asia's longest serving ruler after 30 years in power, has repeatedly raised the spectre of climate change on international platforms, warning the UN Security Council of the potential "death of a nation" in 1987. The Maldives' 1,200 coral islands sit less than 2 metres (yards) above sea level and are threatened with inundation if sea levels rise 59 cm (23 inches) by 2100 as predicted by the UN climate panel. It would cost an estimated $1.5 billion to provide sea defences for the country's deluxe $1,000-a-night resorts. The conference brings together officials from countries including Singapore, Micronesia, Grenada and the Seychelles, as well as environmental lawyers. Delegates are also expected to hammer out a portfolio of practical policies to counter climate change, with an emphasis on emissions reduction, rather than carbon trading.

CANBERRA, Mon May 4, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Australia's government put back its much-vaunted carbon-emissions trading scheme by a year on Monday, bowing to industry demands for more relief amid a recession while opening the door to an even deeper long-term reduction. Lacking the political backing to implement the world's most sweeping cap-and-trade scheme outside Europe, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said the regime would be delayed until mid-2011, but he still aimed to push laws through parliament this year. But the major opposition, Green opponents and a key independent senator immediately rejected Rudd's concessions as "flawed," making eventual success far from assured. "Starting slower because of the global economic recession and finishing stronger, with the prospect of a bigger outcome for greenhouse gas reductions... we believe gets the balance right," Rudd told reporters. The setback was not unexpected after months of hardening resistance to Rudd's plan, a cornerstone of his election platform. Some carbon industry players said the delay could help clear away uncertainty that had stymied early trade and clouded the outlook for corporate costs. The new draft included several short-term concessions to big industry in Australia, one of the world's biggest emitters per capita: a low fixed carbon price capped for a year at A$10 ($7.36), with a transition to full market trading in July 2012; and increased eligibility for free emissions permits, including 95 percent for the heaviest export-oriented polluters. But Rudd also left open the possibility of deeper reductions. While maintaining his interim 2020 emissions reduction target at 5 to 15 percent below 2000 levels, he said the government could increase the cut to 25 percent if other rich nations agreed to similar reductions at Copenhagen -- a measure aimed at appeasing Green party legislators who wanted tougher targets. But his overture fell flat, with Greens negotiator Senator Christine Milne calling the delay "environmentally reckless," and party leader Bob Brown unveiling an ad campaign against Rudd's climate credentials, running ahead of elections late next year. Key independent senator Nick Xenophon, one of two swing independent votes necessary to win passage, also rejected it as a "lame duck" when most Australian voters wanted climate action. "The government's (scheme) is fundamentally flawed. Their model is unfixable and the changes announced today are simply window dressing." COPENHAGEN, ELECTIONS LOOM Rudd is walking a difficult line, with business and conservatives pulling his center-left Labor party toward a softer carbon regime, and environmentalists demanding he not undermine global climate talks in Copenhagen in December, when world governments will seek a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. But Rudd's delay enables Australia to await the outcome of those talks before deciding whether to match tough world targets or opt for a softer target in the event of a global impasse. U.S. President Barack Obama's administration will likely be eyeing Australia's climate tactics as it prepares for its own Senate battle over creating a "cap-and-trade" law that would slash emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Brown said he had written to Rudd with an offer to break the Australian Senate deadlock and support the legislation if amendments made it environmentally effective. But the new plan still falls short of Green demands for an unconditional emissions cut of 25 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, with a commitment to move to a 40 percent cut if the climate talks in Copenhagen forge a new global climate pact. Major emitting industries and conservatives had complained the original regime start date on July 1 next year would hamper an economic recovery from a recession tipped to see 1 million unemployed by next year. The changes will help placate companies most exposed, like flag carrier Qantas Airlines, OneSteel and top steelmaker Bluescope, whose chairman last week attacked the emissions plan as an economic "de-stimulus." Australian electricity futures for later in 2010 fell 12 percent as the expected price of carbon was removed. Some participants in the nascent carbon market said the delay was welcome relief after months of deepening uncertainty. "I'm a little surprised but I suppose the good thing is at least it gets resolved... The worst outcome is continued uncertainty about what is going to happen," said Gary Cox, vice president of commodities and energy at global brokers Newedge. ($1=1.357 Australian Dollars)

In a sweeping new report, the International Energy Agency issued a detailed road map of what it would take for the world’s nations to slash carbon dioxide emissions to net zero by 2050. That would very likely keep the average global temperature from increasing 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels — the threshold beyond which scientists say the Earth faces irreversible damage. While academics and environmentalists have made similar recommendations before, this is the first time the International Energy Agency has outlined ways to accomplish such drastic cuts in emissions. That’s significant, given the fact that the influential agency is not an environmental group but an international organization that advises world capitals on energy policy. Formed after the oil crises of the 1970s, the agency’s reports and forecasts are frequently cited by energy companies and investors as a basis for long-term planning. “It’s a huge shift in messaging if they’re saying there’s no need to invest in new fossil fuel supply,” said Kelly Trout, senior research analyst at Oil Change International, an environmental advocacy group. Several major economies, including the United States and the European Union, have recently pledged to zero out their emissions responsible for global warming by midcentury. But many world leaders have not yet come to grips with the extraordinary transformation of the global energy system that is required to do so, the agency warned. “The sheer magnitude of changes needed to get to net zero emissions by 2050 is still not fully understood by many governments and investors,” Fatih Birol, the agency’s executive director, said in an interview. Net zero emissions doesn’t mean countries would stop emitting carbon dioxide altogether. Instead, they would need to sharply reduce most of the carbon dioxide generated by power plants, factories and vehicles. Any emissions that could not be fully erased would be offset, such as by forests or artificial technologies that can pull carbon dioxide directly out of the atmosphere. To reach that goal of net zero worldwide by 2050, every nation would need to move much faster and more aggressively away from fossil fuels than they are currently doing, the report found. For instance, the annual pace of installations for solar panels and wind turbines worldwide would have to quadruple by 2030, the agency said. For the solar industry, that would mean building the equivalent of what is currently the world’s largest solar farm every day for the next decade. For now, the world remains off course. Last month, the agency warned that global carbon dioxide emissions were expected to rise at their second-fastest pace ever in 2021 as countries recovered from the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic and global coal burning neared a high, led by a surge of industrial activity in Asia. “We’re seeing more governments around the world make net-zero pledges, which is very good news,” Birol said. “But there’s still a huge gap between the rhetoric and the reality.” President Joe Biden has made climate action a top priority of his administration and is pushing for an aggressive pivot away from fossil fuels at home and abroad. But his own pledge to cut US greenhouse gases at least 50 percent below 2005 levels by the end of this decade faces significant political obstacles. And at a virtual summit of 40 world leaders that Biden hosted last month, Japan, Canada and Britain joined the European Union in committing to steeper cuts but China, India and Russia did not. China still has plans for dozens of new coal-fired power plants, although President Xi Jinping said his country would “strictly limit increasing coal consumption” in the next five years. And companies in the United States and Canada are still targeting new oil and gas fields for development. The unevenness in global action comes even as scientists warn that the damages from rising temperatures are already reverberating around the globe. A report by the Environmental Protection Agency published last week found that in the United States, wildfires are now starting earlier in the year, heat waves are more frequent and flooding is more common. If the world’s governments want to change course quickly, the International Energy Agency has essentially offered a step-by-step guide for how they might do so. The agency sketched out one potential timetable: — This year, nations would stop approving new coal plants unless they are outfitted with carbon capture technology to trap and bury their emissions underground. Nations would also stop approving the development of new oil and gas fields beyond those already committed. — By 2025, governments worldwide would start banning the sale of new oil and gas furnaces to heat buildings, shifting instead to cleaner electric heat pumps. — By 2030, electric vehicles would make up 60 percent of new car sales globally, up from just 5 percent today. By 2035, automakers would stop selling new gasoline- or diesel-fueled passenger vehicles. By 2050, virtually all cars on the roads worldwide would either run on batteries or hydrogen. — By 2035, the world’s advanced economies would zero out emissions from power plants, shifting away from emitting coal and gas plants to technologies like wind, solar, nuclear or carbon capture. By 2040, all of the world’s remaining coal-fired power plants would be closed or retrofitted with carbon capture technology. — In 2035, more than half of new heavy trucks would be electric. By 2040, roughly half of all air travel worldwide would be fueled by cleaner alternatives to jet fuel, such as sustainable biofuels or hydrogen. The American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry trade group, said it agreed with the goal of a lower carbon future but still saw a role for oil and gas going forward. “Any pathway to net zero must include the continued use of natural gas and oil, which will remain crucial to displacing coal in developing nations and enabling renewable energy,” said Stephen Comstock, the institute’s vice president of corporate policy. The International Energy Agency warned that an energy transformation on the scale necessary would require “unprecedented” global cooperation, with wealthier nations helping poorer countries that lack the technological expertise or investment capital to decarbonize. It would also require a crash research programme to improve clean energy technologies. The world can make enormous strides in cutting emissions over the next decade by deploying technologies that are already widely used, such as wind turbines, solar panels and electric vehicles. But roughly half the emissions cuts by 2050 would come from technologies that are still in the demonstration or prototype stage, the report said, such as cleaner hydrogen fuels for steel plants, advanced batteries to juggle wind and solar output and devices to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. Governments will have to pay careful attention to the geopolitical upheaval that could accompany a rapid shift to clean energy, the agency said. For instance, mining for critical metals such as cobalt or copper would grow sevenfold over the next decade. The sharp decline in oil and gas production worldwide would likely mean that low-cost oil producers in places like the Middle East would assume a dominant share of the remaining market. Other challenges abound. While a push for clean energy could create some 30 million new jobs globally, another 5 million people in fossil-fuel industries could find themselves out of work. And, today, more than 785 million people worldwide currently have no access to electricity, and the agency warned that a shift away from fossil fuels should not leave them behind. “This isn’t too far out of line with what other academic reports have said, but it’s important that this is the International Energy Agency saying this,” said David Victor, a climate expert at the University of California, San Diego, who reviewed the report before its publication. “Companies or governments might come in and say they disagree with the specifics of what needs to happen, but this report essentially serves as a starting point for those discussions.” The agency concluded that limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius remains technically and economically feasible, but there is little margin for error or delay. “Making net-zero emissions a reality,” the report concluded, “hinges on a singular, unwavering focus from all governments — working together with one another, and with businesses, investors and citizens.”   © 2021 The New York Times

The demonstrations began earlier this week as a campaign by high school students, who jumped subway turnstiles to protest the second fare increase this year. But Friday night, demonstrators set fire to a dozen subway stations, several banks, buses and the headquarters of the country’s largest electricity provider, Enel Looters stormed into supermarkets, stores and pharmacies. One student was reported to have been killed by the police and another was wounded by rubber bullets during the demonstrations, which rattled one of Latin America’s most prosperous and orderly capitals. The state of emergency declared by Piñera imposes restrictions on citizens’ right to move about and assemble freely, and it gives the army authority over internal security. Speaking from the presidential palace around midnight, he said the measure was needed to restore order after the chaos caused by protesters, whom he called “delinquents.” The fare increase unleashed fury when it was announced Oct 6, coming at a time when the cost of living for poor and middle-class families has been rising while wages remain stagnant. “Everything that is going on is so unfair, because everything is going up: transportation fares, electricity, gas, everything, and salaries are so low,” said Isabel Mora, an 82-year-old retiree who receives a monthly pension of about $62. Piñera had announced earlier in the week that he would try to find ways to mitigate rising transportation costs. With the fare hike, rush hour rides now cost about $1.20. On Friday afternoon, as hundreds of people stormed into subway stations without paying, the protests spilled into the streets. Special police units barged into stations and deployed tear gas, beat up demonstrators and violently dragged people from subway cars to take them into custody. The subway system suspended service for several lines, and by nighttime it had been forced to shut down the entire network. Hundreds if not thousands of people were left stranded on the streets. Unable to board overflowing buses, many had to walk for hours to get home. Government officials called the demonstrators “organised vandals” and “criminals” and announced that they would enforce an internal security law that gives the state the authority to impose higher penalties for crimes. Residents in the capital banged pots and pans throughout the city Friday night. As people looted supermarkets and set up barricades, the police appeared to have retreated to their stations. The protests occurred as Chile prepares to host two major international conferences: an APEC summit meeting in mid-November and the UN Climate Change Conference in December. © 2019 New York Times News Service

Denmark's prime minister called on rich and poor countries alike to commit to big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, ahead of key year-end talks on a new climate treaty he will host in Copenhagen. Hopes that a deal may be possible have increased since the election of what many see as a "green" US president and business is increasingly enthusiastic about the opportunities thrown up by climate change. "It is essential to engage heads of state and government stronger in the whole process to ensure a positive result in Copenhagen," Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos Friday. Business leaders meeting in the Swiss ski resort this week have called on governments to create certainty on the climate issue, so they can plan for the future. "What I hear business leaders here in Davos say is: We want clarity from governments on where they intend to go with climate change. We need a clear investment perspective," the UN's top climate official, Yvo de Boer, told Reuters. In a statement released Thursday, the forum said clean energy investment needs to more than triple to $515 billion a year to stop planet-warming emissions reaching levels deemed unsustainable by scientists. This changing business environment would create opportunities for firms, said Royal Dutch Shell Chief Executive Jeroen van der Veer. "This is the best opportunity that could come for Shell because we claim to be good at technology, we have an international mindset, we can invest in it and we happen to know something about it," he said. However, some have warned the temptation is to switch to cheap, polluting fuels, notably coal, in times of economic hardship and there was a risk that would offset the effects of lower industrial energy use. "It's bad news for the long term. Many renewable, nuclear and efficiency projects are being postponed," said Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency, which advises 28 industrialized nations. "The long-term impact is that emissions will go up if governments don't do something," he told Reuters. OPTIMISM European Energy Commissioner Andris Piebalgs agreed that recession potentially made it difficult to push through the EU's ambitious environmental plans, and could complicate the process of getting a deal in Copenhagen this year, but said events this month had made him feel more optimistic. The European Commission this week announced funding on carbon capture and storage and, in addition to the boost provided by Obama's backing for the environment, he said more unlikely supporters had included Russia and China. "I am optimistic about what I have heard from leaders... There is a new chance for green growth. It is important to see the silver lining," he told Reuters. Rasmussen said world leaders should agree on a long-term goal of reducing carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent by 2050, with industrialized countries cutting by 80 percent. By 2020 -- a timeframe more relevant to political cycles -- the rich world should cut by 30 percent versus 1990 levels and developing countries by 15-30 percent against current trends, he said. Leading industrial nations agreed at a G8 summit in Japan last July to a "vision" of cutting world emissions of greenhouse gases by 50 percent by 2050. The European Union wants all developed countries to cut greenhouse gases by 25 to 40 percent by 2020. "READY TO LEAD" Valerie Jarrett, President Obama's adviser on intergovernmental relations, earlier told the Davos meeting that the United States was "ready to lead" in the fight against global warming, which threatens droughts, floods, disease and rising seas. That has raised hopes among those pushing for action. "For the last eight years a few countries have been hiding behind the U.S.," said Steve Howard, head of Britain's The Climate Group, a non-profit group working to combat climate change. "Now there is no place to hide because the US is assuming a leadership position, so the politics took a fundamental shift." The recession now gripping the world is set to slow industrial emissions in coming years, which could dim pressure to commit to cutbacks and divert attention from the issue. Some economists estimate emissions fell 35 percent in the great depression of the 1930s, and might do so again. But de Boer, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said countries from the United States to the European Union to China had been announcing plans and targets since the crisis broke.

Yet President Donald Trump this past week proposed guidelines for reopening the economy and suggested that a swath of the United States would soon resume something resembling normalcy. For weeks now, the administration’s view of the crisis and our future has been rosier than that of its own medical advisers, and of scientists generally. In truth, it is not clear to anyone where this crisis is leading us. More than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history shared their thoughts on the future during in-depth interviews. When can we emerge from our homes? How long, realistically, before we have a treatment or vaccine? How will we keep the virus at bay? Some felt that American ingenuity, once fully engaged, might well produce advances to ease the burdens. The path forward depends on factors that are certainly difficult but doable, they said: a carefully staggered approach to reopening, widespread testing and surveillance, a treatment that works, adequate resources for health care providers — and eventually an effective vaccine. Still, it was impossible to avoid gloomy forecasts for the next year. The scenario that Trump has been unrolling at his daily press briefings — that the lockdowns will end soon, that a protective pill is almost at hand, that football stadiums and restaurants will soon be full — is a fantasy, most experts said. “We face a doleful future,” said Dr Harvey V Fineberg, a former president of the National Academy of Medicine. He and others foresaw an unhappy population trapped indoors for months, with the most vulnerable possibly quarantined for far longer. They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on. “My optimistic side says the virus will ease off in the summer and a vaccine will arrive like the cavalry,” said Dr William Schaffner, a preventive medicine specialist at Vanderbilt University medical school. “But I’m learning to guard against my essentially optimistic nature.” Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain. Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us. More Americans may die than the White House admits. COVID-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, is arguably the leading cause of death in the US right now. The virus has killed more than 1,800 Americans almost every day since April 7, and the official toll may be an undercount. By comparison, heart disease typically kills 1,774 Americans a day, and cancer kills 1,641. Yes, the coronavirus curves are plateauing. There are fewer hospital admissions in New York, the centre of the epidemic, and fewer COVID-19 patients in intensive care units. The daily death toll is still grim, but no longer rising. The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is 60,000. New York seen from Weehawken, NJ, Apr 16, 2020. The New York Times While this is encouraging news, it masks some significant concerns. The institute’s projection runs through Aug 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time. New York seen from Weehawken, NJ, Apr 16, 2020. The New York Times The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed. The best hope is that fatalities can be held to a minimum. Reputable longer-term projections for how many Americans will die vary, but they are all grim. Various experts consulted by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48% to 65% of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1%, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread. A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the US by September under the same circumstances. By comparison, about 420,000 Americans died in World War II. The limited data from China is discouraging. Its epidemic has been halted — for the moment — and virtually everyone infected in its first wave has died or recovered. China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5%. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones. Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China’s estimated death rate was 17% in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7% by late February. In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos. Officials in both Wuhan and New York had to revise their death counts upward last week when they realised that many people had died at home of COVID-19, strokes, heart attacks or other causes, or because ambulances never came for them. In fast-moving epidemics, far more victims pour into hospitals or die at home than doctors can test; at the same time, the mildly ill or asymptomatic never get tested. Those two factors distort the true fatality rate in opposite ways. If you don’t know how many people are infected, you don’t know how deadly a virus is. A health worker checks her personal protective equipment in a mirror in Central Park in New York, Apr 16, 2020. The New York Times Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the US The CDC has suggested it might be 25% of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that. A health worker checks her personal protective equipment in a mirror in Central Park in New York, Apr 16, 2020. The New York Times China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1% of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60% were. Our knowledge gaps are still wide enough to make epidemiologists weep. “All models are just models,” Dr Anthony S Fauci, science adviser to the White House coronavirus task force, has said. “When you get new data, you change them.” There may be good news buried in this inconsistency: The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu. At the moment, however, we do not know exactly how transmissible or lethal the virus is. But refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals tell us all we need to know: It is far worse than a bad flu season. The lockdowns will end, but haltingly. No one knows exactly what percentage of Americans have been infected so far — estimates have ranged from 3% to 10% — but it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable. Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks. Then the emergency rooms will get busy again. “There’s this magical thinking saying, ‘We’re all going to hunker down for a while and then the vaccine we need will be available,’” said Dr Peter J Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine. In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews. Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance. Each assumes the virus will blossom every time too many hosts emerge and force another lockdown. Then the cycle repeats. On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth. Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theatres, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travellers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones. The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia. Even the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines Trump issued Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing — but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place. On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states’ shutdowns. China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus’ incubation period. Compared with China or Italy, the US is still a playground. Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps. Partly as a result, the country has seen up to 30,000 new case infections each day. “People need to realise that it's not safe to play poker wearing bandannas,” Schaffner said. Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control. China, which has reported about 100 new infections per day, recently closed all the country’s movie theatres again. Singapore has closed all schools and nonessential workplaces. South Korea is struggling; Japan recently declared a state of emergency. Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr Thomas R Frieden, a former director of the CDC, has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed. Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90% of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals. “We need to reopen the faucet gradually, not allow the floodgates to reopen,” Frieden said. “This is a time to work to make that day come sooner.” Immunity will become a societal advantage. Imagine an America divided into two classes: Those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable. “It will be a frightening schism,” Dr David Nabarro, a World Health Organisation special envoy on COVID-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.” Already, people with presumed immunity are very much in demand, asked to donate their blood for antibodies and doing risky medical jobs fearlessly. Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense, said Dr Daniel R Lucey, an expert on pandemics at Georgetown Law School. Many companies are working on them. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them. The California adult-film industry pioneered a similar idea a decade ago. Actors use a cellphone app to prove they have tested HIV negative in the last 14 days, and producers can verify the information on a password-protected website. As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbours resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection, experts predicted. Younger citizens in particular will calculate that risking a serious illness may still be better than impoverishment and isolation. “My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have COVID-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,” said Dr Michele Barry, who directs the Centre for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University. It has happened before. In the 1980s, Cuba successfully contained its small AIDS epidemic by brutally forcing everyone who tested positive into isolation camps. Inside, however, the residents had their own bungalows, food, medical care, salaries, theatre troupes and art classes. Dozens of Cuba’s homeless youths infected themselves through sex or blood injections to get in, said Dr. Jorge Pérez Ávila, an AIDS specialist who is Cuba’s version of Fauci. Many died before antiretroviral therapy was introduced. It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of COVID-19. The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources. The next two years will proceed in fits and starts, experts said. As more immune people get back to work, more of the economy will recover. But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative. Fauci has said “the virus will tell us” when it’s safe. He means that once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises. Detecting rising fevers as they are mapped by Kinsa’s smart thermometers may give an earlier signal, Schaffner said. But diagnostic testing has been troubled from the beginning. Despite assurances from the White House, doctors and patients continue to complain of delays and shortages. To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases. In this country, patients who test positive are asked to stay in their homes but keep away from their families. Television news has been filled with recuperating personalities like CNN’s Chris Cuomo, sweating alone in his basement while his wife left food atop the stairs, his children waved and the dogs hung back. But even Cuomo ended up illustrating why the WHO strongly opposes home isolation. On Wednesday, he revealed that his wife had the virus. “If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,” said Dr Bruce Aylward, who led the WHO observer team to China. In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community centre outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners. There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears. Nurses even led dance and exercise classes to raise spirits, and help victims clear their lungs and keep their muscle tone. Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards. Fineberg co-wrote a New York Times op-ed article calling for mandatory but “humane quarantine processes.” By contrast, Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, opposed the idea, saying: “I don’t trust our government to remove people from their families by force.” Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the US is far short of that goal. Someone working in a restaurant or factory may have dozens or even hundreds of contacts. In China’s Sichuan province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts. The CDC has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases. China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Frieden recently estimated that the US will need at least 300,000. There will not be a vaccine soon. Even though limited human trials of three candidates — two here and one in China — have already begun, Fauci has repeatedly said that any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months. All the experts familiar with vaccine production agreed that even that timeline was optimistic. Dr Paul Offit, a vaccinologist at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, noted that the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine. Researchers differed sharply over what should be done to speed the process. Modern biotechnology techniques using RNA or DNA platforms make it possible to develop candidate vaccines faster than ever before. But clinical trials take time, in part because there is no way to rush the production of antibodies in the human body. Also, for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against HIV and dengue have unexpectedly done the same. A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial. It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them. Challenge trials are used only when a disease is completely curable, such as malaria or typhoid fever. Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as COVID-19. But in these abnormal times, several experts argued that putting a few Americans at high risk for fast results could be more ethical than leaving millions at risk for years. “Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands,” said Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers. Others were deeply uncomfortable with that idea. “I think it’s very unethical — but I can see how we might do it,” said Lucey. The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem. “Challenge trials won’t give you an answer on safety,” said Michael T Osterholm, director of the University of Minnesota’s Centre for Infectious Disease Research and Policy. “It may be a big problem.” Dr W Ian Lipkin, a virologist at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, suggested an alternative strategy. Pick at least two vaccine candidates, briefly test them in humans and do challenge trials in monkeys. Start making the winner immediately, even while widening the human testing to look for hidden problems. As arduous as testing a vaccine is, producing hundreds of millions of doses is even tougher, experts said. Most American vaccine plants produce only about 5 million to 10 million doses a year, needed largely by the 4 million babies born and 4 million people who reach age 65 annually, said Dr R Gordon Douglas Jr, a former president of Merck’s vaccine division. But if a vaccine is invented, the US could need 300 million doses — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes. “People have to start thinking big,” Douglas said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.” Flu vaccine plants are large, but those that grow the vaccines in chicken eggs are not suitable for modern vaccines, which grow in cell broths, he said. European countries have plants but will need them for their own citizens. China has a large vaccine industry, and may be able to expand it over the coming months. It might be able to make vaccines for the US, experts said. But captive customers must pay whatever price the seller asks, and the safety and efficacy standards of some Chinese companies are imperfect. India and Brazil also have large vaccine industries. If the virus moves rapidly through their crowded populations, they may lose millions of citizens but achieve widespread herd immunity well before the US does. In that case, they might have spare vaccine plant capacity. Alternatively, suggested Arthur M Silverstein, a retired medical historian at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the government might take over and sterilise existing liquor or beer plants, which have large fermentation vats. “Any distillery could be converted,” he said. Treatments are likely to arrive first. In the short term, experts were more optimistic about treatments than vaccines. Several felt that convalescent serum could work. The basic technique has been used for over a century: Blood is drawn from people who have recovered from a disease, then filtered to remove everything but the antibodies. The antibody-rich immunoglobulin is injected into patients. The obstacle is that there are now relatively few survivors to harvest blood from. In the pre-vaccine era, antibodies were “farmed” in horses and sheep. But that process was hard to keep sterile, and animal proteins sometimes triggered allergic reactions. The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said. The most effective antibodies are chosen, and the genes that produce them are spliced into a benign virus that will grow in a cellular broth. But, as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers. Antibodies can last for weeks before breaking down — how long depends on many factors — and they cannot kill virus that is already hidden inside cells. Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesised in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified. But even if one were invented, production would have to ramp up until it was as ubiquitous as aspirin, so 300 million Americans could take it daily. Trump has mentioned hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin so often that his news conferences sound like infomercials. But all the experts agreed with Fauci that no decision should be made until clinical trials are completed. Some recalled that in the 1950s inadequate testing of thalidomide caused thousands of children to be born with malformed limbs. More than one hydroxychloroquine study has been halted after patients who got high doses developed abnormal heart rhythms. “I doubt anyone will tolerate high doses, and there are vision issues if it accumulates,” Barry said. “But it would be interesting to see if it could work as a PrEP-like drug,” she added, referring to pills used to prevent HIV. Others were harsher, especially about Trump’s idea of combining a chloroquine with azithromycin. “It’s total nonsense,” said Dr Luciana Borio, a former director of medical and bio-defence preparedness at the National Security Council. “I told my family, if I get COVID, do not give me this combo.” Chloroquine might protect patients hospitalised with pneumonia against lethal cytokine storms because it damps down immune reactions, several doctors said. That does not, however, make it useful for preventing infections, as Trump has implied it would be, because it has no known antiviral properties. Several antivirals, including remdesivir, favipiravir and baloxavir, are being tested against the coronavirus; the latter two are flu drugs. Trials of various combinations in China are set to issue results by next month, but they will be small and possibly inconclusive because doctors there ran out of patients to test. End dates for most trials in the US are not yet set. Goodbye, ‘America First.’ Previously unthinkable societal changes have taken place already. Schools and business have closed in every state, and tens of millions have applied for unemployment. Taxes and mortgage payments are delayed, and foreclosures forbidden. Refrigerated trucks used as mobile morgues in Randall’s Island in New York, Apr 15, 2020. The New York Times Stimulus checks, intended to offset the crisis, began landing in checking accounts last week, making much of America, temporarily, a welfare state. Food banks are opening across the country, and huge lines have formed. Refrigerated trucks used as mobile morgues in Randall’s Island in New York, Apr 15, 2020. The New York Times A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Trump is moving to defund the WHO, the only organisation capable of coordinating such a response. And he spent most of this year antagonising China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries. A major recipient is the US, through Project Airbridge, an air-cargo operation overseen by Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. This is not a world in which “America First” is a viable strategy, several experts noted. “If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,” said Nicholas Mulder, an economic historian at Cornell University. He has called Kushner’s project “Lend-Lease in reverse,” a reference to American military aid to other countries during World War II. Osterholm was even blunter. “If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us,” he said. “What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?” Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Mulder noted. The psychological fallout will be harder to gauge. The isolation and poverty caused by a long shutdown may drive up rates of domestic abuse, depression and suicide. Even political perspectives may shift. Initially, the virus heavily hit Democratic cities like Seattle, New York and Detroit. But as it spreads through the country, it will spare no one. Even voters in Republican-leaning states who do not blame Trump for America’s lack of preparedness or for limiting access to health insurance may change their minds if they see friends and relatives die. In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Pueyo analysed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016. He calculated that those voters could be 30% more likely to die of the virus. In the periods after both wars, Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the GI Bill and VA home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered. If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change, experts said. The blue skies that have shone above American cities during this lockdown era could even become permanent.   © 2020 New York Times News Service

Three quarters of Britons would like to see news coverage of food crises in the developing world at the early stages and said it was up to the media to inform them, a poll by Care International said on Wednesday. Many food crises in Africa and elsewhere develop slowly and predictably, with rains failing and crops failing months before the food actually runs out and acute malnutrition sets in. But journalists and film crews often only after people start dying. Aid workers complain by that stage it is much more expensive to help people. Need may be so acute that airdrops are needed instead of truck deliveries and children require pricey and difficult therapeutic feeding to regain dangerously lost weight. In the early stages of the 2005 Niger food crisis, Care said it would only have cost a dollar a day to keep a malnourished child fed. By the time the crisis reached its peak, it cost $80. "We assume that the public just want to get a simple basic message but actually people who give to charities think about what they are doing," Carol Monoyios, marketing director of Care International UK, told Reuters. "We have a responsibility to give them the full picture and not be apologetic about it." Care said 68 percent of 1,003 adults surveyed said they would rather give money in advance of an emergency to help prevent it than donate after the event. Almost three quarters said it was the media's responsibility to inform them about emergencies earlier so something could be done. Currently the United Nations World Food Programme is concerned about rising food shortages from drought or conflict -- or both -- in Zimbabwe, Swaziland, Lesotho, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Chad and Central African Republic. Care said it was important long term development programmes addressed the root causes of food shortages. But agricultural development in particular is often not seen as a glamorous or newsworthy subject. Aid experts increasingly say simply rushing in food aid to African countries every couple of years when crops fail does little to address long-term issues of deepening poverty, HIV and climate change. "We have to be able to say the problem is chronic and it's going to get worse and worse if we don't intervene," Monoyios said. "It doesn't take more than a couple of minutes to explain but you do need to get across that slightly more complex message."

A woman holding a clipboard, Amanda Otero, asked Hoch if she planned to vote in favor of a ballot measure that would replace the Minneapolis Police Department with a Department of Public Safety. Hoch had a ready answer: Absolutely not. But she was happy for a distraction and willing to chat for a bit. They ended up talking for nearly 20 minutes. “I think this is setting something that is very good up to fail,” Hoch, 35, said. “It doesn’t have enough substance to it.” But she was also critical of the police. She knew people who had been mistreated. It sounded, Otero said, as if they shared the same values. “Something is really getting in the way of real change,” Hoch replied with a heavy sigh. Otero, the deputy director of TakeAction Minnesota, listened as much as she talked. Finally, she asked: On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being completely in favour of the ballot measure, where would Hoch place herself? She had called herself a three at the beginning. Now, she labelled herself a five. This was deep canvassing in action — a messy, roundabout way to persuade voters not with talking points or pamphlets, but by getting them to talk about their experiences and feelings. Ultimately, the goal is to get voters to support a specific policy, but also to change their minds for the long term, not just in one election or on one issue. In Minneapolis, the aim is not just to gain support for the charter amendment that would transform the police department, but also to help voters rethink what law enforcement should look like in the country, and in the city where Derek Chauvin, a former police officer, was found guilty of murder in the killing of George Floyd, a Black man whose death galvanised a protest movement for racial justice. In an era of mass texting, automated robocalls, email blasts and 280-character social media posts, deep canvassing seems out of step with modern politics — a sort of slow food movement for the activist set. In typical campaign work, canvassers knock on doors with the intent of getting a voter to talk for a minute or two. In deep canvassing, the idea is to exchange stories — in this case, experiences with the police — and develop empathy for anyone who thinks differently. And while many modern campaigns on the left and right are designed to engage people who already agree on the issues, deep canvassing aims to preach far outside the choir or even the congregation, to those whose minds would need to be changed for them to support a given policy or candidate. Canvassers are briefed before splitting into groups and heading out to speak with residents about a Minneapolis ballot measure on Oct 10, 2021. For organisers, the intent of deep canvassing is to have longer conversations with voters and focus on people who need to be convinced. Aaron Nesheim/The New York Times Minneapolis is an important test case for those eager to bring deep canvassing to communities all over the country. Envisioning tens of thousands of people trained to talk with people who disagree with them, they aim not just to win over converts on policy, but to help restore voters’ faith in democracy. Canvassers are briefed before splitting into groups and heading out to speak with residents about a Minneapolis ballot measure on Oct 10, 2021. For organisers, the intent of deep canvassing is to have longer conversations with voters and focus on people who need to be convinced. Aaron Nesheim/The New York Times “We’re in an era when many people think the opposition is the boogeyman,” said Steve Deline, whose New Conversation Initiative has worked with teams to lead deep canvasses on climate, immigration, jail reform and other issues. “This is giving people the space to share what they are feeling and experiencing, and not just tell them they’re wrong, but instead get to a shared place that is relatable and human.” Proponents argue that in a polarised age, the strategy can work to persuade those who have not yet embraced sweeping progressive changes on such issues as immigration, transgender rights and policing. Knocks on doors often lead to conversations that can last as long as half an hour and that often leave both the canvasser and the voter feeling disarmed and more open. “Progressives have a superpower right now, and that’s getting a big idea into the national conversation like never before,” said George Goehl, the director of People’s Action, which trains liberal groups like the one in Minnesota. “But we think to really get things across the finish line, you have to be in conversation with people who do not see eye-to-eye with you.” The work is both labour-intensive and expensive. Training canvassers takes hours. The vast majority of voters never even open their doors, and those who most strongly disagree are often the least likely to speak to a stranger at their door. In Minneapolis, a city of 2.9 million, about 60 volunteers and staff members have reached just 2,400 voters after visiting 6,900 homes and making 49,000 phone calls. Still, the method of persuasion has been shown to be effective. It was pioneered by gay-rights advocates in California in 2009, after a state ballot measure there outlawed same-sex marriage. Three years later, advocates in Minnesota relied on deep canvassing to help defeat a ballot measure banning same-sex marriage. So far, the political tactic has primarily been used by activists on the left. A 2016 study by researchers at University of California, Berkeley and Yale found that deep canvassing in Miami and Los Angeles had changed the attitudes of some voters who were reluctant to support transgender rights, in part by prompting voters to reflect on their own experiences with being treated differently. Canvassers with Take Action Minnesota prepare to speak with residents about a Minneapolis ballot measure on Oct 10, 2021. Take Action Minnesota has adopted deep canvassing as a way to engage voters as it knocks on thousands of doors. Aaron Nesheim/The New York Times And Goehl’s group used deep canvassing by phone to try to win over rural white voters in swing states on behalf of Joe Biden in 2020, with an internal study showing that it was far more effective at persuading voters than traditional canvassing. Canvassers with Take Action Minnesota prepare to speak with residents about a Minneapolis ballot measure on Oct 10, 2021. Take Action Minnesota has adopted deep canvassing as a way to engage voters as it knocks on thousands of doors. Aaron Nesheim/The New York Times This year, supporters of the charter amendment in Minneapolis, who contend that Black residents are unfairly targeted by the police, turned to deep canvassing as a way to engage voters first about racism, and then about the push for law-enforcement reform — whose opponents have reduced it to a loaded phrase: defunding the police. Changing minds on race requires “the hard work of human-to-human contact — listening to learn, not to confirm,” Goehl said. “There will be no quick fixes or shortcuts.” But there are things that go unsaid even in the lengthiest conversations on the police issue. Racism was not mentioned in training sessions or in conversations with voters observed by a reporter over two days earlier this month — in which most of the canvassers were white, as were most of the voters they encountered. Some white voters said they would be more likely to vote in favour of the measure if they were convinced the majority of Black voters supported it. It was only as Otero was leaving the home of Hoch, the librarian, that Otero noticed a Black Lives Matter sign in the front window. Perhaps she had missed an opening. But then came a welcome surprise: A woman sitting on the porch next door waved her over. She, too, had a Black Lives Matter sign posted at the front of her house, along with a sign spelling out “love” in several different languages. Mary Scavotto introduced herself and announced that it was her birthday. Otero politely declined a piece of cake and launched into her script. Had Scavotto heard about the charter amendment? Oh, she had. “The whole idea of throwing everything up in the air and exploding it, without a plan, concerns me,” Scavotto said. Scavotto said she had lived on the block for nearly 20 years, but would move out of Minneapolis if the measure passed. She pointed to a gas station that burned down last summer. She recalled how she and her neighbours were careful to take anything off their porch that could be taken and used to cause damage to their homes. “We had our bags packed and gas in our tank and were ready to go at any moment,” she said. Now, she added: “We’ve seen what happens with less police. I don’t want my kids out anymore after dark.” Nodding along, Otero noted that increased spending on the police had not made anyone feel safer. Then she described her younger brother’s struggles with his mental health and her own ambivalence toward law enforcement. “Do I want the cops to catch my brother so that then he gets help?,” said Otero, who is Latina. “Well, but wait, I don’t want him to have a record — and would they give him the help?” She spoke of her fear whenever her husband, an immigrant from Nicaragua, drives around Minneapolis. Scavotto, who is white, listened intently. “I understand that people of colour have not felt safe with the police, and so I know we have to reform,” she said. Otero said she hoped that more conversations like this would bring about that kind of clarity. “What do you think it would take in Minneapolis for us to really come together, across age and race and class and life experience?” she asked. “Because we are reeling from a year of trauma.” “Well, that’s the million-dollar question,” Scavotto replied, with a nervous laugh. “I can’t even get along with my eight siblings right now.” Looking back on their half-hour conversation days later, Scavotto said it had kept her up that night. She remarked how Otero had listened more than she spoke. And she said she had promised herself to attend local forums to better understand the charter amendment. “I wouldn’t change my vote yet,” she said, but added: “I feel more open to it.” © 2021 The New York Times Company

Wildfire smoke contains high levels of the smallest, most dangerous type of soot, known as PM 2.5. Researchers at Harvard University estimated that there were nearly 20,000 extra coronavirus infections and 750 COVID-19 deaths associated with exposure to wildfire smoke between March and December 2020 in the American West. The paper was published Friday in the journal Science Advances. Exposure to smoke, whether from air pollution or cigarette smoke, is believed to impair the function of white blood cells in the lungs, blunting the body’s immune response. The chemicals in particulate matter can also inflame cells lining the airways and lungs. In both cases, if the body is exposed to a virus in addition to air pollution, the immune response may be slowed and the person may develop a more severe illness than they would have otherwise, researchers say. The findings build on the well-established connection between air pollution and respiratory-tract infections and conditions such as asthma. But the study is the first to show a statistical link between wildfire smoke and COVID-19 caseloads and deaths. “These results provide strong evidence that, in many counties, the high levels of PM 2.5 that occurred during the 2020 wildfires substantially exacerbated the health burden of COVID-19,” the authors wrote. Some places experienced levels of air pollution that were dangerously high. In September 2020, Mono County, California, had four days where PM 2.5 levels exceeded 500 micrograms per cubic meter, a “hazardous” level, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. By comparison, on days when wildfires were not burning, the average daily level in the three states was 6 micrograms per cubic meter. To arrive at their conclusion, the researchers used satellite data of smoke plumes from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to identify the locations and days affected by wildfires. They paired those readings with PM 2.5 data from ground-level air quality monitors in each of the counties and COVID-19 cases and death rates from data compiled by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Their statistical model accounted for other factors such as weather and the amount of time people were at home, and included a four-week lag to capture the virus’ incubation period, as well as the additional time it can take for infected people’s health to deteriorate. The same team of Harvard researchers also published the first study to find a clear connection between long-term exposure to air pollution and COVID-19 death rates last year. The new study included reported infections, not just deaths, which makes it especially interesting, said John Balmes, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and an expert on the health effects of pollution who was not involved in the research. “It’s one thing for air pollution to be increasing the severity of the coronavirus infection, it’s another for it to be increasing reported cases,” he said. After decades of tightening air quality regulations, the air in many American cities is cleaner now than it’s been in 50 years. But in the West, increased wildfire smoke threatens to undo those advances, said Loretta Mickley, an atmospheric chemist at Harvard’s John A Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and one of the paper’s authors. As the planet warms, droughts intensify and the West becomes drier, wildfires are starting earlier, growing larger, spreading faster and reaching higher elevations. In California alone, a record 2.5 million acres burned during the 2020 wildfire season, 20 times what had burned the previous year. “We are really talking about climate change,” said Francesca Dominici, a biostatistician at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health and senior author of the paper. “I hope that this is providing an additional piece of evidence for why it’s important to get our act together to combat climate change.” Wildfire smoke may contribute up to half of the PM 2.5 in some parts of the western United States. It is so far unclear whether wildfire smoke is more or less toxic than smoke from diesel combustion or power plants. Dominici noted that the analysis did not include individual patient data or consider other factors such as mask mandates. Researchers are currently investigating whether fine particulate matter can spread the coronavirus. The research does not bode well for this year, Dominici said, as wildfires started early and the pandemic is still raging in the United States, with a delta variant that tends to be more contagious. She added: “I think the wildfires will have the same, if not worse impact on COVID-19 cases and deaths among the unvaccinated.”

Barack Obama this week makes his first trip to Asia as president, leaving behind a host of domestic problems with a visit that recognizes the region's economic and diplomatic importance to the United States. The trip, which starts on Thursday, will take Obama to an Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore. But the critical leg will come in China, where Obama will have to navigate an increasingly complex relationship with the country that is the largest holder of U.S. foreign debt and its second-largest trading partner. "I see China as a vital partner, as well as a competitor," Obama told Reuters in an interview before the trip. "The key is for us to make sure that that competition is friendly, and it's competition for customers and markets, it's within the bounds of well-defined international rules of the road that both China and the United States are party to, but also that together we are encouraging responsible behavior around the world," he said. He will also visit Japan and South Korea. "The overarching theme is that America is a Pacific nation, it understands the importance of Asia in the 21st century, and it's going to be very engaged in a very comprehensive way to make progress on a whole series of issues that are critical for our prosperity and our security," said Ben Rhodes, a deputy national security adviser. North Korea, Iran, the global economy and trade, climate change, energy, human rights, Afghanistan and Pakistan are likely to get the most attention. Obama will also use a stop in Tokyo to speak broadly about his view of U.S. engagement with Asia. In China from November 15-18, Obama will visit Shanghai and Beijing, hold bilateral meetings with President Hu Jintao -- their third -- and Premier Wen Jiabao. DEEPLY ENGAGED The trip is intended to make the point that the United States is deeply engaged with Asia, after years of focusing on the threat of Islamic militancy in the region. But the issues dominating U.S. politics -- his fight to reform the healthcare system, joblessness and the pressing question of how many more troops to send to Afghanistan -- are likely to dog Obama on his Asian trip. Those domestic worries could make it more difficult to make progress on climate change and trade, on which he faces stiff opposition from U.S. groups whose support he needs on healthcare and other issues. Many businesses, for example, are wary of new rules on climate change they say could be costly and labor unions worry about free trade agreements they fear could cost jobs, so Obama is unlikely to push hard for deals such as a free trade pact with South Korea. "I think the administration has been sending pretty careful signals that, hey, we're not gone on trade ... we'll be back to the table on trade on some of these regional agreements and some of the bilateral agreements," said Ernie Bower, director of the Southeast Asia program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "Do Asian leaders believe that? I'm not sure," he said. With Obama enjoying sky-high popularity ratings in the countries he is visiting, concrete results may be beside the point. Noting that Obama has been in office only since January, analysts and administration officials point to this trip as mostly laying the groundwork for future cooperation. "President Obama is enormously popular in all the countries that he's visiting. I haven't seen the latest polls, but the numbers I have seen are staggering," said Jeffrey Bader, senior director for East Asian affairs at the National Security Council. "When we have someone who has that degree of respect and affection and admiration, the message that he is bringing is much more likely to resonate than when you come in with a five percent approval rating," he said.

“These poor orphans have lost their parents and have nowhere to go,” said the father-of-five, 59. “How am I going to look after their needs? Only God knows.” In the once-bustling provincial capital of Parwan, where nearly 160 people died, residents are trying to repair their shattered properties, while still grieving for relatives. The north and east of the country are struggling to recover from the effects of the heavy downpours that claimed more than 200 lives, mostly women and children, across 13 provinces, as officials warn climate change could bring more such disasters. In August, torrential rains swept off the majestic Hindu Kush mountains and through the valleys of Parwan, washing away hundreds of homes. When Afghan President Ashraf Ghani visited the area in early September, he noted that 80% of natural floodwater channels had been turned into residential areas, increasing the loss of life. He ordered Charikar’s administration to clear the flood pathways, resettle people now living there, and produce a new development master plan for the city. Thousands of hectares of farmland were also damaged and livestock perished in the floods that caught local communities off-guard. TINY EMISSIONS Rohullah Amin, deputy head of the National Environmental Protection Agency (NEPA), set up in 2010, warned of far worse impacts from rising temperatures and erratic weather in the coming years if climate change "is not taken seriously locally and internationally". "The developed world needs to take responsibility as we have barely contributed to climate change, but are losing so many lives due to it," he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. With very little industry of its own, Afghanistan accounts for far less than 1% of global greenhouse gas emissions. In a report submitted to the United Nations in 2017, the NEPA said that since 1950, Afghanistan's mean annual temperature had increased significantly by 1.8 degrees Celsius, while spring rainfall - important for crops - had decreased by up to a third. Amin called for greater support from wealthy, high-emitting countries for his war-ravaged nation that, despite its tiny role in heating up the planet, is on the receiving end of the wild weather being intensified by global warming. Afghanistan ranks among the countries most at risk of - and least prepared for - climate-linked threats ranging from food insecurity to disease outbreaks, according to an index compiled by the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative. UN agencies says droughts are likely to become the norm in Afghanistan by 2030, leading to land degradation and desertification, affecting more than a third of its 38 million people. Projections by the NEPA suggest rising temperatures will lead to reduced spring rainfall and higher evapotranspiration, together with more frequent extreme events such as droughts, floods, landslides and avalanches. But preparing people for that, and encouraging them to take precautions, will not be easy, said Mohammad Iqbal, director of public awareness at the NEPA. “Even after these floods, it is hard to convince the locals, especially the poor farmers - who are suffering the most - that climate change is real and they need to adapt to this new reality,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. The government has launched programmes to raise awareness about climate impacts and encourage better protection of the country's fragile environment, with the help of local community and religious leaders. Under a new national climate action plan developed by the NEPA, now pending cabinet approval, it also aims to move gradually towards clean energy, cut back on low-grade coal for heating in its harsh winter, and launch a reforestation drive. WAR-WEARY But the impacts of climate change are already exacerbating the consequences of long years of war. Spells of drought followed by untimely torrential rains - coupled with political insecurity - displaced more than 500,000 Afghans last year alone, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Amin, who leads the NEPA’s climate change directorate, warned the recent floods should be taken as a “grim reminder and alarm calls” for what the future may have in store. Glaciers are melting rapidly, compounding the threat of flash floods, which can severely damage crop yields, he added. The NEPA estimates that well over half of households across Afghanistan depend on farming and livestock-keeping for their main source of income. The August floods hit the northern, eastern and central highlands, where rain-fed farming and pastoralism are common, hampering households' ability to produce enough food and income to meet their basic needs, NEPA officials said. Environmentalist Sayed Montazer Shah, a former adviser at the agriculture ministry, said the government and the international community had neglected Afghanistan's “environmental emergency”, with the spotlight on its recently rejuvenated but fragile peace process. Government and Taliban negotiators have been meeting in Doha since Sept 12, hoping to agree on a ceasefire and a power-sharing deal. But they have been bogged down in the principles and procedures for the talks. Shah said the country's ongoing conflict also had inflicted harm on its ecosystems, which in turn could add more deaths to the toll from violence. “The forest cover is fast depleting, with trees in the jungles - particularly in the areas held by the (Taliban) insurgents - being cut ruthlessly at an alarming rate,” Shah said, noting militants are likely working hand in hand with illegal loggers to make money. The 2017 NEPA report said Afghanistan's forests were severely damaged as a result of decades of deforestation, over-harvesting, mismanagement and drought - and covered just 1.5-2% of the country. In mountainous areas especially, deforestation can lead to soil erosion, hiking the risks of deadly landslides and floods. Amin of the NEPA said he hoped the renewed push for peace would take a holistic view of the multiple risks facing the country – including its environment. “Our sincere hope and aspiration is that all sides embrace peace and realise the common threat of climate change,” he said.

CANBERRA Mon Dec 15,(bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Australia vowed on Monday to push ahead with the most sweeping carbon trade scheme outside Europe in 2010, resisting calls for a delay, but some feared the plan would fall far short of what's needed to combat global warming. As part of the plan, Canberra set a target to cut emissions by at least 5 percent of 2000 levels by 2020, rising to 15 percent if world governments reached an ambitious agreement next year in talks for a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Climate Change Minister Penny Wong said the scheme was vital for Australia, which has the fourth-highest per-capita greenhouse gas emissions in the world, and five times more per person than China, due to its reliance on coal for electricity. "These are hard targets for Australia," Wong told reporters, adding that the policy was designed to ease the economic impact of the scheme in light of the global financial crisis. "Our economy, including food production, agriculture and water supplies, is under threat. If we don't act now, we will be hit hard and fast. We will lose key industries and Australian jobs." The plan allows for prices to be set by the market, first under auctions to be held in the first half of 2010, abandoning an earlier idea of a fixed price. The government expects a price of about A$25 ($16.70) a tonne, below the European emission allowances, which are trading around 15 euros (A$30) a tonne. But the government said it would also impose an interim price cap of A$40 a tonne, a move that analysts said could limit the market's development initially. "It seems a bit like the old game of one foot on the brake and one foot on the accelerator, having a bet each way and I'm not sure the numbers add up," said Brett Janissen, executive manager of the consultancy Asia-Pacific Emissions Trading Forum. By allowing polluters to import carbon permits from green projects abroad but barring potential exports from Australia, participants will have their pick of the cheapest price. Scientists and green groups wanted cuts of at least 25 percent but the carbon scheme comes at a politically sensitive time for the government, with the mid-2010 start date set only months before it is due to hold elections to seek a second term. "It's a total and utter failure," Greenpeace climate campaigner John Hepburn said. The government said the scheme would trim about 0.1 percent off annual growth in gross national product from 2010 to 2050, with a one-off increase in inflation of around 1.1 percent. "BUY THEIR WAY OUT" Wong said carbon trading would cover 75 percent of Australia's carbon emissions and involve 1,000 of the nation's biggest firms, although big-polluting exporters would receive up to 90 percent of carbon permits for free. The rapidly growing liquefied natural gas (LNG) industry, which had been excluded from an earlier draft plan in July, was pleased to be given exemptions in the final version. "There's no doubt that this has come a long way since the model was outlined in the Green paper," said Belinda Robinson, CEO, Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association. "For that the LNG (liquefied natural gas) industry is very pleased and for that, we think Australia should be pleased, because it's the LNG industry that represents Australia's best chance for assisting the rest of the world reduce its greenhouse gas emissions." But by global standards the targets were cautious. Europe has pledged a 20 percent reduction by 2020 and the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recommended rich nations back reductions of 25 up to 40 percent by then. "The proposed scheme is disappointing in terms of the levels of reductions required as set down by the IPCC," said Martijn Wilder, partner at Baker & McKenzie in Sydney. "By adopting a A$40 price cap, it will provide companies with certainty as to their compliance cost but it also enables companies to buy their way out of compliance, in circumstances where the carbon price breaks the $40 ceiling," he added. Janissen described the scheme as a soft start with a tougher downward trajectory on emissions occuring beyond the 2012-2013 financial year. But he said it also appeared to be "providing a high degree of shielding key industries that are concerned about their emissions intensity", referring to subsidies for emissions intensive and trade exposed industries. Under the scheme, participating firms will need to surrender a permit for every tonne of carbon emitted. The auction of permits is expected to raise A$11.5 billion in 2010/11, which will all be used to compensate business and households for higher costs for electricity and transport. Australian farmers, who have suffered more than seven years of severe drought, will be spared from taking part in carbon trading for at least five years. Agriculture accounts for about 16 percent of Australian emissions. But transport and fuel will be included in the scheme. The government will introduce carbon-trading laws into parliament in 2009, where it needs the support of the Greens and two independent senators, or the conservative opposition, which want the scheme delayed due to the global economic downturn. ($1 = A$1.49)

While fans of the fantasy drama watched by almost 20 million people may be mesmerised by the White Walkers and power struggles for the Iron Throne, a growing number of US bloggers think the show could also be a way to make the threat of climate change more vivid to a wide audience, a new study suggests. Manjana Milkoreit, a research fellow at Arizona State University, says US bloggers, among them "scientists, science communicators and geeks", are using "Game of Thrones" to trigger public discussion about the dangers of global warming. The HBO show is the latest in an expanding genre of TV shows, films and novels that touch on the genre of climate change fiction, or "cli-fi." "Climate change can be a scary and overwhelmingly difficult topic that people want to avoid," Milkoreit told the Thomson Reuters Foundation in a telephone interview. "(But some bloggers) want to help people become engaged in climate change by showing that it can be fun by talking about it in terms of the show and how there are actually solutions to solve this global problem." While climate worries in the fictional Westeros might seem irrelevant to the uninitiated, the blogs have triggered some lively online debates in the United States about the consequences of global warming. Milkoreit, a sustainability fellow, found six blogs in 2013 focussed on the climate in "Game of Thrones" - and that increased to eight blogs last year. She expects the fifth series of the show, that is just starting, to prompt further discussions. She said the blogs draw parallels between the responses of the fictional people of Westeros to the looming threat of winter and the response to climate change in the real world - something helpful in explaining the complex world of climate change and politics. Fantasy or founded fears? The White Walkers for example, a mythical race with magical powers elated to ice and cold, are portrayed by some bloggers as representing the threat of climate change. Meanwhile, some observers have suggested that the Night's Watch, a military order dedicated to guarding an immense ice "Wall" to block northern invaders, represents scientists warning about impending problems. The links to climate change in "Game of Thrones" might not be as evident as in films such as "The Day After Tomorrow" - when a huge superstorm sets off catastrophic natural disasters globally - and "Snowpiercer" - based in a post-apocalytpic ice age - which focus more directly on climate change. Academics disagree on how well such films portray the problem and spur understanding of it or action from viewers. Elizabeth Trobaugh, who teaches a class on climate fiction in popular culture at Holyoke Community College in Massachusetts, believes they help the cause. "For many movie-goers, these climate fiction films might just be action films, but for many they are raising awareness and interest in the air," she said. But Ted Howell, who teaches a climate fiction class at Temple University in Philadelphia, said film-goers may be getting the wrong idea about what climate change looks like. "Some people think (climate change) is going to be this massive tidal wave or giant snowstorm, but it's actually slower than that," he said. Finding the right balance between an entertaining storyline and science can be difficult but in trying to bring about effective action on climate threats it is worth pursuing, Milkoreit said. "(The world needs to) engage people with the subject in a way that is fun and doesn't turn them off," she said.

During the period, around 265 people were killed in tiger attacks in different areas close to the Sundarbans mangrove region, according to government statistics.   The number of Royal Bengal Tigers that died since 2001 totals 35. The tiger population in Bangladesh, according to a 2015 census, stands at 106. The government initiated a project nine years ago to save tigers which proved to be ineffective as more and more tigers were falling prey to the humans. One reason the forest officials cited for the killings is that due to the change in their habitat and climate, more tigers were coming to localities and getting killed by the villagers to save themselves.  On Tuesday, the villagers at Gulishakhali in Morelganj Upazila in Bagherhat killed a two and a half years old tiger cub after it had entered the locality and attacked people. The forestry officials in the Sundarbans said their records showed 20 tigers died in the east zone and 15 in the west. Photo: mostafigur rahman/ bdnews24.com Sundarbans East Zone Forest Officer Mahmudul Hasan told bdnews24.com at least five of the 20 tigers that have died in the zone since 2001 were beaten to death or shot dead after they had entered human habitats. Photo: mostafigur rahman/ bdnews24.com Four tigers died naturally while the others were killed in flash floods or by poachers, he said. He also said 26 people died in tiger attacks in this zone since 2001. West Zone Forest Officer Bashirul Al Mamun said eight of the 15 tigers that died in this period in the zone were beaten to death by people. The number of deaths of people in tiger attacks is much higher in this zone - 234 - than the other. Bashirul said most of the victims were people whose livelihood depended on the Sundarbans. Sundarbans Wild Life Management and Conservation Department official Md Modinul Ahsan, however, claimed fewer tigers were being killed by people now than before. Photo: mostafigur rahman/ bdnews24.com He said only nine tigers were killed by people in past 10 years after the government formed 89 response teams to save tigers under the Bangladesh Tiger Action Plan in 2009. Photo: mostafigur rahman/ bdnews24.com He said they had six tranquilliser guns and were ready to save tigers from being killed once the big cats enter localities. “But we couldn’t save the cub on Tuesday as the angry villagers had killed it before we arrived,” he said.   He also said the Baleshwar and Pasur rivers were dying due to sediment deposition, leading the tigers to enter localities. “The government is taking up a project for river dredging. Tigers will stop entering the localities once it is done,” he said. According to Modinul, an adult tiger weighs up to 220 kilograms and a tigress 160kg. A tiger’s lifespan in nature is between 10 and 14 years. A tigress gives birth to two to three cubs every two years. The cubs live with their mother for two years during which time she avoids the company of the tiger as it is known to eat the cubs.

Because of climate change, “the lives, well-being and living circumstances of many people around the world, including in the Netherlands, are being threatened,” Justice Kees Streefkerk, the chief justice, said in the decision. “Those consequences are happening already.” It was a victory for the environmental group Urgenda, which filed its lawsuit in 2013 against the Dutch government with nearly 900 co-plaintiffs. The group issued a statement applauding the ruling. “Today, at a moment when people around the world are in need of real hope that governments will act with urgency to address the climate crisis, the Dutch Supreme Court has delivered a groundbreaking decision that confirms that individual governments must do their fair share to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” the group said. This is the third court victory for Urgenda. In 2015, the The Hague District Court ordered the government to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25% from 1990 levels in the following five years. The lawsuit had demanded reductions of between 25% and 40%. The government had already committed to reducing emissions, but by a smaller amount. That decision, based partly on theories of human rights, stated that the possibility of damages to current and future generations was so great and concrete that, given its duty of care, “the state must make an adequate contribution, greater than its current contribution, to prevent hazardous climate change.” The government appealed that decision. In October 2018, The Hague Court of Appeal ruled in favor of Urgenda. In that case, the court, citing obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights, stated that the government was “acting unlawfully” by not taking stronger action to reduce emissions and that “a reduction obligation of at least 25% by end-2020, as ordered by the district court, is in line with the state’s duty of care.” The government appealed that decision as well, this time to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. In September, the procurator general and advocate general, who advise the court, published an opinion urging the justices to reject the government’s arguments. In the ruling Friday, Streefkerk said the argument that a cut in emissions in the Netherlands would not have a big effect on a global level did not absolve a country from taking measures to reduce its own emissions. “Every country is responsible for its share,” he said. In practical terms, the Supreme Court’s decision will force the government to take strong action to reach the 25% reduction, which could include closing coal-fired power plants, some of which opened as recently as 2016. Urgenda is a portmanteau word, a combination of “urgent” and “agenda.” The Dutch case has inspired similar suits against governments around the world, including in Belgium, France, Ireland, Germany, New Zealand, Britain, Switzerland and Norway, and from plaintiffs around the world against the European Union, part of a larger trend of citizens seeking action from the courts on climate issues. In the United States, climate policy has been influenced by the courts numerous times, and the number of lawsuits against the federal government has grown. In a 2007 case, Massachusetts v Environmental Protection Agency, the Supreme Court supported the state’s argument that the Clean Air Act empowered the government to regulate greenhouse gases. A federal suit on behalf of young people awaits trial in Oregon after a labyrinthine path of pretrial filings and appeals that have reached the Supreme Court twice already. The plaintiffs are currently awaiting a decision from the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals about whether the trial can move forward. The group sponsoring that lawsuit, Our Children’s Trust, has also launched state-level suits across the United States. Michael Gerrard, director of the Sabin Center for Law at Columbia University Law School, said in an email, “There have been 1,442 climate lawsuits around the world. This is the strongest decision ever. The Dutch Supreme Court upheld the first court order anywhere directing a country to slash its greenhouse gas emissions.” Global governmental action on climate change has lost momentum since the 2015 Paris climate agreement was reached. President Donald Trump has begun the process of withdrawing the United States from the agreement, and the most recent climate talks to move the process forward, which were held in Madrid, were widely considered a disappointment. In response to Friday’s ruling in the Netherlands, Mary Robinson, former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights and a former president of Ireland, said, “After the UN climate talks in Madrid, the urgency of increasing our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions could not be clearer.” The new decision, she said, “affirms that governments are under a legal obligation, as well as a moral obligation, to significantly increase their ambition on climate change. Our human rights depend on it.” One of the plaintiffs in the case, Damian Rau, was 12 years old when the case was first filed. In the Urgenda statement, he called the judgment “an example to the world that no one is powerless and everybody can make a difference.”   c.2019 The New York Times Company

LONDON, June 04 (bdnews24.com/Reuters)- Plants and shrubs have colonised parts of the Arctic tundra in recent decades growing into small trees, a scientific study found, adding the change may lead to an increase in global warming pressures if replicated on a wider scale. Scientists from Finland and Oxford University investigated an area of 100,000 square km, roughly the size of Iceland, in the northwestern Eurasian tundra, stretching from western Siberia to Finland. Using data from satellite imaging, fieldwork and observations from local reindeer herders, they found that in 8-15 percent of the area willow and alder plants have grown to over 2 metres in the last 30-40 years. A report of the research is published on Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. "It's a big surprise that these plants are reacting in this way," said Marc Macias-Fauria of Oxford University and lead author of the report. Scientists had thought that the colonisation of the warming Arctic would take centuries, he said. "But what we've found is that the shrubs that are already there are transforming into trees in just a few decades." Previous studies suggested that the advance of forest into Arctic tundra could increase Arctic warming by an extra 1-2 degrees Celsius (1.8-3.6 Fahrenheit) by the late 21st Century . Warming in the Arctic is happening about twice as fast as in the rest of the world. As reflective snow and ice recede, they expose soil or water which are a darker colour and so soak up more of the sun's heat. The same occurs when trees are tall enough to rise above the snowfall, presenting a dark, light-absorbing surface. More warming in the Arctic is likely to spur oil and gas development, as well as attracting herds of reindeer as they feed on willow shrubs. But a warming planet is also linked to increases in severe drought and flooding around the world, putting people, crops and livestock at greater risk. The global average temperature last year was the ninth-warmest in the modern meteorological record, continuing a trend linked to greenhouse gases that saw nine of the 10 hottest years occurring since the year 2000, NASA scientists said in January. Macias-Fauria said the area researched in the study is a small part of the vast Arctic tundra, and an area that is already warmer than the rest of the Arctic, likely due to the influence of warm air from the Gulf Stream. "However, this area does seem to be a bellwether for the rest of the region, it can show us what is likely to happen to the rest of the Arctic in the near future if these warming trends continue."

If climate change continues at its current pace, deadly heatwaves beginning in the next few decades will strike parts of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, according to a study based on computer simulations by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Key agricultural areas in the Indus and Ganges river basins will be particularly hard-hit, reducing crop yields and increasing hunger in some of the world's most densely populated regions, researchers said. "Climate change is not an abstract concept, it is impacting huge numbers of vulnerable people," MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. "Business as usual runs the risk of having extremely lethal heat waves." The areas likely to be worst affected in northern India, southern Pakistan and Bangladesh are home to 1.5 billion people, said Eltahir, the study's co-author. Currently, about 2 percent of India's population is sometimes exposed to extreme combinations of heat and humidity; by 2100 that will increase to about 70 percent if nothing is done to mitigate climate change, the study said. Heatwaves across South Asia in the summer of 2015 killed an estimated 3,500 people and similar events will become more frequent and intense, researchers said. Projections show the Gulf region will be the world's hottest region by 2100 as a result of climate change. But with small, wealthy populations and minimal domestic food production requirements, oil-rich states in the Gulf will be better able to respond to rising heat than countries in South Asia, Eltahir said. The study does not directly address migration but researchers said it is likely that millions of people in South Asia will be forced to move due to blistering temperatures and crop failures unless steps are taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Disaster experts from South Asian countries met in Pakistan last month to launch a toolkit to help city governments develop ways to manage the impact of heatwaves in urban areas. Ahmedabad, in western India, has already introduced a heat action plan - South Asia's first early warning system against extreme heatwaves. Authorities in the city of 5.5 million have mapped areas with vulnerable populations and set up "cooling spaces" in temples, public buildings and malls during the summer.  

The EU had pledged to spend at least 20% of its 2014-2020 budget on measures to limit climate change, and by its own account hit that goal exactly, spending 216 billion euros ($232.8 billion) in the period. The auditors said, however, that the EU had overstated its climate spending by at least 72 billion euros and the actual figure was likely to have been 144 billion euros, equating to 13% of the total budget. "Not all the reported climate-related spending under the EU budget was actually relevant to climate action," said ECA member Joelle Elvinger. Agriculture subsidies made up 80% of the "climate" spending the auditors said was mislabelled. While some schemes had made a solid contribution to fighting climate change, such as enriching soil carbon storage, others had little climate impact, the auditors said. Among those having little impact were crop diversification, The European Commission stood by its assessment that the 20% target was met and said its method of tracking EU climate spending was reliable and used transparent underlying assumptions. It accepted most of the auditors' recommendations, including one to use scientific evidence to assess agriculture spending's climate contribution. "The Commission has already significantly strengthened the EU climate tracking methodology," a Commission spokesperson said. The EU assigns a score to spending based on its expected contribution to addressing climate change. The auditors said this system is "beset with weaknesses", involves significant approximations and is unreliable since it does not assess the real impact made by the projects once the money is spent. The auditors warned that the EU had not fixed loopholes in its system of tracking climate spending, potentially undermining its new target to spend 30% of the EU's 2021-2027 budget and 37% of the bloc's COVID-19 recovery fund on climate action.

"Consumer prices remain too high," Biden said at the Port of Baltimore. "We still face challenges we have to tackle head on." The remarks followed hours after the Labor Department reported that US consumer prices accelerated 6.2% in the 12 months through October, the largest year-on-year jump since November 1990. Broad-based gains from pork chops to gasoline, sports tickets and health insurance suggested the issue was not a one-off, as the White House has largely maintained was the case through 2021. On Wednesday, Biden described reversing inflation as "a top priority for me." The trip would have been more of a victory lap under different circumstances. Lawmakers on Friday passed a $1 trillion infrastructure package that Biden chaperoned after months of torturous negotiations. Baltimore's port is one of the nation's busiest, and it is set to benefit from billions of dollars that the bill has set aside for ports alone. Port congestion is one of the major issues. Goods ordered months ago from abroad wait at sea to be unloaded and transported inland. Issues like those have turned Biden's White House into an economic emergency response team. Biden on Tuesday talked to companies including Walmart and UPS to ensure they are ready for demand to skyrocket during the Christmas holiday rush. His aides worked with the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles to move goods around the clock. The infrastructure package includes $17 billion in investments to help ports, including dredging to allow for larger ships and capacity expansion. The Port of Baltimore imports and exports more autos, farm machinery and construction equipment than any other US port. It employs more than 15,300 people. Economic concerns have created political issues for Biden. The Democratic president has seen his popularity sag in recent months. His party is looking ahead to the 2022 mid-term elections, when they must defend their thin congressional majorities. Now, Biden is trying to close a deal on a roughly $1.75 trillion proposal to expand the country's social safety net and fight climate change. Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat who holds a virtual veto over Biden's agenda given narrow congressional margins, said on Wednesday that politicians "can no longer ignore the economic pain Americans feel every day." Manchin has previously expressed concern that the new spending bill could exacerbate inflation, a notion disputed by White House officials and a number of independent economists.

Like Trump did when he came to Davos last year, Bolsonaro tried to smooth the edges of the insurgent message that vaulted him into the presidency last fall. He pitched Brazil to the well-heeled audience gathered in this Alpine ski resort as a good place to do business — a country committed to rooting out rampant corruption and rolling back regulations. But Bolsonaro also said Brazil would purge left-wing ideology from its politics and society, and he made no apologies for emphasising economic growth, something his critics say will come at the cost of protecting Brazil’s environment. “We represent a turning point in the eyes of the Brazilian people — a turning point in which ideological bias will no longer take place,” Bolsonaro said in a brief address to a packed room, which was greeted with perfunctory applause. “Our motto is, ‘God above all things.'” Bolsonaro’s keynote address set the tone for a Davos gathering shorn of its usual retinue of American and European leaders, wrestling with political forces, from Latin America to Europe, that are starkly at odds with this conference’s ethos of global cooperation and a liberal world order. With his nationalist instincts, strongman style, and history of making crude statements about women, gay people and indigenous groups, Bolsonaro is in many ways the very antithesis of a “Davos Man” — the term once used to describe the type of person who attends the annual conference. A 63-year-old former Army officer whose victory symbolised the frustration of Brazilians with their corrupt governing elite, he has acted swiftly since taking power to loosen restrictions on guns, curb lesbian and gay rights, and put civil-society groups under tighter control. In November, at the behest of Bolsonaro, Brazil withdrew its pledge to host the 2019 United Nations global summit meeting on climate change. During the election campaign, many people feared he would pull out of the Paris climate accord, which he has not yet done. On Tuesday, Bolsonaro insisted that Brazil would “work in harmony with the world, in sync with the world” to reduce carbon emissions, though he did not mention the accord. “Those who criticize us have a great deal to learn with us,” he added. Bolsonaro and Trump have cultivated each other assiduously, and the parallels between them are at times striking. Bolsonaro boasted of winning “despite having been unfairly attacked all the time,” echoing Trump’s vilification of the news media. Though he was speaking in a heated room, Bolsonaro wore a long winter coat. Trump is partial to these as well: He was photographed wearing one recently in the State Dining Room as he posed with a spread of fast food laid out for the Clemson University football team. After Bolsonaro took office, Trump tweeted, “Congratulations to President @JairBolsonaro who just made a great inauguration speech — the USA is with you!” Bolsonaro quickly replied, “Together, under God’s protection, we shall bring prosperity and progress to our people!” Trump, whose presence dominated last year’s meeting, cancelled his visit this year because of the government shutdown. He pulled the plug on the rest of the American delegation a few days later, after he denied House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other lawmakers the right to use a military aircraft to fly to Afghanistan and Brussels. Those who wanted to hear from the Trump administration had to make do with a video appearance by Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who spoke from the balcony of the State Department, with the Lincoln Memorial over his left shoulder. Pompeo delivered a faithful summary of Trump’s “America First” foreign policy, with harsh words for Iran and China. He told the audience that Trump’s brand of disruption was a healthy response to voters who had tuned out more traditional politicians, and mirrored political upheavals in Britain, France, Italy and Brazil. Prime Minister Theresa May of Britain, who is dealing with the chaos over Britain’s exit from the European Union, and President Emmanuel Macron of France, who is facing a wave of unrest from “Yellow Vest” protesters, both skipped this year’s meeting. Pompeo said that critics of the Trump administration were not ready to face the challenge of reforming international institutions like the United Nations. “But President Trump is,” he said. Asked if the United States was isolated, Pompeo said, “I don’t think we’re remotely isolated.” Still, the signposts of a changing world order were evident throughout the snow-covered streets of Davos. While Silicon Valley stalwarts like Facebook and Salesforce still put up gleaming pavilions to promote their presence, the biggest billboard belonged to Saudi Arabia, which took up the side of a hotel to encourage visitors to invest in the kingdom. Saudi Arabia’s own investor conference, known as Davos in the Desert, was hit by a wave of cancellations in October after intelligence reports linked the conference’s patron, Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, to the killing of Saudi journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. Along the streets were advertisements for the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s answer to Davos. Though few Chinese officials turned up here, the sessions devoted to China’s economy, like the Belt and Road Initiative, drew by far the largest audiences. Although the United States kept a lower profile this year, it continued to cast a long shadow over the gathering. Economic analysts cited Trump’s trade war with China as a culprit for cutting their forecasts of global economic growth. And foreign policy analysts said Trump’s erratic style remained the greatest single source of risk in the world. “If you are challenging the international system, you need something to put in its place,” said Karin von Hippel, a former State Department official who is director-general of the Royal United Services Institute in London. “There doesn’t seem to be a plan.”   c.2019 New York Times News Service

UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon has urged all parties to negotiate in good faith at the Cancún climate talks. Just after attending a high-level segment of the 16th session of the UN climate convention, Ban held a press briefing where he made it clear that not much was expected from the conference. But the UN head indicated that he expected things to fall into place for a concrete decision next year. He reminded the participants that the whole world was watching as governments negotiated a deal. "I expect that delegations will negotiate in the spirit of compromise and common sense." Ban stressed that each country must negotiate solely on the basis of the long-term interests of their people and nothing else. "This is not a sprint, but a marathon," he said trying to drive home the point that climate change was a gradual long-drawn process to begin with and so it will be to do away with it.

VATICAN CITY, Sun May 25, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Pope Benedict urged all Christians on Sunday to help international efforts to resolve a food price crisis that threatens to make millions more people go hungry, ahead of a food summit in Rome early next month. "Whoever is nourished by the bread of Christ cannot remain indifferent before those who, in our times too, are deprived of daily bread," he said, referring to the Christian Eucharist where bread and wine represent the body and blood of Christ. "This problem is getting more and more serious and the international community is struggling to resolve it," said the German-born pontiff in his regular Angelus address to pilgrims at St. Peter's Square in Rome. The United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization hosts a summit in Rome on June 3-5 to discuss the difficulties caused by record-high commodity prices, which have doubled the food import bills of the poorest countries in the past two years. With food protests and riots already seen in some developing countries, the summit will discuss the impact on food security of climate change and biofuel use, which has switched millions of tonnes of cereals from food to fuel production.

Scholz's centre-left Social Democrats (SPD), the ecologist Greens and the libertarian Free Democrats (FDP) want to accelerate the transition to a green economy and digitalisation while maintaining fiscal discipline, according to a 177-page agreement. The alliance - named a traffic light coalition after the three parties' respective colours - has a majority in the lower house of parliament and hopes the government will be sworn in early next month after the parties ratify the coalition pact. The first alliance at a federal level between the ideologically disparate parties will end 16 years of Merkel-led conservative government, marking a new era for relations with Europe and the rest of the world. The three parties defied predictions that their coalition talks would last into next year or fail, and managed to keep details of their negotiations under wraps following an inconclusive election in September. At a news conference in Berlin, flanked by the FDP and Greens leaders, Scholz recalled that when the first traffic light was erected at the city's Potsdamer Platz in 1924, many questioned whether it could work. "Today, the traffic light is indispensable when it comes to regulating things clearly and providing the right orientation and ensuring that everyone moves forward safely and smoothly, " he said. "My ambition as chancellor is that this traffic light alliance will play a similarly groundbreaking role for Germany." Merkel leaves big shoes to fill. She has navigated Germany and Europe through multiple crises and been a champion of liberal democracy in the face of rising authoritarianism worldwide. Her critics say she has managed rather than solved problems and leaves her successor tough decisions on many fronts. Scholz's incoming government faces immediate challenges, with Europe grappling with the fallout from Brexit, a crisis on the European Union's border with Belarus and surging COVID-19 cases. While Germany's electoral campaign was largely focused on domestic issues, the coalition pact shed light on the next government's foreign policy priorities. The parties agreed to strengthen the EU's economic and monetary union and signalled an openness to reform the bloc's fiscal rules, also known as the Stability and Growth Pact. They also agreed Germany would remain part of NATO's nuclear sharing agreement, a move that will prevent a rift in the Western military alliance at a time of rising tensions with Russia. MERKEL BIDS FAREWELL Presiding over what could be her final cabinet meeting, Merkel bade her colleagues farewell earlier in the day, and Scholz presented the EU's longest-serving leader with a tree to plant in her garden, according to a person at the meeting. As finance minister and vice chancellor in the outgoing "grand coalition" of the SPD and conservatives, Scholz, 63, was seen as a competent rather than a charismatic politician who, like Merkel, has moderate views and is adept at dialogue. He now needs to build and maintain a consensus between the Greens and SPD, who are widely seen as natural centre-left partners, and the fiscally hawkish FDP have historically been closer to Germany's conservatives. While the coalition did not name its cabinet line-up on Wednesday, FDP leader Christian Lindner, 42, is widely expected to take over at the finance ministry and Greens co-leader Robert Habeck, 52, to take on a newly expanded economy and climate change ministry. Merkel did not seek re-election after four terms as chancellor. Her personal popularity ratings remain high, but her party is in disarray and facing a leadership contest after achieving its worst results in a federal vote following a gaffe-prone campaign by its candidate for chancellor.

By Diana Furchtgott-Roth Undated, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) – The first Thanksgiving festival was celebrated in 1621 in Massachusetts by the Pilgrims, immigrants to America, out of gratitude for a plentiful harvest. As we sit around our Thanksgiving tables this Thursday, almost all of us immigrants or their descendants, we're reminded that one of President-elect Obama's most important challenges will be to mend our broken immigration policy. Instead of a rational immigration system, we have occasional raids by immigration officers on plants suspected of employing illegals. Then come deportations that may separate an undocumented parent and children whose birth in the United States made them citizens. The most controversial facet of the immigration challenge is what to do about the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants. Most are unlikely to return to their native lands, even in today's tough economic climate. Nor would we want them to do so. They work at jobs that few Americans choose to do, both in high-skill area—scientific and medical research, for instance—and in mundane yet essential low-skill jobs, such as gardening, washing cars, and cleaning. In 2007, Congress did not pass President Bush's comprehensive immigration proposals, supported by the Democratic leadership and many Republicans. Will Obama succeed where Bush failed? Obama's proposal mirrors the bill that failed: increased border protection; more visas for new immigrants; penalties for employers who hire undocumented workers; and eventual citizenship for undocumented workers already here, after payment of a fine. It would be a major improvement. But with unemployment rising, if Congress won't pass immigration reform, it could still improve the functioning of American labor markets with narrower action. It could authorize the Department of Labor to decide on its own the number of work permits and temporary visas to be issued each calendar quarter. Every year, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), as instructed by law, issues 65,000 H-1b temporary visas for skilled workers. These lucky workers are certified by the Labor Department out of approximately 630,000 approved applications from employers. Immigrants who hold H-1b visas must return to their home countries when their jobs end. Yet, as the numbers show, most applicants do not get a visa. Many skilled foreign college graduates who have been studying in America, often at American taxpayer expense, are denied access to American jobs. They must leave, taking their intellectual achievements and valuable skills with them. Foreign workers benefit the American economy. They pay taxes. They keep laboratories and motels, high-tech shows and construction sites, running. They cannot if they are sent away. For 2009, the H-1b visa cap of 65,000 was reached one week after the start of the application process on April 1, 2008. That represents a tiny part of the U.S. labor force of 154 million. Even if the quota were raised to 150,000, that would be less than one tenth of 1% of the labor force. Such a quota would still deny admission to the vast majority of prospective applicants who don't apply due to the small likelihood of success. Whereas Congress is ill-suited to change laws each time the economy goes up or down, the Labor Department has both the expertise to evaluate changing labor markets and the flexibility to adjust visa quotas. Congress should consider letting the Labor Department make quarterly decisions about how many visas to issue. When unemployment rises, the Department would issue fewer visas; when it goes down, visas could be increased. The Department could manage visas without causing undue burden on U.S. workers or community facilities, such as schools and hospitals. Allowing the Labor Department to adjust legal immigration every quarter would help America. President-elect Obama could leave behind the rancor and division over immigration that have plagued the Bush administration, and set a new tone for a new year. That would be something to be thankful for next Thanksgiving. — Diana Furchtgott-Roth, former chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor, is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. The opinions expressed are her own. — Diana Furchtgott-Roth can be reached at [email protected].

The data, published in Thursday's edition of the journal Science, shows that the oceans have experienced consistent changes since the late 1950s and have gotten a lot warmer since the 1960s, CNN reported. The oceans are heating up much faster than scientists calculated in the UN assessment of climate change released in 2014, the study said. For the new study, scientists used data collected by a high-tech ocean observing system called Argo, an international network of more than 3,000 robotic floats that continuously measure the temperature and salinity of the water. Researchers used this data in combination with other historic temperature information and studies. "The ocean is the memory of climate change, along with melted ice, and 93 per cent of the Earth's energy imbalance ends up in the ocean," said study co-author Kevin Trenberth, part of the Climate Analysis Section at the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research. "Global warming is close to ocean warming, and 2018 will be the warmest year on record, followed by 2017, then 2015. "Global warming is rearing its head," Trenberth said. A warmer ocean causes sea level to rise, bringing problems like dangerous coastal flooding. It leads to the loss of sea ice, heating the waters even further. It can affect the jet stream, allowing cold Arctic air to reach farther south, making winters more intense and endanger the lives of animals that depend on sea ice like penguins and polar bears. A warmer ocean also contributes to increases in rainfall and leads to stronger and longer-lasting storms like Hurricanes Florence and Harvey. Thursday's study fits within other reports like the UN warning in October that humanity has just over 10 years to act to avoid disastrous levels of global warming, CNN said. A US government report in November delivered a similar dire warning that the country could lose hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of lives by the end of the century due to climate change.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, inspecting the rubble of UN offices hit by a car bombing in Algiers last week, said on Tuesday he was "very shocked" by an attack that killed 17 UN staff. "Terrorism is never justified," Ban, on a one-day visit, said of the Dec. 11 bombings claimed by al Qaeda's north Africa wing. "It must be condemned in the name of humanity and the international community. I was very shocked," he said of the attack, one of twin attacks the same day which killed at least 37 people in Algiers. The attacks were the second big bombing this year in the capital of the OPEC member country, seeking to rebuild after an undeclared civil in the 1990s war which killed up to 200,000. "I would like to express my sincere condolences to the government and people of Algeria and the families of the victims and to UN colleagues." Witnesses said Ban was driven in a heavily guarded convoy of vehicles to the city's Hydra district where he inspected crumpled blocks of masonry at the site of the ruined offices of the UN's refugee agency and the UN Development Programme. Reporters were not permitted to accompany Ban to the site. The second suicide car bombing on Dec. 11 damaged the Constitutional Court building in Ben Aknoun district. Al Qaeda's North African wing claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings, saying it had targeted what it called "the slaves of America and France". Ban also met President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, saying Algeria and the world body had decided to work together closely to fight terrorism. Ban said the two men also discussed climate change, illegal migration and the question of Western Sahara. The United Nations has identified the dead UN employees as 14 Algerians and one victim each from Denmark, Senegal and the Philippines. Ban said at the time that the bombs were "a despicable strike against individuals serving humanity's highest ideals under the UN banner" and "an attack on all of us". UN Development Programme Administrator Kemal Dervis said during a visit to Algiers last week that the United Nations was boosting security at its offices around the world after Tuesday's attacks, but he said this would need more funding.

“2022 sounds really far away,” she said. “But once I saw Egypt, I couldn’t get enough of it.” People have always planned big trips months or even a year ahead of time, but now many are extending that timeline even further. In the travel stasis induced by the pandemic, future travellers have taken to tackling their bucket lists with big trips that are more distant and longer than usual — and planned further in advance. Optimists are targeting 2021. For others, their next big trip will be in 2022. Before the pandemic, according to the American Society of Travel Advisors, most travellers booked trips six months ahead or more, on average, and longer for elaborate honeymoons or very special events like the solar eclipse passing over South America in December. Some travel companies say longer-term bookings have recently rebounded. For instance, Red Savannah, a British luxury travel agency that organises custom trips, says it is up 160% over bookings this time last year. These days, even spontaneous types have more time to think about where they want to go and put a plan in place. “I’m trying to go big with my trips,” said Rayme Gorniak of Chicago, who is currently laid off from his work managing fitness studio franchises. Anything short and normally easy to plan might bring disappointment as the pandemic continues, he reasoned, but a far-horizon destination — he’s considering Jordan for June 2021 — offers hope. The trip also represents a personal conquest for Gorniak, who is gay and worried about the persecution of LGBT people in some Muslim countries. “Jordan’s been on my radar because of the rich history, and off it because of the potential risk I would have,” he said. “But I’ve been doing research on Amman and seeing, as strict religious standards go, it’s a little bit more lax on tradition,” he said. For Lori Goldenthal of Wellesley, Massachusetts, changing plans meant changing the destination. She had originally planned a trip in and around Vietnam for her husband’s upcoming 60th birthday. But after the pandemic hit, she worked with the agency Extraordinary Journeys to book a two-week trip to Namibia for 2021. “Namibia was on my bucket list and it seemed like a better idea than going to all these big cities in Asia,” she said. “I believe we will go, but who knows,” she added, noting generous cancellation policies that made her more comfortable booking the trip. “Having something to look forward to is fantastic.” Other forward-looking travellers are simply picking up a year later. After months of reading about the climate and culture of Greenland, Jill Hrubecky, a structural engineer based in Brooklyn, New York, was excited for a cruise she had planned there in August with her mother and an aunt and uncle. Working with their agency, Huckleberry Travel, they rebooked the cruise for summer 2021 only after learning that the cancellation policy is flexible. “I will not make any nonrefundable, permanent plans for the next couple of years,” she said. “But I’m an optimist. Half the fun of travelling is planning and getting excited.” There are psychological benefits to planning activities, especially travel, according to Shevaun Neupert, a professor of psychology at North Carolina State University. Future-oriented thinking is equated with proactive coping, a means of reducing stress through detailed planning, such as learning which flights to book to avoid layovers, and gathering the resources — including time and money — to make it happen. “Being able to think about and imagine something positive in the future has benefits in the present,” she said. The pandemic, too, may have shown travellers that what they thought they could always do — namely, see the world — isn’t such a certainty. “Maybe they thought it would always be available, which was previously true. Now we’ve experienced restrictions and realise, oh, I need to make this happen,” she added. Advance planning is also a practical way to turn vague desires into concrete plans. The travel adviser network Virtuoso offers a program called Virtuoso Wanderlist, an online survey that friends or family seeking to travel together take individually. (Since the pandemic, Virtuoso has made the online planning tool free.) The program asks where they want to go, their interests and the kinds of activities they prefer. It then compares the results to identify mutual preferences and priorities that a travel adviser will analyse and, in consultation with the clients, use to come up with a five-year plan for tackling the bucket list. Jim Bendt, the managing director of Virtuoso Wanderlist, equates travel planning with financial planning in the sense that both seek to maximize precious resources. In the case of travel, the currency is time. “It takes away the stress,” said Karen Walkowski, a health care manager in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, who took the Wanderlist survey with her husband. “It turns a bucket list into a plan.” Theirs started with Vietnam and Cambodia last year. This fall, it was to be a small ship cruise in Greece, which has been postponed a year because of the virus. The pandemic, she said, reshuffled their priorities, pushing Tanzania — originally planned for 2021 — farther out, pending a coronavirus vaccine, and moving Alaska up in its place. “Having a plan takes it from dreaming and conjecturing to actually having things committed on paper, always with adjustments,” she said. “We’ve moved the chess pieces around.” In addition to compounding their wanderlust, many travellers and planners say the pandemic has revealed travel’s environmental impact and are planning more mindfully. “Our current situation has made me even more committed to focusing exclusively on sustainability going forward,” Rose O’Connor, a travel adviser in Granite Bay, California, wrote in an email. “On one hand, we have seen how tourism can be vital to conservation efforts in certain destinations,” she wrote, noting the uptick in poaching in Africa in the absence of tourism revenue. On the other hand, she added, traveling from a hot spot like the United States particularly to remote or developing countries “is an ethical issue.” Jeremy Bassetti, a professor of humanities at Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, has a sabbatical coming up in fall 2021 and plans to use miles to get to China and then travel overland to Tibet, Nepal and India for several months. While big trips often accompany sabbaticals, Bassetti has rethought his to “travel longer, farther and more slowly in 2021,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we want to travel more to connect more” when assumptions about being free to travel are “disappearing before our eyes?” he added. “If you want to experience new cultures, you can’t do it very quickly.” For others, 2022 presents the possibility of traveling in a time when the virus may be contained and spontaneity can resume. High school freshmen Scout Dingman, of Miami, and Sophie Brandimarte, of Glen Head, New York, had been collaborating on a 2021 trip to Europe, making plans for their families to join. They have marked up maps and are keeping a Google Doc of destinations where they might branch out to from Hamburg, Germany, where they plan to visit a friend, although they are keeping their plans loose. Because of the uncertainty of the virus, and the possibility of having to cancel and risk deposits, they are delaying the trip to summer 2022 while maintaining their optimism. “We thought if we pushed it back, then we wouldn’t be disappointed,” Dingman said. “We have to think of safety measures now,” Brandimarte added. “But in terms of the actual trip, we really want to keep on the bright side and not have to worry about that, too.”

The reshuffle is not expected to be as explosive as some commentators had suggested, based on his senior adviser Dominic Cummings' well-publicised desire to see a radical reorganisation of government to fit Johnson's agenda. Instead, a source in his office said Johnson was keen to foster new talent, particularly among women, in the junior ranks of government while also rewarding loyal supporters who helped him win a large majority in last year's election. For now, Johnson is not expected to rock the boat too much, but he started his reshuffle with the sacking of Northern Ireland minister Julian Smith. Only a month ago Smith helped broker the restoration of a Northern Irish government, three years after a power-sharing agreement broke down. "The prime minister wants this reshuffle to set the foundations for government now and in the future," a source in his Downing Street office said. "He wants to promote a generation of talent that will be promoted further in the coming years. He will reward those MPs (members of parliament) who have worked hard to deliver on this government's priorities to level up the whole country and deliver the change people voted for last year." NO RADICAL OVERHAUL EXPECTED Several Conservative officials said now was not the time for the radical transformation of government many had anticipated. Cummings, who worked with Johnson on Britain's Brexit campaign, had long argued for a shake up. That would be costly, they said, as well as disruptive at a time when Johnson must stay on good terms with those voters who gave him such a hefty majority, many of them traditional supporters of Britain's opposition Labour Party. He also wants to wage parallel trade negotiations with the EU and the United States, which observers in Brussels and Washington say will not be easy, and host a meeting of world leaders in November at the COP26 climate change summit. "The question he will be asking of them is 'are you tame?'" one veteran Conservative said, adding Johnson's team wanted a new government that pulls together to meet his goals. So instead of merging departments, Johnson is expected to promote lawmakers and ministers who backed him before last year's election and who are on board with his agenda. The source said Johnson was expected to promote several women such as Anne-Marie Trevelyan, minister for the armed forces, Suella Braverman, a former Brexit junior minister, and Gillian Keegan. Oliver Dowden, a minister in the Cabinet Office, and Alok Sharma, the international development minister, are also expected to be promoted.

Millions more South Asians will suffer from diseases like malaria and cholera, or go hungry due to global warming, but governments are not fully aware of the dangers, the World Health Organisation said on Thursday. A United Nations climate panel report last month predicted climate change would result in temperatures rising by between 1.8 and 4.0 Celsius (3.2 and 7.8 Fahrenheit) in the 21st century. But the WHO's environmental health adviser for South Asia, Alex Hildebrand, said little attention had been paid to the impact rising temperatures would have on the health of the region's 1.4 billion people. "There are so many impacts to human health such as vectoral and water-borne diseases, thermal stress and dehydration and malnutrition," Hildebrand told Reuters in an interview. "This issue needs to be prioritised by governments and health professionals ... The link between climate change and human health is still not known even at the highest levels of government. We need to promote awareness on this." South Asia, home to more than one-sixth of humanity, is considered particularly vulnerable to climate change with low-lying countries such as Bangladesh, Himalayan glaciers, desert areas and huge populations in coastal cities. Hildebrand said the predicted increase in temperature will lead to areas such as the Kathmandu Valley in Nepal and Timpu, Bhutan's capital, and parts of India becoming more susceptible to mosquito-borne diseases. "Diseases like malaria, Japanese encephalitis, tick-borne diseases and dengue fever will definitely thrive in warmer climates," he said. South Asia gets around 20 million cases of malaria every year. Greater frequency of droughts and heatwaves will not only adversely affect crops but will also punish those who live with a scarcity of water and push up rates of respiratory illness. At the same time, increased rainfall will trigger damaging floods along rivers. "Floods will bring more drownings as well as water-borne diseases like cholera and diarrhoea to many more places like Bangladesh and cities like Mumbai and Chennai," he said. Diahorrea already kills about 600,000 people every year in South Asia, he added, and governments will struggle to cope with the extra health burden.

A small but growing network of asset managers, academics, start-up entrepreneurs and campaigners are working to harness an armada of recently deployed satellites to better predict the economic impact of global warming. While climate scientists caution that the discipline is in its infancy, advocates say the early findings have one over-riding virtue: dynamiting any remaining complacency about the scale of the disruption that lies in store. "This is the missing piece of the jigsaw," said Michael Hugman, a portfolio manager at London-based asset manager Ninety One, where the fixed-income team runs $44.3 billion of mostly emerging market debt. "What we can now do is concretely put hard numbers on what climate change means for countries over the next 30 years. This is a whole different way of thinking about risk and return." While investors have long used satellites to track specific metrics such as activity in shopping mall car parks or iron ore shipments, the new approach -- known as "spatial finance" -- is far more sweeping in scope. It works like this: analysts acquire satellite imagery and other datasets, filter them using algorithms and use the results to project how climate change could affect anything from a single factory to an entire economy. Unlike standard risk models largely based on historical data, spatial finance aims to anticipate how rising heat could usher in a radically different future. Ben Caldecott, director of the Oxford Sustainable Finance Programme, a research unit at the University of Oxford, likens the depth of potential insights to the revolution in biology unlocked by the sequencing of the human genome. "We've had this massive explosion in Earth observation capabilities that means we can see what's going on every point of planet Earth, and we can interpret it and use that for financial analysis," said Caldecott, who has launched a spatial finance initiative to widen the discipline's applications. "What is so transformative is adding another dimension to the information you have as an analyst." Asset managers specialising in emerging market debt have been among the first to explore the possibilities, recognising, for example, that more intense hurricanes or heatwaves can upend the finances of countries dependent on agricultural exports. The results can be sobering. Hugman decided to model how climate change might affect a hypothetical debt restructuring plan for Argentina, which is struggling to pay its creditors. He focused on two of the many possible risks -- the prospect of more ambitious global moves to curb deforestation, which could hit farm exports, and more frequent droughts, using numbers based on spatial techniques. The result: what had looked on paper like a viable plan to manage the country's debt was no longer sustainable. GREEN SWANS Environmentalists hope such findings can in turn be used to arm governments in Latin America, Africa and Asia with the data they need to identify the most promising investments to cushion populations from climate impacts. "What it gives you is a much richer way of engaging with governments," said Susanne Schmitt, nature and spatial finance lead at the World Wildlife Fund, an advocacy group. Working with Hugman and other asset managers, Schmitt aims to leverage spatial finance to mobilise investment in climate-friendly projects such as preserving mangrove swamps or forests. Others wonder whether developing ever-more specific levels of analysis might prove a double-edged sword, enabling smart investors to offload potentially doomed assets to climate-naive counterparts rather than help the vulnerable. "The big question for me is, what happens when particular companies, assets and entire countries are identified as being at risk?" said Kate Mackenzie, a Sydney-based consultant who has advised companies and regulators on climate change. "Are those assets sold to markets and buyers who have the same visibility of that risk?" Even before the coronavirus pandemic gave investors a crash course in the fragility of the global economy, concerns were growing over the far bigger dangers posed by the climate crisis. In January, the Basel-based Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a report warning that markets were ill-equipped to spot so-called "green swans" – high-impact environmental shocks. On climate change, none of the models investors were using captured risks of the "magnitude we have today", warned Luiz Pereira da Silva, BIS deputy general manager, speaking on a podcast recorded when the report was launched. "We need to use more and more novel approaches, forward-looking scenarios that instead of just trying to replicate the past, extrapolate from the knowledge that we are accumulating with climate scientists," he said. A stack of research has hammered home the scale of the dangers looming by mid-century if greenhouse gas emissions keep growing. In January, the McKinsey Global Institute pointed out that cities in parts of India and Pakistan could be among the first places in the world to experience heatwaves hot enough to kill a healthy human, under a high emissions scenario. West Africa may see 70-90 more days per year with dangerous levels of heat than at present, according to World Bank data. And even if emissions start to fall moderately, rising sea-levels are projected to hit land in China, Bangladesh and India that is now home to 171 million people, according to a study by Climate Central. ALGORITHMS AT WORK With investor concerns over climate growing, entrepreneurs have spied an opportunity to refine a torrent of data streaming down from space into products for money managers. In Britain, new spatial finance start-ups include Oxford Earth Observation and Sust Global. Based in Charlottesville, Virginia, Astraea Inc mines data from some of the 1,500 earth-observing satellites in orbit at any given time. The company is working with Caldecott's spatial finance initiative to create an open-source database of all the world's cement factories, which could encourage investors to pressure the most polluting operators to clean up their act. "We give you the tools to be able to train an algorithm to look for specific things and then apply that across whatever geographic scale you want, " said Chief Executive Brendan Richardson. With investors in emerging markets increasingly engaging in talks with governments about sustainability, some are exploring whether risks identified using spatial finance could give the discussions more teeth. "We invest our clients' assets for the long term ... where climate change and environmental factors will actually be significant," said Mary-Therese Barton, head of emerging market debt at Pictet Asset Management. "That's where the dialogue becomes really important." Long before big data and space exploration, in 8th century Baghdad, a star-gazer known as Masha'allah ibn Athari inspired generations of future astrologers with a theory that the cycles of Jupiter and Saturn predicted global upheaval. While none of the spatial finance start-ups claim prophetic powers, climate scientists advise caution. The climate-related shocks that tend to cause the biggest market gyrations are generally extreme weather events, such as hurricanes, which cannot be predicted with any real degree of precision. Andy Pitman, a climate scientist at University of New South Wales in Australia, says there is no question that investors need to grapple with climate risk, but worries that some companies might be overselling what they can do. "It's probably a 10-year moonshot to close this gap between what businesses want to know, and what climate scientists can reliably provide them," Pitman said.

Global warming threatens to intensify natural disasters and water shortages across China, driving down the country's food output, the Chinese government has warned, even as its seeks to tame energy consumption. A forthcoming official assessment of the effects of global climate change on China will warn of worsening drought in northern China and increasing "extreme weather events", according to the Ministry of Science and Technology's Web site (www.most.gov.cn) on Wednesday. A deputy director of the National Climate Centre, Luo Yong, was blunt about the risks for China's food production. "The most direct impact of climate change will be on China's grain production," he said on Tuesday, according to the Science Times newspaper. "Climate change will bring intensified pressure on our country's agriculture and grain production." The official report promises to stir debate about whether and how China can balance its ambitious goals for economic growth with steps to rein in rising greenhouse gas emissions from industry and cars, which keep heat in the atmosphere and threaten to dramatically increase the planet's average temperatures. Scientists have been uncertain about the effects of rising global temperatures on China's farming, unsure whether greater average rainfall will outweigh the costs of higher temperatures and more frequent natural disasters. The official assessment concludes that hotter weather and increased evaporation will outweigh greater rain and snowfall. In the country's south, heavier rainfalls could trigger more landslides and mudslides, it also warns. Luo indicated that by 2030-2050, China's potential grain output could fall by 10 percent, unless crop varieties and practices adapt to the increasingly turbulent climate. An official from the Ministry of Science and Technology told Reuters that the government assessment was likely to be fully released in the first half of 2007. The climate change warnings came as Chinese President Hu Jintao called for intensified efforts to save energy. China should use price, tax and other financial measures to promote energy saving and curb wasteful use, Hu told a top party meeting, according to state media on Wednesday. Industries that consume excessive energy and pollute the environment should be shut down, the official Economic Daily quoted Hu as saying. China, the world's fourth-largest economy and second biggest energy user, has set a goal to cut energy consumption per unit of national income by 20 percent by 2010. But with coal-fired stations providing over 80 percent of China's electricity supply, China is on course to overtake the United States by 2009 as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide, one of the main greenhouse gases that warm the planet. China has resisted calls for a cap even on emissions growth, arguing that most carbon dioxide currently in the atmosphere was produced by developed nations as they industrialised, and they have no right to deny the same economic growth to others.

This summer has been tough for Baher, a father of two. Iraq's 2020-2021 rainfall season was the second driest in 40 years, according to the United Nations, causing the salinity of the wetlands to rise to dangerous levels. Animals fell sick and died, and Baher was forced to buy fresh drinking water for his own herd of around 20 buffaloes, his only source of income. Another drought is predicted for 2023 as climate change, pollution and upstream damming keep Iraq trapped in a cycle of recurring water crises. "The marshes are our life. If droughts persist, we will stop to exist, because our whole life depends on water and raising water buffaloes," said 37-year-old Baher. Baher and his family are Marsh Arabs, the wetlands' indigenous population that was displaced in the 1990s when Saddam Hussein dammed and drained the marshes to flush out rebels hiding in the reeds. Children play at the Chebayesh marsh, Dhi Qar province, Iraq, August 25, 2021. REUTERS After his overthrow in 2003, the marshes were partly reflooded and many Marsh Arabs returned, including Baher's family. Children play at the Chebayesh marsh, Dhi Qar province, Iraq, August 25, 2021. REUTERS However, conditions have pushed the wetlands' fragile ecosystem off balance, endangering biodiversity and livelihoods, said Jassim al-Asadi, an environmentalist born in the marshes. "The less water, the saltier it is," Christophe Chauveau, a French veterinarian who surveyed the marshes for Agronomists and Veterinarians Without Borders said, adding that buffalos drink less and produce less milk when the water quality drops. According to the Max Planck Institute, the temperature rise in the Middle East during summer has been more than 0.5 degrees Celsius per decade - about twice as high as the global average. Iraq's neighbours are also suffering from droughts and rising temperatures, which has led to regional water disputes. The water ministry said earlier this year that water flows from Iran and Turkey were reduced by 50 percent throughout the summer. PRIORITIES Then there is the matter of pollution coming from upstream. In 2019, the government said that 5 million cubic metres a day of raw sewage water were being pumped directly into the Tigris, one of the rivers that feed Iraq's marshes. Men pray at the Chebayesh marsh in Dhi Qar province, Iraq, August 14, 2021. REUTERS Environmentalist Azzam Alwash said there was an urgent need for Iraq to commit to a long-term water management strategy as its fast-growing population of nearly 40 million is estimated to double by 2050. Men pray at the Chebayesh marsh in Dhi Qar province, Iraq, August 14, 2021. REUTERS Aoun Dhiab, spokesperson for the water ministry, said the government's strategy was to preserve the deeper, permanent water bodies of the marshes across a minimum of 2,800 square kilometres (1080 square miles). "This is what we are planning, to preserve the permanent water bodies to protect the ecological resources and fish stock," he said. Dhiab said water levels in the marshes had partially improved since the summer, with less evaporation due to falling temperatures and that the wetlands shrink and expand naturally depending on the season. He also said the government could not allocate more water to the marshes when there were shortages of drinking water in summer. "Of course people in the marshes want more water, but we need to prioritise. The priority goes to drinking water, to the municipalities and to preserving the Shatt al-Arab river," he said. Drought and pollution of the Shatt al-Arab river caused a crisis in southern Iraq in 2018, when thousands were hospitalised with water-borne diseases. A man paddles his boat at the Chebayesh marsh, Dhi Qar province, Iraq, August 13, 2021. REUTERS The consequences are nonetheless punishing for the Marsh Arabs. With his youngest daughter nestled in his arms and drinking buffalo milk out of her feeder, Baher watches his nephews tend to a sick buffalo. A man paddles his boat at the Chebayesh marsh, Dhi Qar province, Iraq, August 13, 2021. REUTERS In summer, some of Baher's relatives moved their herds altogether to deeper parts of the marshes, where salinity levels were lower, but fighting over the best spots as families were forced to share shrinking spaces.Estimates on the marshes' current population vary widely. Once 400,000 in the 1950s, around 250,000 people returned when the marshes were reflooded. While diminishing water supplies pushed farmers this year to move to the cities, where a lack of jobs and services have led to protests in the past, Baher, like many other young herders, hopes that he will be able to remain here. "I felt like a stranger in the city," he said, remembering when the marshes were drained. "When the water came back to the marshes, we regained our freedom."

Advertisements for flights, or holidays that include flying, should carry a tobacco-style health warning to remind people of the global warming crisis, a leading British think-tank said on Thursday. Using the traditional Easter holiday getaway to highlight the issue, the Institute for Public Policy Research said such health warnings would make people think twice about the impact their journey would have on the environment. "The evidence that aviation damages the atmosphere is just as clear as the evidence that smoking kills," IPPR climate change chief Simon Retallack said. "We know that smokers notice health warnings on cigarettes, and we have to tackle our addiction to flying in the same way," he added, calling for clearly visible warnings such as "flying causes climate change". Scientists predict that global average temperatures will rise by between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius this century, mainly due to burning fossil fuels for power and transport, putting millions of lives at risk from floods, famines and storms. Environmental campaigners say emissions of climate warming carbon gases at high altitude are more than twice as damaging as those at ground level and that people should be deterred from flying where alternatives are available. Although flying currently contributes relatively litle to the sum total of carbon emissions, the industry is booming and its emissions are expected to double or triple in coming years. "If we are to change people's behaviour, warnings must be accompanied by offering people alternatives to short-haul flights and by steps to make the cost of flying better reflect its impact on the environment," Retallack said. The IPPR called for the health warnings to carry detailed information on the amount of carbon dioxide each flight would emit per passenger and, where relevant, compare it with alternative means of transport like trains. To go alongside that, IPPR called for increases in aviation taxation to deter air travel and for carbon offsetting -- buying surplus emission certificates from elsewhere -- to become an automatic part of the flight ticket. The British government has come in for harsh criticism from environmentalists for promoting rather than trying to rein in surging air travel, refusing to tax air fuel in the same way as road fuel and putting only token taxes on passengers.

Environmentalists love taking aim at ExxonMobil Corp., which many see as the biggest corporate culprit in human-fueled climate change. A documentary on global warming takes this to a new level: buy the $24.99 DVD online, and the film's distributor will donate $10 to victims of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill. "Hey, $10 might not be the $339 billion in revenue that ExxonMobil's going to generate ... this year, but it's what we can do," said Halfdan Hussey, executive director of Cinequest, which is distributing the film "Out of Balance." "We might be able to write a $100,000 check." The donations would go to the Bidarki Youth Center in Cordova, Alaska, on Prince William Sound, where the tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground in March 1989, spilling 11 million gallons (50 million liters) of crude oil along 1,200 miles (1,900 km) of Alaskan coastline. The Valdez spill was what originally got filmmaker Tom Jackson interested in ExxonMobil and its influence. "I was in college then and pretty upset by that whole thing ... and the way it was handled, or perhaps one would say, mishandled," Jackson said by phone from Portsmouth, New Hampshire. He stopped buying Exxon gas and noticed a boycott of the company's credit cards, but did not then associate the company with the growing issue of global warming. That came much later, after Hurricane Katrina ravaged the U.S. Gulf Coast and some scientists linked more severe storms with climate change. Scenes of the ravaged Louisiana coastline open the film. "I myself took a while to come around to the whole climate change issue, and bought the whole 'the jury is still out' (argument)," Jackson said. But then he heard reports that ExxonMobil has funded those skeptical of the reality of global warming. "FOSTERING THE CONFUSION" ON CLIMATE CHANGE "When I started to find out who it was that was really fostering the confusion around the issue ... I just thought it was outrageous that here's this company that basically has been portraying this major debate among climate scientists ... when largely the debate was over a long time ago, back in the 90s." Jackson, who made "Out of Balance" for about $50,000, said the connection between the Valdez spill and ExxonMobil's stance on global warming was former chief executive Lee Raymond, who headed the corporation's cleanup operations in Alaska in 1989. Jackson and others quoted in the film dismissed this operation as a "PR charade" aimed more at looking busy than fixing the problem. ExxonMobil has weathered numerous accusations of funding what critics call "junk science" on climate change by saying that the corporation funds a wide range of organizations and does not dictate what they produce. Asked specifically about the accusations in "Out of Balance," ExxonMobil spokesman Gantt Walton said by e-mail, "This film was produced and originally aired a year ago and the recycling of discredited conspiracy theories diverts attention from the real challenge at hand: how to provide the energy needed to sustain and improve global living standards while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions." ExxonMobil, unlike other oil companies including BP and Chevron, has not been very vocal in opposing climate-warming emissions. But it did run double-page spreads in The Washington Post and The New York Times to promote its new technology that could make the batteries in hybrid vehicles more efficient. The ads ran on Dec. 3, the opening day of an international conference in Bali, Indonesia, aimed at figuring out how to cut greenhouse emissions after the current Kyoto Protocol runs out in 2012. The Exxon Valdez case is still winding its way through the legal system. The US Supreme Court will hear the company's appeal to overturn a $2.5 billion punitive damage award to about 32,000 commercial fishermen, Alaska natives, property owners and others affected by the worst U.S. tanker spill. Exxon's Walton called the spill "a tragic accident," but said the company has paid $3.5 billion in cleanup and other costs and believes that no punitive damage payment is warranted.

World leaders worked through the early hours to try and beat a Friday deadline for a deal on cutting emissions and helping poor countries cope with the costly impact of global warming. After days of stalemate, the United States revived the 193-nation talks on Thursday by backing a $100 billion climate fund to help poor nations adapt their economies and tackle threats such as failing crops and dwindling water supplies. A group of about 25 influential world leaders had constructive talks overnight on how to unblock the climate negotiations, Danish Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen, who hosted the talks, said on Friday. "We had a very fruitful, constructive dialogue," Rasmussen told reporters. Many leaders mentioned risks of failure ahead of the final push, which started with a gala dinner for about 120 world leaders at Christiansborg Palace in Copenhagen, hosted by Denmark's Queen Margrethe. "Time is against us, let's stop posturing," said French President Nicolas Sarkozy, one of scores of leaders who addressed the talks on Thursday. "A failure in Copenhagen would be a catastrophe for each and every one of us." Police said 28 people were detained in connection with a Greenpeace protest near the palace, including three who evaded security to slip inside. After arriving in a motorcade ahead of U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the activists walked straight up the red carpet carrying signs reading: "Politicians talk, leaders Act". U.S. President Barack Obama will arrive on Friday and is expected to face pressure to pledge deeper emissions cuts from the world's number two emitter of greenhouse gases behind China. "I really expect them to announce something more," European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso told reporters. "President Obama is not coming just to reiterate what is in their draft legislation," he said, referring a climate bill that has yet win U.S. Senate approval. Obama will meet Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao on the sidelines of the Dec 7-18 talks, the largest ever climate summit. Officials said the United States was making progress with China on outstanding issues but could not say whether a deal would result after Obama arrived. One U.S. official said there was progress on monitoring, reporting and verification requirements by China and other big developing countries on their emissions curbs. China has resisted such requirements. FUNDING PLEDGE The United States had helped the mood earlier by promising to back a $100 billion a year fund for poor nations from 2020. Such funds would be more than all current aid flows to poor nations, a U.N. official said, and in line with demands put forward for African nations. "That's very encouraging," U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said of the U.S. pledge. A U.S. official said Obama was unlikely to be more specific about U.S. funding commitments. Accord on finance is one part of a puzzle that also includes a host of other measures, such as saving rainforests, boosting carbon markets and stiffening global carbon emissions curbs. "If each and everyone does a little bit more then we can do this," German Chancellor Angela Merkel said. She said the European Union was willing to do more but would not act alone. But any deal will have to be agreed by unanimity. Some small island states and African nations -- most vulnerable to climate change -- say they will not agree a weak deal. "We are talking about the survival of our nation," Prime Minister Apisai Ielemia of the Pacific island state of Tuvalu said of the talks that began two years ago in Bali, Indonesia. The draft texts of the negotiations include possible goals such as halving world greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 or obliging developed nations to cut their emissions by between 25 and 40 percent by 2020. "We are moving out of the valley of death. We are beginning to see the outlines of a compromise, helped by the U.S. offer on finance," said Kim Carstensen, head of the WWF environmental group's global climate initiative. Earlier on Thursday, prospects for a strong U.N. climate pact seemed remote as nations blamed leading emitters China and the United States for deadlock on carbon cuts. But ministers and leaders urged fresh urgency. "Copenhagen is too important to fail," China's climate change ambassador Yu Qingtai said.

Sheikh Maktoum bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum -- Sheikh Mohammed's son and the current deputy ruler of Dubai -- has been appointed deputy prime minister and finance minister. Mohammed bin Hadi Al Husseini replaces long-serving Obaid Humaid Al Tayer as the Emirates' minister of state for finance, while Maryam Al Muhairi becomes the minister of climate change and environment. Suhail Mohamed Al Mazrouei remains energy minister, but also takes on the role of infrastucture minister reflecting the merger of both ministries. Sheikh Mohammed announced the reshuffle as part of a new government strategy aimed at expediting change through "transformational projects" in the Emirates. "The new strategy comes with the completion of our previous plan, UAE Vision 2021, through which we achieved all our ambitions in the past 10 years," he said on Twitter. The announcement comes as Gulf countries seek to secure investment and boost their international status as the importance of oil declines. The UAE recently announced plans to launch 50 new economic initiatives to boost the country's competitiveness and attract 550 billion dirhams ($150 billion) in foreign direct investment in the next nine years. The Gulf state has launched several measures over the past year to attract investment and foreigners to help the economy recover from the effects of the pandemic. The changes also come amid a growing economic rivalry with Gulf neighbour Saudi Arabia to be the region's trade and business hub.

It has sown death in the thousands and filled hospitals with wartime surges, turning them into triage wards. People gird for the grocery store in mask and gloves, as if they were going into battle. Particularly for Europe, which has experienced waves of terrorism that achieved some of the same results, the current plague has eerie echoes. But this virus has created a different terror because it is invisible, pervasive and has no clear conclusion. It is inflicted by nature, not by human agency or in the name of ideology. And it has demanded a markedly different response. People run screaming from a terrorist’s bomb and then join marches of solidarity and defiance. But when the all-clear finally sounds from the new coronavirus lockdown, people will emerge into the light like moles from their burrows. “People are more afraid of terrorism than of driving their car,” said Peter R Neumann, professor of security studies at King’s College London and founder of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation. Many more people die from car accidents or falling in the bathtub than from terrorism, but people fear terrorism more because they cannot control it. While terrorism is about killing people, Neumann said, “it’s mostly about manipulating our ideas and calculations of interest.” As Trotsky famously said, “the purpose of terror is to terrorise.” But the terrorism of the coronavirus is all the more frightening not only because it is so widespread but also because it is impervious to any of the usual responses — surveillance, SWAT teams, double agents or persuasion. “It’s not a human or ideological enemy, so it’s not likely to be impressed by rhetoric or bluster,” Neumann said. “The virus is something we don’t know, we can’t control, and so we’re afraid of it.” And for good reason — it has already killed more Americans than the nearly 3,000 who died on Sept 11, 2001, and it will kill many times more. “There is a difference between man-made and natural disasters,” said Thomas Hegghammer, an expert on terrorism and senior research fellow at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment in Oslo, Norway. “People are typically more afraid of man-made threats, even if they are less damaging.” But this virus is likely to be different, he said. “It goes much deeper into society than terrorism, and it affects individuals on a much larger scale.” There is a similar sense of helplessness, however, said Julianne Smith, a former security adviser to former Vice President Joe Biden and now at the German Marshall Fund. “You don’t know when terrorism or the pandemic will strike, so it invades your personal life. With terror, you worry about being in crowds and rallies and sporting events. It’s the same with the virus — crowds spell danger.” Part of what makes terrorism terrifying is its randomness, said Joshua A Geltzer, former senior director for counterterrorism on the National Security Council and now a professor of law at Georgetown. “Terrorists count on that randomness, and in a sense this virus behaves the same way,” he said. “It has the capacity to make people think, ‘It could be me.’ ” But to defeat the virus requires a different mentality, Geltzer argued. “You see the bomb at the Boston Marathon, so you wonder about going next year; it’s a pretty direct impact,” he said. “But the virus requires one greater step — to think collectively, so as not to burden others by spreading the virus” and overwhelm the health system. And it requires a different sort of solidarity. After the terrorist attacks of Sept 11, President George W Bush urged Americans “to go about their lives, to fly on airplanes, to travel, to work.” After both the Charlie Hebdo and Bataclan attacks of 2015, President François Hollande did the same in France, leading marches and public demonstrations of public resilience and defiance. But in the face of the virus, with so many societies so clearly unprepared, resilience now is not to get on a plane, wrote Geltzer and Carrie F. Cordero, a former security official at the Justice Department and a senior fellow at the Centre for a New American Security. “To be resilient now is to stay at home.” So it is difficult for governments that learned to urge citizens to be calm in times of terrorism to now learn how to frighten them into acting for the common good. Rather than mobilisation, this enemy demands stasis. People respond patriotically, and even viscerally, to the nature of the security response to terrorism, from the helicopters to the shootouts. But “there’s nothing sexy or cool about staying at home, or ordering a company to produce face masks and gowns,” Geltzer said. “We don’t usually chant, ‘USA! USA!’ about home schooling.” It will also be difficult for governments to adjust their security structures to deal with threats that do not respond to increased military spending and enhanced spying. For a long time, Neumann said, analysts who worked on “softer” threats, like health and climate, were considered secondary. “Hardcore security people laughed at that, but no one will doubt that now,” he said. “There will be departments of health security and virologists hired by the CIA, and our idea of security will change.” And there will be new threats afterward — worries about economic collapse, widespread debt, social upheavals. Many fear the effect of such low oil prices on Arab and Persian Gulf countries that need to pay salaries for civil servants and the military, let alone deal with subsidies on bread. But even the Islamic State group has warned its adherents that “the healthy should not enter the land of the epidemic and the afflicted should not exit from it,” which may provide some respite. Hegghammer lived in Norway during the terrorist attacks there in July 2011 by Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people to publicise his fear of Muslims and feminism. The response in Norway was collective solidarity and resolve and a widespread sense of “dugnad,” the Norwegian word for communal work, as individuals donate their labour for a common project. “Dugnad” is being invoked again in the face of the virus, Hegghammer said, with the young aiding the elderly, and government and opposition working “almost too closely together.” The virus and the attacks carried out by Breivik “are being linked explicitly in the debate here,” Hegghammer said. But it is being done in a critical way, to criticize how unprepared the government has been, both then and now, to deal with a major threat. “People say, ‘We’ve already been through this, so how can we be so unprepared?’ ” In the aftermath, as with Breivik, there is likely to be a commission of inquiry in Norway, just as there will inevitably be one in the United States, too, as there was after Sept 11, to see how the government failed and what can be done in the future. But unlike largely homogeneous Norway, the sprawling United States is deeply divided. Unlike Sept 11, “when a single set of events united the country in an instant in its grief, this is a slowly rolling crisis that affects different parts of the country and the society at different speeds,” said Smith of the German Marshall Fund. “So we’re not united as a country.” Given the already deep political polarization in the United States, with partisan battles over science and facts, the virus is likely to have the same impact as the plague did in Athens during the Peloponnesian War, creating indifference to religion and law and bringing forward a more reckless set of politicians, said Kori Schake, director of the foreign and defence policy programme at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. But ultimately, she added, the delayed response from the White House “delegitimises the existing political leadership and practices of society.” If the political consequences are severe enough, she said. they could lead to “ the end of the imperial presidency and a return to the kind of federal and congressional activism that the Founding Fathers designed our system for.” The virus may be politically divisive, but “it is also a reminder,” Schake said, “that free societies thrive on norms of civic responsibility.” c.2020 The New York Times Company

A recent drop in food prices could discourage farmers from sowing crops and cut supplies to an increasingly hungry world, the head of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation said on Monday. FAO chief Jacques Diouf said in an interview on the sidelines of the High Level meeting on Food Security for All in Madrid that many producers had sold harvests in the second half of the year, when prices were particularly low. "These people will have no incentive to reinvest (in the coming crop year) and some will even have losses," he said. "That would entail a significant drop in output in 2009/10 and a sharper increase in prices than in 2007/08, unless it is tempered by the effect of the economic recession on income." The Madrid conference was sponsored by the UN and other international bodies like the World Bank. A report from London-based thinktank Chatham House on Monday also saw recent falls in food prices providing only a temporary reprieve with a reverse upward set to resume in the medium to longer term. "There is a real risk of a 'food crunch' at some point in the future, which would fall particularly hard on import-dependent countries and on poor people everywhere," the report said. The report said climate change, water scarcity and competition for land would make it hard to meet an expected 50 percent rise in demand for food by 2030. It called for more investment in agriculture with a focus on helping small farms. "While arguments for supporting small farms are sometimes dismissed as based on a romantic attachment of peasant agriculture, the evidence shows that with the right policy framework, small farming can be a viable route out of poverty," the report said. Aid agency Oxfam, in another report issued on Monday, echoed concerns about the need to invest more heavily in agriculture. "Decades of underinvestment in agriculture coupled with the increasing threat of climate change mean that despite recent price falls, future food security is by no means guaranteed, and in fact the situation could get worse," Oxfam said. FOOD STOCKS RELATIVELY LOW FAO's Diouf said that although world cereal production in 2008 was a record 2.245 billion tonnes and could easily meet estimated demand in the 2008/09 campaign of 2.198 billion, stocks were relatively low. Cereal stocks of 431 million tonnes were enough to cover just 19.6 percent of demand, the lowest level in 30 years. The FAO estimates that almost 1 billion people suffer from malnutrition, a number which rose by 40 million in 2008. Diouf has asked U.S. President Barack Obama to call a summit to find ways and means to invest an annual $30 billion in agriculture which he says could eradicate hunger by 2025. "If there is real political will, we should be able to mobilise this $30 billion as it is only eight percent of the support to agriculture by OECD countries," he said. A food security summit held in Rome last year had prompted pledges of $22 billion in food aid, mostly for the medium term. Diouf estimated that about $2 billion had been received to date. "We are hoping that on the occasion of this meeting, there will be the possibility of more funds being confirmed for immediate or use of the months to come," he said.

US President Barack Obama will start reversing former President George W Bush's climate change policies on Monday by taking steps to allow states to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and by ordering 2011 vehicle fuel efficiency standards to be set by March. An administration official said late on Sunday that Obama, who took office last week, would direct the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider a request by California to impose its own strict limits on car emissions. The request was denied under the Bush administration. The official said a final decision by the EPA would likely take several months. Another official familiar with the policy shift said Obama would instruct the EPA to approve the waiver allowing California to impose the rules. California last week asked the new administration to reconsider the state's request. California and other states sued the EPA after Stephen Johnson, the agency's chief under the Bush administration, denied California's request for federal permission to impose new limits on carbon dioxide emissions from cars. In a letter to Obama, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger asked the president to "direct the U.S. EPA to act promptly and favorably on California's reconsideration request. The White House official said Obama would also direct the Department of Transportation to move forward with setting 2011 vehicle fuel efficiency standards by March. Obama's memorandum would also instruct the agency to reconsider how such standards are set for later years in a separate process. Obama promised on the campaign trail to take aggressive action to fight global warming and reduce emissions blamed on heating the earth. Shortly after his victory in the November 4 election Obama reiterated his commitment to bringing the United States firmly back into the fold of nations trying to reach a global agreement to limit emissions once the first phase of the Kyoto Protocol runs out at the end of 2012.

The predictions follow a January that was the warmest ever in 141 years of record-keeping, Karin Gleason, a climatologist with the National Centres for Environmental Information, said in a conference call. Global average temperatures last month were 2.05 degrees Fahrenheit (1.14 degrees Celsius) above average, slightly higher than in January 2016, the previous record-holder. In comparing this year with previous years, Gleason said, one way to look at it is “we completed the first lap in a 12-lap race, and we are in the lead.” “According to our probability statistics, it’s virtually certain that 2020 will rank among the top 10 years on record,” she said. Their analysis also showed a 49% chance of this year being the warmest ever and a greater than 98% likelihood it will rank in the top five. The forecasts are in keeping with a long-term trend of global warming that is occurring as a result of human-caused emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. All of the 10 current warmest years on record have occurred since 2004, and the past five years have been the hottest five. Last year was only slightly cooler than 2016, the hottest year ever. The record warmth in January was all the more remarkable because it occurred when the world was no longer in the midst of an El Nino event. An El Nino, which is linked to warmer than average sea-surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, can affect weather patterns worldwide and also lead to generally warmer temperatures. A strong El Nino during the first half of 2016, for example, contributed to the record temperatures that year. But the latest El Nino ended last year, and ocean temperatures in the Pacific have returned to much closer to normal. “We’re in sort of new territory here with a record in a non-El Nino month,” Gleason said. January temperatures were much warmer than average across most regions of the world, with Eastern Europe and Russia having the greatest departures from normal. Australia and Eastern China were also much warmer than usual. Central India was one of the few regions with cooler than average temperatures. Temperatures last month were also warmer than average across the contiguous United States and much of Canada. Alaska was cooler than average, but NOAA forecasts for the next few months call for a return to the above-average warmth that has been the norm in Alaska in recent years and that has led to a large decline in sea ice, particularly off the state’s west coast. NOAA is forecasting warmer-than-average temperatures into May across most of the country, from the West through the Southwest, Southeast, Midwest and into the Northeast. There is also a likelihood of a wet spring across most of the eastern half of the country. California and the Southwest are expected to be dry, likely leading to the return of drought to California and intensification of drought in the Four Corners of the Southwest, NOAA said. © 2020 New York Times News Service

Lars Sorensen is certain of one thing: the number of potential customers for his products is going to keep on rising as a global obesity epidemic tips more people into type 2 diabetes in the West and many developing nations.But he has a mounting fight on his hands when it comes to securing a good price for insulin and other diabetes treatments from cost-conscious reimbursement authorities around the world."Pricing is going to be challenging," Sorensen said in an interview at the drugmaker's headquarters in Bagsvaerd on the outskirts of Copenhagen, where a new spiral office complex inspired by the insulin molecule is under construction."In Europe, it is already a challenge and pricing in the United States is likely to be challenging in the future as well, with healthcare reform and concentration in the distribution chain."It has been a torrid year for the 59-year-old, who has been in the job since 2000 and acknowledges that the group is starting to think about succession planning for when he steps down, sometime before his 65th birthday.Last week he reported the group's 46th quarter of double-digit percentage sales growth in local currency terms, a record most rival drugmakers can only dream of.But the results fell short of market expectations - and a warning that sales and operating profits might only grow by high single digits in 2014 unnerved investors who have bought into the Novo story because of its long-term growth visibility. Lars Sorensen, CEO of Novo Nordisk, gestures during an interview at the company's headquarter in Bagsvaerd near Copenhagen, Credit: Reuters/Fabian Bimmer Sorensen insists the aspiration of double-digit sales growth is "still there, alive and kicking" and Novo has not given up on its long-term financial target of 15 percent operating profit growth, adding that forecasts for the following year given at this stage are "always conservative".But he admits that growing the Nordic region's biggest company by value is getting tougher, especially after a decision by the US Food and Drug Administration earlier this year to delay approval of its new long-acting insulin Tresiba.That setback opens the door to competition from Sanofi's new insulin U300, just as Eli Lilly threatens Novo's popular non-insulin diabetes drug Victoza with a potential rival called dulaglutide that may be superior.On top of all this, Novo is now encountering growing pushback on prices from healthcare insurers and governments, challenging its strategy of increasing prices and charging a premium for innovative medicines.Pricing BalanceGetting the pricing mix right is a balancing act for Novo, whose giant factory at Kalundborg, 100 km west of Copenhagen, supplies half the world's insulin, making both modern products for rich markets and cheap generics for the developing world.Up until now, the West - particularly the United States - has accepted higher prices for more convenient and effective treatments. But the climate is changing, with Novo losing a major US managed care contract with Express Scripts in the face of cheaper competition to Victoza, while austerity-hit Europe is reluctant to pay up for Novo's new drugs.It is a battle in which Sorensen believes he cannot afford to give ground."We need to price innovation at a premium, otherwise we will not be able to fund innovation going forward," he said."We could have priced ourselves into the (Express Scripts) contract had we wanted to, but we believe Victoza is a better product and therefore demands a premium."In Europe, Novo is facing resistance to the 60-70 percent price premium it is asking for Tresiba but Sorensen said he had no plans to reduce the price, even though this may mean the new medicine is never launched in Germany.For Sorensen, fighting for a fair reward for innovation is a matter of principle and he believes Europe will have to find extra funding beyond taxation - via insurance or patient co-payments - to deal with its rising healthcare burden.The stand-off, however, is unnerving for investors anxious about Novo's long-term growth story.Even after this year's setbacks, its B shares, the class of stock open to outside investors, still trade on 18 times expected earnings, against a sector average of about 14.The stock is underpinned by the knowledge that more than half a billion people are expected to be living with diabetes by 2030, up from 370 million today, according to the International Diabetes Federation.Sorensen hopes to stay around long enough to see the company well on the way to the next stage of technological breakthrough - oral pills, rather than injections, for delivering insulin and so-called GLP-1 medicines like Victoza.He thinks a GLP-1 pill could hit the market in five years, with a 50/50 chance of an insulin tablet in 6-8 years time.Novo is trailing Israel's Oramed Pharmaceuticals in clinical testing of an insulin pill, sparking speculation of a possible deal. But Sorensen said this was not on the cards since Novo doubted Oramed's approach.At a personal level, the Danish company's boss shows no signs of flagging, having recently extended his mandatory retirement age from 62 to 65. He cycles to work most days and is a keen cross-country skier, preparing to take part again in the 90-km Vasa race in Sweden this winter.Whoever takes over will have a hard act to follow but Sorensen sees good internal candidates for the job."We've bought a little time to work on diligent succession planning and we are doing that at the moment," he said. Lars Sorensen, CEO of Novo Nordisk, gestures during an interview at the company's headquarter in Bagsvaerd near Copenhagen, Credit: Reuters/Fabian Bimmer

The description of China, contained in the communiqué issued at the conclusion of a one-day summit meeting attended by President Joe Biden and others, reflected a new concern over how China intends to wield its rapidly growing military might and offensive cyber technologies in the coming years. At the Group of 7 meeting in Britain that ended on Sunday, Biden and his counterparts agreed to jointly counter China’s growing economic dominance. On Monday, NATO countries warned that China increasingly poses a global security problem as well, signaling a fundamental shift in the attentions of an institution devoted to protecting Europe and North America — not Asia. The first minor reference to China in a NATO statement, not even a communiqué, was at the London summit in 2019, but global concerns have rapidly accelerated since then. Both Biden and President Donald Trump before him put more emphasis on the threats they say China poses, as an authoritarian political system with growing military spending and ambitions, including a budding military cooperation with Russia. China is at the center of Biden’s assertion that democracies are in an existential confrontation with autocracies. “The democratic values that undergird our alliance are under increasing pressure, both internally and externally,” the president told reporters Monday evening after the summit meeting. “Russia and China are both seeking to drive a wedge in our trans-Atlantic solidarity.” In its communiqué, negotiated by consensus from all 30 members, NATO is cautious in its characterization of China. Russia is repeatedly described as a “threat” to NATO in the document, with criticisms of the buildup in Russian weaponry, its hacking and disinformation assaults on Western countries, the 2014 annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, and other aggressive acts. By contrast, China is described as presenting “challenges.” But those challenges are considerable. The NATO secretary-general, Jens Stoltenberg, has said China now has the second-largest military budget after the United States and the world’s largest navy. Beijing is strengthening its nuclear stockpile and developing more sophisticated missiles and ships. “China is not our adversary, but the balance of power is shifting,’’ Stoltenberg said Monday. “And China is coming closer to us. We see them in cyberspace, we see China in Africa, but we also see China investing heavily in our own critical infrastructure,” he said. “We need to respond together as an alliance.” China has sent ships into the Mediterranean and through the Arctic; it has also conducted military exercises with Russia in NATO’s backyard, built bases in Africa, and owns significant infrastructure in Europe, including the Greek port of Piraeus. China’s army has hacked computers to steal industrial and military secrets all over the globe and engaged in disinformation in NATO societies. And with its effort to deploy 5G networks across Africa, the Middle East and Europe, Huawei, the Chinese telecommunications giant, has created new anxiety that it could control the communications infrastructure needed by NATO. President Joe Biden, right, meets with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, second from left, at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Monday, June 14, 2021. NATO leaders expressed a new concern about China’s growing military might, signaling a fundamental shift in the attentions of an alliance devoted to protecting Europe and North America — not Asia. (Doug Mills/The New York Times) In a discussion of “multifaceted threats” and “systemic competition from assertive and authoritarian powers” in the communiqué, NATO says that “Russia’s aggressive actions constitute a threat to Euro-Atlantic security.” While China is not called a threat, NATO states that “China’s growing influence and international policies can present challenges that we need to address together as an alliance.” President Joe Biden, right, meets with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey, second from left, at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Monday, June 14, 2021. NATO leaders expressed a new concern about China’s growing military might, signaling a fundamental shift in the attentions of an alliance devoted to protecting Europe and North America — not Asia. (Doug Mills/The New York Times) NATO promised to “engage China with a view to defending the security interests of the alliance’’ and said it planned to increase partnerships with more countries in the Indo-Pacific. Much further into the document, China comes up again, described as presenting “systemic challenges” to the “rules-based international order.” In a gesture toward diplomacy and engagement, the alliance vows to maintain “a constructive dialogue with China where possible,” including on the issue of climate change, and calls for China to become more transparent about its military and especially its “nuclear capabilities and doctrine.” Chinese officials reacted sharply to the NATO communiqué, as they have to other statements from G-7 leaders made in the previous days. The alliance’s characterization of the challenges posed by China was “a slander of China’s peaceful development, a misjudgment of the international situation and its own role, and a continuation of the Cold War mentality,” the country’s mission to the European Union in Brussels said in a post on Weibo. NATO leaders on Monday also agreed to spend next year updating the alliance’s 2010 strategic concept, which 11 years ago viewed Russia as a potential partner and never mentioned China. New challenges from cyberwarfare, artificial intelligence and disinformation, as well as new missile and warhead technologies, must be considered to preserve deterrence, the alliance said. And Article 5 of its founding treaty — an attack on one is an attack on all — will be “clarified” to include threats to satellites in space and coordinated cyberattacks. This NATO meeting was mostly a warm embrace of Biden, who in contrast to his predecessor has expressed deep belief in the alliance and in the importance of American participation in the multilateral institutions Washington established after the horrors of World War II. The contrast to Trump’s May 2017 NATO summit was remarked on by many other leaders. Then, Trump was particularly angered by the expense and lavish use of glass in NATO’s new $1.2 billion headquarters. Trump also defied the expectations of even his own aides and refused to announce support for NATO’s Article 5, a central tenet of collective defense. Biden quickly declared Monday that the alliance is “critically important for US interests” and called Article 5 a “sacred obligation.” He added: “I just want all of Europe to know that the United States is there.” Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy spoke for many when he connected this summit with the Group of 7 summit meeting just concluded in Britain and compared them unfavorably with the period of Trump. “This summit is part of the process of reaffirming, rebuilding the fundamental alliances of the United States,” which were “weakened by the previous administration,” Draghi said. And he pointed to Biden’s similarly important meetings on Tuesday with the leaders of the European Union, which Trump considered an economic competitor and even a foe. “We are here to reaffirm these alliances, but also to reaffirm the importance of the European Union,” Draghi said. Another key element of Biden’s European tour, which will conclude on Wednesday in Geneva, where he meets President Vladimir Putin of Russia for a highly anticipated conversation, is how the democracies of Asia and the West can stand up to the authoritarian challenge. While Russia is a particular threat to NATO and the Euro-Atlantic world, it is not an economic rival. Speaking Monday night, Biden called Putin “a worthy adversary” and said he would look for areas of cooperation with Russia, while laying down red lines about Russian efforts to disrupt democratic societies. “I’m going to make clear to President Putin that there are areas where we can cooperate, if he chooses,” Biden said. “And if he chooses not to cooperate, and acts in a way that he has in the past, relative to cybersecurity and some other activities, then we will respond. We will respond in kind.” It is the rise of a rich, aggressive, authoritarian China, however, that Biden identifies as a major challenge to the United States and its allies, and his intention in Europe is to solicit allied support for efforts to meet that challenge — militarily, technologically and economically. While NATO has a role to play, so does the European Union, the largest economic bloc in the world, with deep trading ties to China. The European Union has been hardening its views of China in the face of Beijing’s human rights behavior at home and trade and espionage practices abroad. But the Europeans do not see China as quite the threat perceived by Washington. That disparity is also true in NATO, despite the new communiqué on China. Some NATO members, especially those nearest to Russia in Central and Eastern Europe and the Baltic nations, are anxious that the shift in focus to China does not divert resources and attention from the Russian threat. Biden made a point of meeting the leaders of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland in Brussels before his meeting with Putin. NATO troops are deployed in all four countries. But even Britain, probably Washington’s closest ally, expressed some wariness about confrontation with China. Asked at the NATO meeting about China, Prime Minister Boris Johnson warned against a “new Cold War,” while acknowledging that China’s rise was a “gigantic fact in our lives.” Similarly, Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said after the meeting: “If you look at the cyberthreats and the hybrid threats, if you look at the cooperation between Russia and China, you cannot simply ignore China.’’ But she also said: “One must not overrate it, either — we need to find the right balance.”   © 2021 The New York Times Company

She said that this would ensure better exchange of parliamentary delegations and help further strengthen the cooperation in socioeconomic, educational, agricultural, energy and cultural fields.Hasina came up with the call when she met Chairperson of the Council of Federation of Federal Assembly of Russia Valentina I Matvienko at the Council of Federation building in Moscow.The Prime Minister’s Deputy Press Secretary Bijan Lal Dev briefed reporters after the meeting which lasted about an hour.During the meeting, Hasina said that Bangladesh and Russia could work together in the issue of counter-terrorism.She also recalled the contribution of the Russian government to Bangladesh’s Liberation War and its assistance in reformation and development in the post-independence period.Hasina said her government gave democracy an institutional shape and ensured the fundamental rights of the people.Terming Bangladesh a convenient connecting hub between the Eastern Asia and the Western countries, she said: “We want to ensure peace in the region.”“Bangladesh and Russia can work together in the field of counterterrorism.”In response, Matvienko, the highest-ranking female politician in Russia, agreed to work together with Bangladesh to fight terrorism.She praised the dynamic leadership of Hasina and termed her visit to Russia a landmark which would help further bolster the bilateral relations.In the meeting, the two leaders also agreed to jointly face the climate change impact.Foreign Minister Dipu Moni, State Minister for Science and Technology Yeafesh Osman and AKM Rahmatullah MP were present on the occasion.Later, Hasina moved around the Russian Council of Federation building.Hasina went on a three-day visit to Russia on Monday. This is the first official visit of a Bangladesh Prime Minister to Moscow since Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman’s visit to the erstwhile Soviet Union in April 1972.On Tuesday, Bangladesh and Russia signed six memorandums of understanding and three deals that include financing of a nuclear power plant in Rooppur.

Major influential group G77 and China walked out of negotiation at 3am BdST on Wednesday while developed countries refused any allocation for loss and damage fund separately.The US, Australia, Canada were more vocal for a separate mechanism on loss and damage issue.One of the developing country’s key negotiators Quamrul Islam Chowdhury who was at the talk told that G77 staged the walkout as some of the parties tried to reduce the loss and damage issue into a simple disaster risk reduction.Disclosing the latest update of the negotiation, Dr Ainun Nishat told bdnews24.com, there were serious differences on many issues among the parties about the nature of the institutional mechanism. The G77 and China want it to be an independent work stream reporting to COP. Some developed countries wanted to be under the adaptation commitment.The developed countries were also very negative about providing financial support to the loss and damage mechanism, he added.Later Bangladesh delegation told a press conference on Wednesday afternoon at the conference centre, “We believe that the ultimate aim of all negotiation now is to arrive at a clear global understanding about the action to be taken for mitigation and adaptation.”Along with loss and damage, supported by commensurate financing, technology development and transfer and capacity building for a legally binding agreement in Paris in 2015, were the other issues dominated the talk.“We came here with high expectation that during the COP 19 we shall be able to agree on an institutional mechanism on loss and damage. Some party wants to see loss and damage as part of adaptation mechanism”, Bangladesh delegation said in the press conference.Secretary for the ministry of environment and forests Shafiqur Rahman read out the statement in the press conference. Ainun Nushat, Dr Asaduzzaman and Md Quamrul Islam Chowdhury also addressed the press conference members of the delegation.

Halfway through, optimistic reviews of its progress noted that heads of state and titans of industry showed up in force to start the gathering with splashy new climate promises, a sign that momentum was building in the right direction. The pessimistic outlook? Gauzy promises mean little without concrete plans to follow through. Swedish activist Greta Thunberg accused the conference, held in Glasgow, of consisting of a lot of “blah, blah, blah.” On Saturday, diplomats from nearly 200 countries struck a major agreement aimed at intensifying efforts to fight climate change, by calling on governments to return next year with stronger plans to curb their planet-warming emissions and urging wealthy nations to “at least double” funding by 2025 to protect the most-vulnerable nations from the hazards of a hotter planet. Here’s a look at some key takeaways from the 26th annual UN climate change summit. Time for action is running out The agreement established a clear consensus that all nations need to do much more, immediately, to prevent a catastrophic rise in global temperatures. When the conference opened, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said the top priority must be to limit the rise in global temperatures to just 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial levels. That’s the threshold, scientists have warned, beyond which the risk of calamities such as deadly heat waves, water shortages and ecosystem collapse grows immensely. (The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius.) “The reality is you’ve got two different truths going on,” Helen Mountford, vice president for climate and economics at the World Resources Institute, said last week. “We’ve made much more progress than we ever could’ve imagined a couple years ago. But it’s still nowhere near enough.” The agreement outlines specific steps the world should take, from slashing global carbon dioxide emissions nearly in half by 2030 to curbing emissions of methane, another potent greenhouse gas. And it sets up new rules to hold countries accountable for the progress they make — or fail to make. The environment minister of the Maldives, Shauna Aminath, said the latest text lacked the “urgency” that vulnerable countries like hers required. “What looks balanced and pragmatic to other parties will not help the Maldives adapt in time,” she said. Who needs to cut and how much? The final agreement leaves unresolved the crucial question of how much and how quickly each nation should cut its emissions over the next decade. Rich countries, including the United States, Canada, Japan and much of western Europe, account for just 12% of the global population today but are responsible for 50% of all the planet-warming greenhouse gases released from fossil fuels and industry over the past 170 years. US President Joe Biden and European leaders have insisted that countries such as India, Indonesia and South Africa need to accelerate their shift away from coal power and other fossil fuels. But those countries counter that they lack the financial resources to do so, and that rich countries have been stingy with aid. A decade ago, the world’s wealthiest economies pledged to mobilise $100 billion per year in climate finance for poorer countries by 2020. But they have fallen short by tens of billions of dollars annually. The COP26 agreement still leaves many developing countries without the funds they need to build cleaner energy and cope with increasingly extreme weather disasters. The call for disaster aid and regulation increases One of the biggest fights at the summit revolved around whether — and how — the world’s wealthiest nations, which are disproportionately responsible for global warming to date, should compensate poorer nations for the damages caused by rising temperatures. Calls for this fund, an issue called “loss and damage,” is separate from money to help poorer countries adapt to a changing climate. "Loss and damage" is a matter of historic responsibility, its proponents say, and would pay for irreparable losses, such as the disappearance of national territory, culture and ecosystems. The Paris agreement in 2015 urged clearer rules on how to allow polluting companies and countries to buy and trade permits to lower global emissions, but the extremely dense and technical subject continued as a topic of discussion well into Saturday in Glasgow. Negotiators announced a major deal on how to regulate the fast-growing global market in carbon offsets, in which one company or country compensates for its own emissions by paying someone else to reduce theirs. One of the thorniest technical issues is how to properly account for these global trades so that any reductions in emissions aren’t overestimated or double-counted. Vulnerable countries insist that rich nations should grant them a share of proceeds from carbon market transactions to help them build resilience to climate change. The United States and the European Union have opposed doing so, but island nations in particular want a mechanism to ensure that carbon trading leads to an overall reduction in global emissions. “We want a credible market that will deliver reductions in emissions, not just a free pass for countries to buy cheap credits offshore to meet their national requirements,” said Ian Fry, a negotiator for the Solomon Islands, an archipelago in the southwest Pacific Ocean. Other international agreements came out of the summit US AND CHINA: The two countries announced a joint agreement to do more to cut emissions this decade, and China committed for the first time to develop a plan to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas. The pact between the rivals, which are the world’s two biggest polluters, surprised delegates to the summit. The agreement was short on specifics, and although China agreed to “phase down” coal starting in 2026, it did not specify by how much or over what period of time. DEFORESTATION: Leaders of more than 100 countries, including Brazil, China, Russia and the United States, vowed to end deforestation by 2030. The agreement covers about 85% of the world’s forests, which are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the pace of global warming. Some advocacy groups criticised the agreement as lacking teeth, noting that similar efforts have failed in the past. METHANE: More than 100 countries agreed to cut emissions of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, 30% by the end of this decade. The pledge was part of a push by the Biden administration, which also announced that the Environmental Protection Agency would limit the methane coming from about 1 million oil and gas rigs across the United States. INDIA: India joined the growing chorus of nations pledging to reach “net zero” emissions, setting a 2070 deadline to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. One of the world’s largest consumers of coal, India also said that it would significantly expand the portion of its total energy mix that comes from renewable sources and that half its energy would come from sources other than fossil fuels by 2030. The different faces of climate action There was a clear gender and generation gap at the Glasgow talks. Those with the power to make decisions about how much the world warms in the coming decades are mostly old and male. Those who are angriest about the pace of climate action are mostly young and female. Malik Amin Aslam, an adviser to the prime minister of Pakistan, scoffed at some of the distant net zero goals being announced during the conference, including India’s: “With an average age of 60, I don’t think anyone in the negotiating room would live to experience that net zero in 2070,” he said. On the first day of the conference, Thunberg joined scores of protesters on the streets outside. Throughout the two-week conference, she and other young climate activists — including Vanessa Nakate, Dominika Lasota and Mitzi Tan — made numerous appearances at protests. Thunberg told the BBC in an interview before the summit that she had not been officially invited to speak. She added that she thought the organisers had not invited a lot of young speakers because they “might be scared that if they invite too many ‘radical’ young people then that might make them look bad,” she said, using air quotations. Just holding the talks during the pandemic posed a challenge The climate summit, which was delayed last year, is one of the biggest international gatherings held during the coronavirus pandemic. Many summit participants travelled from countries where vaccines are still not widely available. Globally, fewer than half of all adults have been vaccinated against COVID-19, illustrating the inequities of vaccination. Travel and quarantine restrictions meant additional costs in both time and money for lodging, which made the trip impossible for some. And some participants, including Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, decided against traveling at all. Partway through, conference organisers issued a letter of apology to participants for the long lines and video difficulties, saying that planning around COVID restrictions has been challenging. Patricia Espinosa, executive secretary of the UN climate body, asked attendees to “bear with us” as organisers grappled with the complex arrangements, such as ensuring that all those entering the venue tested negative for the coronavirus, and enforcing controls on the number of people in meeting rooms. © 2021 The New York Times Company

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina left for New York on Saturday night on a nine-day official visit to the USA to attend the 67th United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). An Emirates flight carrying the Prime Minister and members of her entourage took off from Hazrat Shahjalal International Airport at 9.30 pm. The flight is expected to reach the John F Kennedy (JFK) International Airport in New York at 8.15am (New York time) on Sunday. On their way to New York, Hasina and members of her entourage would make a stopover at Dubai International Airport for two hours. From the JFK Airport the Prime Minister will straight drive to the Hotel Grand Hayatt in New York where she will be staying during her visit to the city. Foreign Minister Dipu Moni, Environment and Forest Minister Hasan Mahmud, Ambassador-At-Large M Ziauddin, Principal Secretary to the Prime Minister Shaikh Mohammad Wahid-Uz- Zaman and Press Secretary Abul Kalam Azad, among others, would accompany Hasina during her visit to the USA. A 23-member high-level business delegation led by AK Azad, president of the Federation of Bangladesh Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FBCCI), will accompany the Prime Minister to explore new areas of trade and business in the USA. The Prime Minister will attend a high-level event on 'Rule of Law' on Sept 24 at the General Assembly Hall at the UN headquarters. On the same day, she will join a reception to be hosted by the US President Barak Obama and the First Lady Michelle Obama. On Sep 25, Hasina will attend the reception to be hosted by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. She will also join the opening session of the 67th UN General Assembly on the same day. On the next day, the Prime Minister will launch an event titled 'Second Edition of the Climate Vulnerability Monitor'. Expatriate Bangladeshis will give her a reception at Marriott Marquis Hotel adjacent to the Times Square in New York. On Sep 27, Hasina will attend a meeting on autism to be arranged by the US First Lady at the Roosevelt House. She is also scheduled to join the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) initiative. She will deliver a speech at the General Assembly at 8pm local time on Sep 27. The theme for this year's session is "Bringing about adjustment or settlement of international disputes or situations by peaceful means". Before leaving New York for home on Sep 30, Hasina will attend a press conference at 4pm. She is expected to reach Dhaka in the morning on Oct 2.

In flood-hit fields in the Philippines, farmers are testing a hardy new variety of rice that can survive completely submerged for more than two weeks. In Kenya's Kibera slum, poor urban families are turning around their diets and incomes just by learning to grow vegetables in sack gardens outside their doors. And in India, a push to help marginalised rural communities gain title to their land is leading to a significant drop in hunger. These are just a few of the kinds of innovations and intitiatives that experts say will be critical if the world is to feed itself over coming decades as the population soars, cities sprawl and climate change takes its toll. By 2050, the planet will need at least 70 percent more food than it does today to meet both an expected rise in population to 9 billion from 7 billion and changing appetites as many poor people grow richer, experts say. "Can we feed a world of 9 billion? I would say the answer is yes," said Robert Watson, chief scientific adviser to Britain's Department of Environment and Rural Affairs and a former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But doing so will require fundamental changes to unsustainable but well-entrenched policies and practices, from eating so much meat to spending trillions on agriculture and fuel subsidies, he said. In the meantime, many hunger fighters say the answer lies in clever alterations to the way food is planted, watered, harvested, stored, transported, sold, owned and shared. Many of those changes are already being tested in the world's farms and fields, in laboratories and government offices, in factories and markets. Some are even speaking of the beginnings of a 21st century food revolution. MYRIAD 'GREEN BULLETS' Unlike the last century's agricultural "Green Revolution", which dramatically boosted world food production with new high-yielding crop varieties and more irrigation, this revolution must rely on myriad "green bullets" to tackle hunger. They range from persuading farmers in Africa's drought zones to switch from water-hungry rice to hardier crops like sorghum or millet, to helping them build pest-proof grain silos that allow food to be stored longer or sold when prices are higher. With 70 percent of the world's people expected to live in cities by 2050, finding ways to help city dwellers grow food in small urban plots or roof gardens, or group together to buy food at cheaper prices, is a major focus. In California's East Palo Alto, for instance, older inner-city residents - who are particularly vulnerable to high food prices - are learning growing techniques for the first time and producing food for themselves and a neighbourhood market. Other urban areas are turning to vertical hydroponic gardens clinging to the edge of skyscrapers. Women - who grow at least 40 percent of food in Africa and Asia - will need improved land rights and better access to information, something being made much easier by the spread of mobile phone technology, experts say. Rural women in India's Andhra Pradesh state now use advance drought warnings, relayed by Internet and mobile phone, to switch to more drought-tolerant crops -- a move that has saved harvests and helped stem the usual wave of migration to cities in drought times. Changing farming practices by adopting more water-conserving drip irrigation or planting crops amid fertilizing trees, as is now happening throughout Africa, will also be key. So will cutting the at least 30 percent of the world's food supply eaten by pests, spoiled on the way to market or thrown away unused from plates and supermarkets. Simply getting supermarkets to stop offering two-for-one specials - which can encourage people to overbuy - would be a start, some anti-hunger activists say, as would improving roads in regions like South Asia and Africa where transport delays mean produce often rots on the way to market. Solutions to the threat of worsening hunger will vary by region, by country, sometimes even from one farm or village or apartment building to the next, experts say. Not all ideas will succeed, and scaling up those that do prove to work, as quickly as possible, will be essential. In a world where an estimated 900 million people are already hungry today, curbing surging consumption in rich nations and those fast getting rich, especially India and China, will be particularly important, experts say. "If we look at the graph of (rising) human consumption, that's the one to worry about," said Phil Bloomer, director of campaigns and policy for Oxfam Great Britain. "That is a graph that should strike panic in our hearts." Persuading rich people to eat less meat and fewer milk products, which take a lot of grain to produce, would go a long way toward curbing ever-rising demand for grain. 'NO NORMAL TO GO BACK TO' Many innovations focus on easing the adverse effects of climate change on food production. While warmer weather and growing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could spur plant growth and food production in some regions -- and open a few northern reaches of the world to farming -- many more regions are expected to see worsening losses from droughts, floods, storms, rising sea levels and higher temperatures that can cause crop yields to drop. "It used to be there was an extreme weather event here or there but we knew that in a year or so things would go back to normal," said Lester Brown, a food security and sustainability expert, and president of the U.S.-based Earth Policy Institute. "Now there is no normal to go back to." That's why scientists from Bangladesh to Tanzania are developing new resilient varieties of maize, wheat, rice and other crops that can survive underwater, or with very little rain, or even both extremes in the same season, and still produce a reliable crop. Other innovators are focusing on the effects of growing water scarcity. "A substantial amount of our food production worldwide comes from non-renewable groundwater sources, and in the long run that is not sustainable," said Peter Gleick, a leading water expert and head of the U.S.-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. In villages where glacier-fed streams are set to become more irregular or disappear in the years ahead, or where flooding from heavy rain is quickly followed by drought, communities are learning to harvest and store water to ensure supplies throughout the year. They are also developing water-conserving irrigation methods to make what they have available last. Will all such innovations be enough to feed 9 billion people by 2050? Possibly, say experts, but success will depend on making enough key changes fast enough. In addition to on-the-ground solutions, those changes will need to include major policy shifts -- including potentially a ban on turning grain into biofuel or limits on food speculation. "Food insecurity and climate change are already inhibiting human well-being and economic growth throughout the world, and these problems are poised to accelerate," said John Beddington, Britain's chief science adviser, in a March report by the International Commission on Sustainable Agriculture and Climate Change. "Decisive policy action is required if we are to preserve the planet's capacity to produce adequate food in the future."

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said on Wednesday Washington's relations with India needed an "upgrade" and urged closer cooperation on security, trade and other issues. Clinton is set to visit India next month and she said she hoped the two nations could work together to solve global challenges from climate change to securing Afghanistan. "As we pursue an enhanced bilateral relationship, we should recognize that, compared to other metrics of our cooperation, our official ties are past due for an upgrade," Clinton said in a speech to the U.S.-India Business Council. "We need the bilateral cooperation between our governments to catch up with our people-to-people and economic ties." Last year, India and Washington signed a landmark civil nuclear deal, overturning a 30-year ban on global nuclear commerce with India. That deal will allow India to procure nuclear technology and fuel for its reactors from the international market. To improve ties, she said Washington and New Delhi must overcome mistrust and address what she said were lingering uncertainties in the relationship. She said some Americans feared that greater economic ties with India would mean lost jobs and falling wages, while Indians felt a closer partnership ran counter to the country's strong tradition of independence. She also pledged closer economic and trade ties and said negotiations would begin soon on a bilateral investment treaty, creating more opportunities for trade between the two countries. "President Obama has been clear that the United States has learned the lessons of the past. We will not use the global financial crisis as an excuse to fall back on protectionism," she said. Without providing details, Clinton said the two countries needed to increase cooperation in fighting terrorism and improve intelligence-sharing. "The president and I are committed to enhancing India's ability to protect itself," she said, adding that six Americans died in the November attacks on India's financial capital, Mumbai. She welcomed Tuesday's meeting between the leaders of India and Pakistan, their first talks since the Mumbai attacks, which New Delhi blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group. "As Pakistan now works to take on the challenge of terrorists in its own country, I am confident India, as well as the United States, will support that effort," Clinton said.

President Barack Obama scored a major victory on Friday when the US House of Representatives passed legislation to slash industrial pollution that is blamed for global warming. The House passed the climate change bill, a top priority for Obama, by a vote of 219-212. As has become routine on major bills in Congress this year, the vote was a partisan one, with only eight Republicans joining Democrats for the bill. The Senate is expected to try to write its own version of a climate change bill, but prospects for this year were uncertain. The House-passed bill requires that large US companies, including utilities, oil refiners, manufacturers and others, reduce emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases associated with global warming by 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050, from 2005 levels. They would do so by phasing in the use of cleaner alternative energy than high-polluting oil and coal. "The scientists are telling us there's an overwhelming consensus ... global warming is real and it's moving very rapidly," said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry Waxman, the chief sponsor of the legislation. In urging passage, Waxman also said the legislation would create jobs and help move the United States from its reliance on foreign oil. But Republicans said the bill was a behemoth that would neither effectively help the environment nor improve an economy reeling from a deep recession. 'BIGGEST JOB-KILLING BILL' House Republican leader John Boehner called the measure "the biggest job-killing bill that has ever been on the floor of the House of Representatives." Representative Joe Barton, the senior Republican on the energy panel, said the measure would set unrealistic targets for cutting carbon pollution. "You would have to reduce emissions in the United States to the level that we had in 1910," Barton said. At the core of the bill, which is around 1,500 pages long, is a "cap and trade" program designed to achieve the emissions reductions by industry. Under the plan, the government would issue a declining number of pollution permits to companies, which could sell those permits to each other as needed. "The federal government will be joining California in the effort to combat global warming and the framework for doing it is one that is very similar to the one that California has adopted," said that state's top climate official, Air Resources Board Chair Mary Nichols. California is recognized as having the most aggressive plan to fight global warming in the United States.

There’s also a risk that devoting our attention to these technological marvels may give us a pass from confronting a deeper question: How can we make our lives less dependent on cars? After decades of putting the automobile at the centre of the United States' transportation plans and policy, we’re now dealing with the downsides, like air pollution, traffic, road deaths, sprawl and the crowding out of alternative ways to move people and products. The solution to problems caused partly by cars may not only be using different kinds of cars but also remaking our world to rely on them less. I’ve been thinking about the risk and reward of faith in technology recently because of a new book by Peter Norton, an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. Norton detailed decades of unfulfilled promises by carmakers and tech companies that some invention was just around the corner to free us from the worst aspects of our car dependency. Radio waves, divided highway engineering, transistors and technology repurposed from targeted bombs were all pitched at points after World War II as ways of delivering an automobile utopia. Norton told me that the technologies were often half-baked but that the idea behind them was that “anyone can drive anywhere at any time and park for free and there would be no crashes.” These technologies never delivered, and Norton said he doubted that driverless cars would, either. “The whole boondoggle depends on us agreeing that high tech is better tech,” he said. “That just doesn’t stand up.” This is not only Norton’s view. Even most driverless-car optimists now say the technology won’t be ready to hit the roads in large numbers for many more years. Our health and that of the planet will significantly improve if we switch to electric cars. They are one focus of the global climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland. And taking error-prone drivers out of the equation could make our roads much safer. But making better cars isn’t a cure-all. Popularising electric vehicles comes with the risk of entrenching car dependency, as my New York Times Opinion colleague Farhad Manjoo wrote. Driverless cars may encourage more miles on the road, which could make traffic and sprawl worse. (Uber and similar services once also promised that they would reduce congestion and cut back on how many miles Americans drove. They did the opposite.) The future of transportation needs to include safer and more energy-efficient cars. But Norton also said that it would be useful to redirect money and attention to make walking, cycling and using shared transportation more affordable and appealing choices. What Norton is talking about might sound like a fantasy concocted by Greta Thunberg. The car is a life-changing convenience, and changing our reliance on it will be difficult, costly and contentious. Why should we try? Well, the transportation status quo is dangerous and environmentally unsustainable, and it gobbles up public space and government dollars. It took decades to build the U.S. around the car. It was a choice — at times a contested one — and we could now opt for a different path. Norton asked us to imagine what would happen if a fraction of the bonkers dollars being spent to develop driverless cars was invested in unflashy products and policy changes. He mentioned changing zoning codes to permit more homes to be built in the same places as stores, schools and workplaces so that Americans don’t have to drive everywhere. He also said that bicycles and electric railways that don’t require batteries are technology marvels that do more good than any driverless-car software ever could. Talking to Norton reminded me of the mixed blessing of innovation. We know that technology improves our lives. But we also know that belief in the promise of technology sometimes turns us away from confronting the root causes of our problems.   © 2021 The New York Times Company

Research into "solar geo-engineering", which would mimic big volcanic eruptions that can cool the Earth by masking the sun with a veil of ash, is now dominated by rich nations and universities such as Harvard and Oxford. Twelve scholars, from countries including Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Ethiopia, India, Jamaica and Thailand, wrote in the journal Nature on Wednesday that the poor were most vulnerable to global warming and should be more involved. "Developing countries must lead on solar geo-engineering research," they wrote in a commentary. "The overall idea (of solar geo-engineering) is pretty crazy but it is gradually taking root in the world of research," lead author Atiq Rahman, head of the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies, told Reuters by telephone. The solar geo-engineering studies may be helped by a new $400,000 research project, the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI), which is issuing a first call for scientists to apply for finance this week. The SRMGI is financed by the Open Philanthropy Project, a foundation backed by Dustin Moskovitz, a co-founder of Facebook, and his wife, Cari Tuna, the scientists wrote. The fund could help scientists in developing nations study regional impacts of solar geo-engineering such as on droughts, floods or monsoons, said Andy Parker, a co-author and project director of the SRMGI. Rahman said the academics were not taking sides about whether geo-engineering would work. Among proposed ideas, planes might spray clouds of reflective sulphur particles high in the Earth's atmosphere. "The technique is controversial, and rightly so. It is too early to know what its effects would be: it could be very helpful or very harmful," they wrote. A UN panel of climate experts, in a leaked draft of a report about global warming due for publication in October, is sceptical about solar geo-engineering, saying it may be "economically, socially and institutionally infeasible." Among risks, the draft obtained by Reuters says it might disrupt weather patterns, could be hard to stop once started, and might discourage countries from making a promised switch from fossil fuels to cleaner energies. Still, Rahman said most developed nations had "abysmally failed" so far in their pledges to cut greenhouse gas emissions, making radical options to limit warming more attractive. The world is set for a warming of three degrees Celsius (5.7 Fahrenheit) or more above pre-industrial times, he said, far above a goal of keeping a rise in temperatures "well below" 2C (3.6F) under the 2015 Paris Agreement among almost 200 nations.

Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda pledged 200 billion yen ($1.83 billion) in loans over the next five years for environmental projects in Asia, officials said on Wednesday. The projects include sewage disposal and sulphur dioxide scrubbing from power plant smoke stacks. Tokyo also said it was ready to provide up to $10 mln for a World Bank fund aimed at preserving forests, an issue Indonesia will push for at a UN meeting in Bali next month to try to find a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. Japan also plans to launch a satellite by the end of March 2009 that would monitor greenhouse gas emissions and share the data with Asian nations. Experts say dealing with the effects of climate change will be a major problem for Asia, where greater extremes of weather are expected to cause more intense storms and droughts, while melting of Himalayan glaciers could lead to summer water shortages for tens of millions. China is expected to overtake the United States as the world's top carbon dioxide polluter and Indonesia might have risen to the No.3 emitter because of deforestation and massive forest fires. India's emissions are also rising quickly.Japan is among the world's top-five greenhouse gas emitters.

SYDNEY, Nov 30, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Tibet's exiled Buddhist spiritual leader the Dalai Lama entered the climate change debate on Monday, urging governments to take serious action and put global interests ahead of domestic concerns. Australia's government is struggling to have its key climate change policy, a carbon emissions trading scheme (ETS), passed by a hostile upper house Senate this week ahead of UN climate talks in Copenhagen from Dec. 7-18. In Sydney for a series of talks, the Dalai Lama called for individual and collective action to tackle climate change. "In my own case I never use bathtub, only shower. Whenever I leave my room I always put off my light," the Dalai Lama told a news conference. "Taking care of the environment ... (is now) part of my life. Taking care of the environment should be part of our daily life." Some Australian politicians sceptical about the causes of climate change have dumped a deal to back the government's carbon trade scheme. If defeated in parliament for a second time this week, the deal could allow Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to call an early election in 2010 on the issue of climate change. The sceptical climate change views of some Australians are being echoed in other countries, like the United States, as they seek to reach agreement on climate policy ahead of Copenhagen. The Dalai Lama urged governments to act in the global interest in dealing with climate change. "The elected government, sometimes their number one ... priority is national interest, national economy interest, then global issues are sometimes secondary," said the Dalai Lama. "That, I think, should change. The global issue should be number one. In some cases in order to protect global issues, some sacrifice of national interest (is needed)."

Climate change will be a significant factor in next month's municipal elections, the Local Government Association said on Friday. A poll found that 62 percent of 1,003 people interviewed nationwide said they were more likely to vote for a candidate with policies to tackle the climate crisis. By contrast 21 percent said it would make no difference to their voting intentions and only 15 percent said it would put them off a candidate. It also showed that two-thirds of women would be attracted to candidates with climate policies while the same was true of only 57 percent of men. Interest in the climate was high across all age groups but highest at 66 percent in the 35-44 bracket and lowest among those aged 65 or above. "Climate change is the most important long-term priority for local government. It is a test of the sector's credibility and reputation," said LGA environment chief Paul Bettison. It is as important now as public health and sanitation were to our Victorian predecessors." "All parties should sit up and take notice of the fact that almost two in three people would be more likely to vote for a candidate with policies to tackle climate change." Formed in 1997, the LGA speaks on behalf of some 500 local authorities in England and Wales representing 50 million people and spending some 74 billion pounds a year.

Several thousand people rallied on Saturday on the streets of central Sapporo, Japan, to protest against a Group of Eight summit due to start next week at a luxury hotel a two-hour drive away. Four Japanese men were arrested, said a police official on the northern island of Hokkaido, of which Sapporo is the capital. Two were arrested for violating the public safety ordinances and two others for interfering with police activities. A Reuters cameraman was taken away by police but it was not immediately clear if he was among the four arrested. The one-and-a-half hour march by Japanese and foreign activists, citizen groups and non-governmental organizations took place under heavy security ahead of the July 7-9 summit of the rich nations at the hot spring and lake resort of Toyako 70 km (45 miles) away. The protesters banged drums and carried colorful banners proclaiming "Shut Down the G8" and yelled: "We are against a summit of rich nations". Some marched dressed in traditional Japanese summer kimonos and costumes of the local ethnic minority, the Ainu. A police source estimated the crowd at 2,000 to 3,000. "They have been pushing upon us their policies. I wish they would hear and represent the voices of the people who actually live here and not be so selfish," said Mizuho Tsuboi, a 64-year-old farmer from Hokkaido. Summits of the G8, which bring together the leaders of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States each year, have become a magnet for protesters angry about everything from what world leaders are doing about climate change to the effects of globalization. Japan has detained and questioned dozens of people at its airports, including journalists and academics, in the run-up to the summit, although many have been allowed to enter the country after several hours. Saturday's rally was expected to be the largest one in Sapporo over the next week and several thousand police wearing helmets and holding riot shields were in attendance. Although the protesters generally marched peacefully, scuffles broke out with police around a truck in the middle of the march that was blasting music, and the truck's window was shattered. Japan is concerned about violent protests as well as acts of terrorism during the summit and has tightened security around the country at a cost of some 30 billion yen ($283 million), topping the 113 million euros ($186 million) spent at the last summit in Germany. Around 21,000 police officers are being deployed in Hokkaido and domestic media have said a similar number have been mobilized in Tokyo.

Biden's "Billionaire Minimum Income Tax" would set a 20% minimum tax rate on households worth more than $100 million, in a plan that would mostly target the United States' more than 700 billionaires, according to a White House fact sheet released on Saturday. The plan would require such households to pay the minimum tax of 20% on all of their income including unrealized investment income that is now untaxed, the fact sheet said. The tax will help reduce the budget deficit by about $360 billion in the next decade, the fact sheet added. Senate Democrats last autumn had proposed a billionaires tax to help pay for Biden's social and climate-change known as "Build Back Better" although the spending package did not move forward due to insufficient support in the Senate.

Scientists have linked the early onset of an intense summer to climate change, and say more than a billion people in India and neighbouring Pakistan were in some way vulnerable to the extreme heat. With cooling monsoon rains only expected next month and increasingly frequent power outages in some parts of India, even households that can afford air conditioners will have little respite over the next several weeks. Many of the deaths in Maharashtra occurred in the more rural areas of India's richest state. "These are suspected heat stroke deaths," Pradeep Awate, a Maharashtra health official, told Reuters. India is the world's second-biggest wheat producer, but the heat is set to shrivel this year's crop, after five consecutive years of record harvests. As power demand surges, generating companies are staring at massive shortages of coal and the government is pleading with them to step up imports. India recorded its warmest March in over a century, with the maximum temperature across the country rising to 33.1 degrees Celsius, nearly 1.86 degrees above normal, according to the India Meteorological Department. Many parts of India's north, west and the east saw temperatures surging past 40C last month. In the eastern state of Odisha, authorities said a 64-year-old man died of heat stroke on April 25 and hundreds of others have been given medical treatment. In Subarnapur, Odisha's hottest district, a high of 43.2 degree Celsius was recorded on Tuesday. "It is so hot," Subarnapur resident Mohana Mahakur said. "Fan, air cooler - nothing is working."

The greenish-brown, loose-fitting outer clothing - suitable for a person up to about 176 cms (5 ft 9 inches) tall - was found 2,000 meters (6,560 ft) above sea level on what may have been a Roman-era trade route in south Norway. Carbon dating showed it was made around 300 AD. "It's worrying that glaciers are melting but it's exciting for us archaeologists," Lars Piloe, a Danish archaeologist who works on Norway's glaciers, said at the first public showing of the tunic, which has been studied since it was found in 2011. A Viking mitten dating from 800 AD and an ornate walking stick, a Bronze age leather shoe, ancient bows, and arrow heads used to hunt reindeer are also among 1,600 finds in Norway's southern mountains since thaws accelerated in 2006. "This is only the start," Piloe said, predicting many more finds. One ancient wooden arrow had a tiny shard from a seashell as a sharp tip in an intricate bit of craftsmanship. RECEDING GLACIERS The 1991 discovery of Otzi, a prehistoric man who roamed the Alps 5,300 years ago between Austria and Italy, is the best known glacier find. In recent years, other finds have been made from Alaska to the Andes, many because glaciers are receding. The shrinkage is blamed on climate change, stoked by man-made emissions of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. The archaeologists said the tunic showed that Norway's Lendbreen glacier, where it was found, had not been so small since 300 AD. When exposed to air, untreated ancient fabrics can disintegrate in weeks because of insect and bacteria attacks. "The tunic was well used - it was repaired several times," said Marianne Vedeler, a conservation expert at Norway's Museum of Cultural History. The tunic is made of lamb's wool with a diamond pattern that had darkened with time. Only a handful of similar tunics have survived so long in Europe. The warming climate is have an impact elsewhere. Patrick Hunt, a Stanford University expert who is trying to find the forgotten route that Hannibal took over the Alps with elephants in a failed invasion of Italy in 218 BC, said the Alps were unusually clear of snow at 2,500 meters last summer. Receding snows are making searching easier. "I favor the Clapier-Savine Coche route (over the Alps) after having been on foot over at least 25 passes including all the other major candidates," he told Reuters by e-mail. The experts in Oslo said one puzzle was why anyone would take off a warm tunic by a glacier. One possibility was that the owner was suffering from cold in a snowstorm and grew confused with hypothermia, which sometimes makes suffers take off clothing because they wrongly feel hot.

The White House unveiled a long-term strategy on climate change on Thursday, with plans to gather the countries that emit the most greenhouse gases and to cut tariff barriers to sharing environmental technology. Coming a week before a meeting of the world's richest nations in Germany at which global warming will be a key issue, the US strategy calls for consensus on long-term goals for reducing the greenhouse gases that spur global warming, but not before the end of 2008, a senior White House official said. The official, speaking before President George W. Bush's official announcement, denied it was timed to coincide with next week's Group of Eight meeting. Bush has been under pressure from European allies to give ground on climate change. In negotiations before the summit, Washington rejected setting targets to reduce greenhouse gases, championed by other participants. "We're announcing now because we're ready," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. The plan calls for eliminating tariff barriers within six months, freeing up the distribution of new environmentally friendly technology, the official said. The gathering of the biggest greenhouse gas countries -- those that spew a combined 80 percent of the world's emissions -- should take place in the United States this fall, the official said. The meeting will likely include the G8 developed countries, fast-developing China and India, and Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Mexico, South Korea and Russia, according to the official.

About 190 nations met in Bali on Monday seeking a breakthrough to a new global pact to fight climate change by 2009 to avert droughts, heatwaves and rising seas that will hit the poor hardest. "The world is watching closely," Indonesian Environment Minister Rachmat Witoelar told delegates at the Dec. 3-14 meeting trying to bind outsiders led by the United States and China into a long-term UN-led fight against warming. "Climate change is unequivocal and accelerating," he told an opening ceremony in a luxury beach resort on the Indonesian island. "It is becoming increasingly evident that the most severe impacts of climate change will be felt by poor nations." After a year of intense climate diplomacy and bleak UN reports about the risks of climate change, 10,000 delegates will try to agree to launch negotiations on a broad UN pact by late 2009 to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A new treaty is meant to widen the Kyoto Protocol, which binds 36 industrial countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 5 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-12. The United States and developing nations have no caps under Kyoto. Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Secretariat, said the rich had to agree to axe emissions from burning fossil fuels to encourage poor nations to start braking their own rising emissions even as they burn more energy to ease poverty. "Bold action in the north can fuel clean growth in the south," he said, urging a sharing of clean energy technologies such as solar or wind power. "I fervently hope you will make a breakthrough here in Bali by adopting a negotiating agenda." A senior Australian delegate told the conference his country was taking immediate steps to ratify Kyoto, earning a rapturous ovation from officials in the cavernous hall, many of whom stood to applaud Canberra's dramatic U-turn. Voters drove out the 11-year administration of former prime minister John Howard last month, leaving the United States as the only major industralised nation still refusing to back the accord. COOK PLANET "Don't cook the planet," environmental group Greenpeace said in a banner outside the conference centre. An activist dressed as a polar bear stood by an inflatable 6 metre (20 ft) high thermometer in sweltering heat. Some delegates said UN climate talks were too sluggish after warnings by the UN climate panel this year that humans are stoking warming that will bring more droughts, erosion, hunger in Africa, water shortages and rising seas. "Some progress has been made, but it is inadequate," said Kenyan Environment Minister David Mwiraria. "The pace of climate change negotiations is out of step with the urgency required." Scientists say time is running out. To avoid the worst effects, the United Nations says global emissions need to peak by 2015 and be cut by 50 to 85 percent from 2000 levels by 2050. The trick is to find the magic formula that gets every nation on board, from the biggest emitters such as the United States and China to the smallest and most vulnerable, such as tropical island states or sub-Saharan African nations. President George W. Bush rejected Kyoto in 2001, saying it would damage the U.S. economy and wrongly excluded developing nations from legally binding emissions cuts. But he has said the United States will contribute to a new global accord by 2009. "One of the stumbling blocks...has been the fear of economic hardships," Witoelar said. But he said costs would be "bearable". Climate change talks have been bogged down by arguments over who will pay the bill for cleaner technology and how to share out the burden of emissions curbs between rich and poor nations. China and India, among the world's top polluters and comprising more than a third of humanity, say it's unfair and unrealistic for them to agree to targets, particularly as they try to lift millions out of poverty. The European Union, which has pledged to cut emissions by 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020, said that countries should start to look at hard new commitments in Bali.

Today, more than 77 percent of land on earth, excluding Antarctica, has been modified by human industry, according to a study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, up from just 15 percent a century ago. The study, led by researchers from the University of Queensland in Australia and the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York, paints the first global picture of the threat to the world’s remaining wildernesses — and the image is bleak. “We’re on a threshold where whole systems could collapse and the consequences of that would be catastrophic,” said James R Allan, one of the study’s authors. In the study, Allan and his colleagues urged the participants of a United Nations conference on biological diversity, scheduled for November in Egypt, to protect all of the world’s remaining wilderness areas. “We cannot afford to lose more,” he said. “We must save it in its entirety.” The parts of the world most in need of protecting are in some of the largest and most powerful nations, the study found. More than 70 percent of wilderness areas can be found in Russia, Canada, Australia, the United States and Brazil. Wilderness, the study’s authors said, is defined as an area not subject to direct human use. These areas are the only places on earth that have natural levels of biodiversity, and can continue to sustain plant and animal species on an evolutionary time scale. Moreover, these spots often act as the world’s lungs, storing carbon dioxide that would otherwise be released into the atmosphere. “Wild areas provide a lot of life support systems for the planet. We’d lose those benefits and those ecosystems services, and the cost of having to replace that would be immense,” Allan said. In 2016, the scientists mapped the world’s terrestrial wildernesses. This year, they did the same for the world’s oceans. More of the oceans have been affected by human industry — including oil exploration, shipping and commercial fishing — than have the world’s land mass, the study found. According to the study, “87 percent of the ocean has been modified by the direct effects of human activities.” “This astonishing expansion of the aggressive human footprint is happening everywhere,” said William Laurance, a professor of environmental science at James Cook University in Cairns, Australia, who was not involved in the study. Laurance said that while he “wholeheartedly” agreed with the researchers’ message to policy experts, even more aggressive action was needed to stop global resource extraction and industrial expansion. He warned that developing countries like Brazil and China are eager to catch up with more industrialised nations. Each step those countries take has a compounding effect on the environment: Developing mines also means building roads and refineries. Healthy ecosystems are crucial in their own right for biodiversity and mitigating climate change, but more importantly, said the researchers, they are home for hundreds of millions of indigenous people, who rely on the wilderness to survive and thrive.   © 2018 New York Times News Service

In his remarks opening the meeting — the first gathering in person for the group since the pandemic struck — Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi pointed to the stark disparity in access to vaccines between richer and poorer countries. “Going it alone is simply not an option,” said Draghi, whose country is hosting the summit. Now, he added, the world could “finally look at the future with great — or with some — optimism.” But as the leaders gathered to discuss plans to protect against future pandemics, health experts and activists expressed concerns that the world’s richest nations were still not doing enough to help people in poor nations survive the current one. Advisers said U.S. President Joe Biden, who has promised to make the United States an “arsenal of vaccines,” would not announce concrete plans related to closing the gap between rich and poor nations on vaccination rates. A senior administration official said Biden had met with a group of leaders early in the day and pushed them to support debt relief and allow more emergency financing to reach poor countries whose economies have been battered by the pandemic. While wealthy nations are offering people third vaccine doses and increasingly inoculating children, poor countries have administered an estimated 4 doses per 100 people, according to the World Health Organization. Biden said in June that the United States would buy 500 million Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine doses for poorer nations. He followed up in September by announcing an additional 500 million Pfizer doses, along with the promise of an additional $750 million for vaccine distribution, roughly half of it through a nonprofit involved in global vaccinations. Only about 300 million of those doses are expected to be shipped this year, a number that experts say falls short of the amount needed for meaningful protection against the virus. But Biden’s advisers said he came into the summit focused on a host of problems, including fixing global supply chains, urging investments to curb climate change, and meeting with the leaders of France, Britain and Germany to discuss ways to return to a 2015 nuclear accord with Iran that the Trump administration scuttled. Before that meeting, Biden suggested to reporters that talks to restart the accord were “scheduled to resume.” But in a hastily released joint statement, the group seemed to put the brakes on Biden’s assertion. The statement said the leaders “welcome President Biden’s clearly demonstrated commitment to return the US to full compliance” with the accord and “stay in full compliance, so long as Iran does.” On Saturday, Biden and other world leaders endorsed a landmark global agreement that seeks to block large corporations from shifting profits and jobs across borders to avoid taxes — a win for Biden, whose administration pushed hard to carry the deal over the finish line. The leaders were set to formally back the accord in a communiqué to be released Sunday, an administration official said. But health experts and influential advocates, including Pope Francis, have urged Biden during his trip to stay focused on closing the vaccine gap for poor nations, who are particularly vulnerable to the virus and its variants. Jake Sullivan, Biden’s national security adviser, told reporters on Air Force One en route to Rome that “the main thrust of the effort on COVID-19 is not actually traveling through the G-20.” He said that a virtual summit that Biden convened in September had set “more ambitious targets” for countries to pledge to share doses of the vaccine. Although U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken is scheduled to host a meeting of dozens of countries and nongovernmental organizations this year to secure commitments on vaccine sharing, Sullivan said the focus for the G-20 was on the future. “You really have a failure of developed countries’ leadership post-COVID,” said Célia Belin, a visiting foreign policy fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution. “This is going to have consequences.” Indeed, offering vaccine doses to developing countries is more than an altruistic gesture on the part of wealthy nations. The more the virus continues to circulate globally, the more likely it is to continue producing lethal variants, making it harder to end the pandemic and rendering vulnerable rich and poor alike. Since arriving in Rome, Biden has already heard a personal appeal to do more: During a meeting at the Vatican on Friday, Pope Francis pushed Biden on the issue, a senior official said afterward. And in an open letter to the G-20, the head of the World Health Organization, Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, urged the leaders of the world’s largest economies to “to help stem the pandemic by expanding access to vaccines and other tools for the people and places where these are in shortest supply.” As the summit got underway, it is also drew a melange of protesters — laid-off factory workers, climate activists, anti-globalization campaigners, unions, feminist groups, communists and some vaccine skeptics. “There will be many of us,” said Gino Orsini, a representative for the Si Cobas union, one of the organisers of a demonstration planned for Saturday to coincide with the gathering. The group is protesting what it says is the exploitation of workers by the international elite. This year marks the 20th anniversary of the Group of 8 summit that Italy hosted in the northern city of Genoa that was marred by rioting. It is also a moment of tension between authorities and opponents of the Italian government’s coronavirus vaccination requirements, which have resulted in violent clashes. “The level of attention is maximum,” said Giovanni Borrelli, a local government official, adding that 5,500 extra law enforcement officers were being deployed this weekend. ©2021 The New York Times Company

About 190 nations meet on the Indonesian island of Bali from Monday to build on a "fragile understanding" that the fight against global warming needs to be expanded to all nations with a deal in 2009. The first round of emissions cuts for developed nations under the Kyoto Protocol, the world's first legally binding agreement on reducing the greenhouse gases that cause climate change, expires in 2012. Here is a timeline of climate change-related meetings and events this year that have helped build momentum for the Dec 3-14 talks in Bali. * Feb 2, PARIS: First of four reports this year by the UN climate panel concludes that mankind is very likely to be to blame for global warming. Subsequent panel reports highlight the risks of extreme weather events, such as floods, droughts and heatwaves and that poor nations would bear the brunt of a warmer world. The cost of even the most stringent scenarios to dramatically curb emissions meant a loss of global GDP by 2030 of less than 3 percent. * July 7, NEW YORK, LONDON, SYDNEY, TOKYO, SHANGHAI, RIO DE JANEIRO, JOHANNESBURG, HAMBURG: former US Vice President Al Gore organises the "Live Earth" global climate change benefit involving 24 hours of music across seven continents beamed to an estimated two billion people. * Sept 17-21, MONTREAL: Canada hosts week of talks on how to quickly eliminate hydrochlorofluorocarbons (HCFCs) at the 19th meeting of signatories to the Montreal Protocol. The chemicals, which are powerful greenhouse gases, harm the ozone layer that protects the Earth from ultraviolet radiation. The United States says faster phase-out of HCFCs would be twice as effective as the Kyoto Protocol in fighting climate change. * Sept 24, NEW YORK: UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon convenes one-day conference with top officials from more than 150 countries to build momentum before Bali. Ban says world leaders showed a "major political commitment" to forge a pact on climate change once the Kyoto Protocol runs out. * Sept 28, WASHINGTON: US President George W. Bush holds his first major climate change meeting, inviting the 17 biggest greenhouse gas emitters to a two-day conference. Bush, who has refused to ratify Kyoto, stresses new environmental technology and voluntary measures to tackle the issue. * Oct 12, OSLO: The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore, star of the Oscar-winning climate film "An Inconvenient Truth," are joint-winners of the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change". * Nov 20, BONN: The 41 industrialized nations that have signed up to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change submit detailed emissions data for climate experts to assess. The data shows their total greenhouse gas emissions rose to a near all-time high. * Nov 21, SINGAPORE: The 10 members of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and six other attendees Australia, China, India, Japan, South Korea and New Zealand, pledge collective action to combat climate change in the "Singapore Declaration" but set no targets to curb emissions. Source: Reuters, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change

MANILA, Wed Jun 17, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Climate change impacts such as lower crop production will have severe effects on Asia and a broader climate pact being negotiated this year is crucial to minimising the effects, a UN official said on Wednesday. Developed nations are under intense pressure to agree to deep 2020 cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to try to seal an agreement at the end of this year that will replace the Kyoto Protocol. "Climate change impacts will be overwhelmingly severe for Asia," Eric Hall, spokesman for the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat, told a forum at the Asian Development Bank in Manila. "They will exacerbate existing vulnerabilities and they have the potential to throw countries back into the poverty trap." Asia's rapidly growing population is already home to more than half of humanity and a large portion of the world's poorest people. Hall said climate change had started threatening development in the region and could continue to put agricultural production and food security at risk by the 2020s. "Coastal cities, including Bangkok, Jakarta, Manila and Shanghai will be increasingly vulnerable to sea-level rise, as well as flooding and storm surges due to unpredictable weather patterns," he said. An ADB study released in April showed that Southeast Asian economies could lose as much as 6.7 percent of combined gross domestic product yearly by 2100, more than twice the global average loss, due to global warming. Some countries say developed nations are using the global financial crisis as an excuse to cut back on their emissions reduction commitments. "But the money spent on junk food can reforest the entire equatorial belt," said Rachmat Witoelar, the minister of state for environment in Indonesia. Other participants at the ADB forum on climate change at its headquarters think nations cannot afford to set aside climate concerns. "One might say, we can sequence this first, get the financial crisis under control and then turn to other issues regarding climate," said Vinod Thomas from the World Bank. "But that luxury doesn't exist anymore. The big question in financing would be whether in addition to the funds that we're talking about, all the money that is going into fiscal expansion would have salutary effects on the climate crisis." Financial and technological resources needed to aid developing countries in adopting climate mitigation measures are estimated to reach $250 billion a year in 2020, according to United Nations. But it is far from certain if nations will agree on funding mechanisms that will raise and managed such large annual sums.

More than 1,000 residents scrambled up 32 feet (9.75 m) of slippery soil and limestone to take refuge inside the Tinabanan Cave, known for providing shelter since colonial times. Lorna dela Pena, 66, was alone when the super-typhoon landed on Nov 8, killing more than 6,000 people nationwide and forcing about 4 million from their homes. She remembered how everything was "washed out" by the storm, but despite being "lost in a daze", she managed to evacuate. "There still weren't stairs to comfortably climb up to the cave. My grandfather's dream was for it to have stairs," she said, noting they were finally put in after the Haiyan disaster. While serving hot porridge to evacuees, dela Pena grasped how important local organisations are to helping communities become more resilient to fiercer weather, as the planet warms. “It’s stronger when more people unite to help. What one can’t do is possible when everyone unites,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. Following that experience, she worked with others in Marabut to build up women's groups focused on different issues. Now they take the lead in organising workshops on organic farming, hold discussions on violence against women, and educate and encourage other women to adopt renewable energy. Azucena Bagunas, 47, and dela Pena are among “solar scholars” trained by the Philippines-based Institute for Climate and Sustainable Cities (ICSC), an international nonprofit that promotes low-carbon development and climate resilience. In an effort to prepare better for disasters after Typhoon Haiyan, known locally as Yolanda, the women learned to operate portable solar-powered generators called TekPaks, which they use during evacuations. LIFE-SAVING TECHNOLOGY The TekPaks light up the dark Tinabanan cave, making it easier to count the number of people seeking shelter there, and charge mobile devices to keep communication lines open. For Bagunas, the most memorable use of the technology was when it helped save a life. “We were able to use this TekPak to power a nebuliser when someone had an asthma attack,” she recalled. Bagunas and dela Pena share their knowledge by teaching other women to operate TekPaks and making them aware of the benefits of renewable energy. Now, whenever a storm is coming, women in Marabut ensure their solar-powered equipment is charged so they are ready to move their communities to safety. Bagunas said harnessing solar energy was also cheaper than relying on coal-fired electricity from the grid. “If we use (solar) as our main source of power in our homes, then we don’t even have to pay for electricity," she said. "As long as you have a panel, you’ll have affordable and reliable power." Bagunas also prefers solar as a safer option. In June, her brother's house next-door went up in flames when a live electricity wire hit his roof, with the fire reaching some parts of her own house. WOMEN'S WORK According to 2020 data from the Department of Energy, about 60% of the Philippines' energy still comes from coal and oil, with only about 34% from renewable sources. But under a 2020-2040 plan, the government aims to shift the country onto a larger share of renewable energy such as solar, rising to half of power generation by the end of that period. Chuck Baclagon, Asia regional campaigner for 350.org, an international group that backs grassroots climate action, said the ICSC's efforts to bring solar power to communities would help expand clean energy at the local level. Today's model of a centralised power system reliant on fossil fuels does little to address energy poverty in remote island areas far from commercial centres, he added. “The shift to solar energy dispels the myth that we can’t afford to transition," he said. "The reason why fossil fuel is expensive is that it’s imported so it’s volatile in the market." Renewable energy sources like solar, however, are easier to build locally because they harness what is available and has the highest potential in particular locations, he added. Leah Payud, resilience portfolio manager at Oxfam Philippines, said her aid agency supported initiatives to introduce solar energy in poor rural communities, especially because it helps women and children who are among the most vulnerable to climate change. "During disasters, the unpaid care work and domestic work of women doubles," she said, adding their burden is made heavier by having to find an energy source to carry out those jobs. "Women don’t have access to a clean kitchen to cook their meals, and there is no electricity to lighten their tasks, for example when breastfeeding or sanitising equipment,” she said. The direct benefits women can gain from clean, cheap and easily available energy mean they should be involved in expanding its adoption, she added. “They are the mainstream users and energy producers - and without their involvement, renewable energy initiatives can become inappropriate," she added. “There is no climate justice without gender justice." One good way to introduce women to renewable energy is by asking them to draw a 24-hour clock of their chores at home and identifying the energy they use to do them, Payud said. They then consult with Oxfam staff on how switching energy sources could lighten their responsibilities, making it "very relatable", she added. The exercise has revealed that many women spend at least 13 hours a day doing unpaid family care work, a load that has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic due to home-schooling. QUICK AND SAFE On Suluan Island, a three to four-hour boat ride from the mainland, women are tasked with collecting water in energy-deprived areas, putting them at risk when they have to go out after dark. They have found solar lights more reliable than oil lamps because they do not have to cross the sea to buy fuel for them. Payud said solar was the best energy source during a disaster, especially when the mains power supply is cut and it is impossible to travel between islands. After Haiyan, it took half a year to restore grid power in far-flung communities, but that would not have been the case had women had access to alternative energy such as solar, she said. For dela Pena and Bagunas, women should be at the forefront of tackling climate change and energy poverty because they act as "shock absorbers". "Women oversee the whole family, and whenever there are problems, they are the ones who try to address it first,” said Bagunas.

In a ceremony where no single movie commanded attention, Mexico's Alejandro Inarritu nabbed the best directing Oscar for "The Revenant", becoming the first filmmaker in more than 60 years to win back-to-back Academy Awards. Inarritu won in 2015 for "Birdman." "The Revenant" went into Sunday's ceremony with a leading 12 nominations, and was among four movies believed to have the best chances for best picture after it won Golden Globe and BAFTA trophies. The ambitious 20th Century Fox Pioneer-era tale, shot in sub-zero temperatures, also brought a first Oscar win for its star Leonardo DiCaprio, who got a standing ovation from the A-list Hollywood audience. "I do not take tonight for granted," DiCaprio said, taking the opportunity in his acceptance speech to urge action on climate change. Yet voters in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences chose Open Road Films'  "Spotlight," which traces the Boston Globe's 2003 Pulitzer Prize winning investigation of child sex abuse by Catholic priests, for best picture. The movie also won best original screenplay. 'Spotlight' Producer Michael Sugar accepts the Oscar for Best Picture. "This film gave a voice to survivors, and this Oscar amplifies that voice, which we hope can become a choir that will resonate all the way to the Vatican," said producer Michael Sugar. 'Spotlight' Producer Michael Sugar accepts the Oscar for Best Picture. Rising star Brie Larson, 26, took home the statuette for best actress for her role as an abducted young woman in indie movie "Room," adding to her armful of trophies from other award shows. 'Jabbing at Hollywood' Racial themes and barbs about the selection of an all-white acting nominee line-up for a second year were a running theme of the show, dubbed "the white People's Choice awards" by Rock, an outspoken black comedian. He questioned why the furore over diversity in the industry had taken root this year, rather than in the 1950s or 1960s, saying that black Americans had "real things to protest at the time.""We were too busy being raped and lynched to care about who won best cinematographer," Rock added. In a taped section, Rock visited the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Compton - the heart of the hip-hop music industry - to ask residents if they had heard or seen the Oscar-nominated movies. None had. Several nominees gave Rock a thumbs-up for striking the right balance on a tricky theme. "I thought it was jabbing at Hollywood, yet at the same time even-handed, and kind of dealing with a new era of how we discuss diversity," said Adam McKay, director and co-writer of best picture nominee "The Big Short." "Really impressive and really funny." Rock wasn't alone in putting people of colour in the spotlight on the movie industry's biggest night. Alejandro Inarritu, winner for Best Director for "The Revenant". "I (am) very lucky to be here tonight, but unfortunately many others haven't had the same luck," Inarritu said, expressing the hope that, in the future, skin colour would become as irrelevant as the length of one's hair. Alejandro Inarritu, winner for Best Director for "The Revenant". Among surprises, Britain's Mark Rylance beat presumed favourite and "Creed" actor Sylvester Stallone to win the Academy Award for best supporting actor for "Bridge of Spies." "Sly, no matter what they say, remember, to me you are the best, you were the winner. I'm proud of you," Arnold Schwarzenegger, a fellow action star, said in a short video he posted online. British singer Sam Smith's theme song for James Bond movie "Spectre" beat Lady Gaga's sexual assault awareness ballad "Til It Happens to You." Swedish actress Alicia Vikander won the supporting actress Oscar for transgender movie "The Danish Girl" while documentary "Amy," about the late and troubled British pop star Amy Winehouse was also a winner. Warner Bros "Mad Max: Fury Road" was the biggest winner, clinching six Oscars, but all were in technical categories such as costume, make-up and editing.

More than 50 speakers from Bangladesh and abroad will share their expert opinions in five panel discussions during the forum, the organisers said in a media briefing on Moday.  Bangladesh Apparel Exchange along with Bangladesh Garment Manufacturers and Exporters Association will organise the forum.The panel discussions will be held on issues currently critical to the country’s apparel industry such as on human, transparency, water, purchasing practice and climate change.“Sustainability is not an option but a must for Bangladesh apparel industry.  So, the SAF aims to add pace to the sustainability momentum and drive discussions to that end,” founder and CEO of BAE Mostafiz Uddin said.BGMEA President Rubana Huq emphasised sustainable labour practice along with sustainable industry environment.The Netherlands Ambassador in Bangladesh Harry Verweij was also present. The embassy is the title sponsor of the forum to be organised in collaboration with H&M. Better Work Bangladesh and C&A Foundation have also partnered with the organisers of the event.

The world can reach a significant new climate change pact by the end of 2009 if current talks keep up their momentum, the head of the United Nations climate panel said on Sunday. The United Nations began negotiations on a sweeping new pact in March after governments agreed last year to work out a treaty to succeed the Kyoto Protocol by the end of next year. "If this momentum continues you will get an agreement that is not too full of compromises," said Rajendra Pachauri, head of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, during a seminar at the Asian Development Bank annual meeting in Madrid. Without a deal to cap greenhouse gas emissions around 2015, then halve them by 2050, the world will face ever more droughts, heatwaves, floods and rising seas, according to the U.N. panel. The United Nations hopes to go beyond Kyoto by getting all countries to agree to curbs on emissions of greenhouse gases that fuel global warming. Only 37 rich nations were bound to cut emissions under Kyoto. The United States, one of the world's biggest polluters, refused to join the agreement. The next talks, to be held in Germany in June, will address funding technology to mitigate climate change -- a key demand from developing countries who say rich countries should foot much of the bill. Getting the private sector on board with a well regulated carbon emissions trading system is key to long-term financing, according to delegates at the ADB seminar. "Investors need some certainty they will get some return," said Simon Brooks, vice president at the European Investment Bank. PRESTIGE AND POLITICS India's Pachauri said popular awareness of global warming had risen sharply over the last 12 months and put pressure on Washington and other governments for action. He said he believed it would be very difficult for any country to remain outside a climate change pact. "There's a question of national prestige involved," said Pachauri, head of the U.N. panel that last year shared the Nobel Peace Prize with former President Al Gore. President George W. Bush pulled the United States out of Kyoto in 2001, saying the pact would hurt the economy and was unfair since it excluded big developing nations from committing to emissions cuts. Key to a new agreement is Asia, notably China, said Odin Knudsen, a managing director for JP Morgan & Chase. "China is making tremendous progress," said Knudsen, a specialist in climate change. "It's in China's interests and they want to be energy efficient." In the last 3 decades Asia's energy consumption has grown 230 percent and the region has gone from producing one tenth of world greenhouse gas emissions, to a quarter, according to the Asian Development Bank. The United Nations calculates global warming will cause a 30 percent decline in crop yields in central and south Asia by 2050 and decrease freshwater availability for over a billion people. Faced with such threats, China is switching over to renewable energy sources which are expected to provide more than 30 percent of its power needs by 2050, according to the United Nations.

Nigeria, Japan and Pakistan are among the 24 new signatories to the Global Methane Pledge, which was first announced by the United States and EU in September with the aim of galvanising rapid climate action before the start of the Scotland summit on Oct 31. It could have a significant impact on the energy, agriculture and waste sectors responsible for the bulk of methane emissions. The nine original partners include Britain, Indonesia and Mexico, which signed on to the pledge when it was announced at the Major Economies Forum month. The partnership will now cover 60 percent of global GDP and 30 percent of global methane emissions. US special climate change envoy John Kerry and European Commission Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans will introduce the new partners at a joint event on Monday and also announce that more than 20 philanthropic organisations, including ones led by Michael Bloomberg and Bill Gates, will mobilise over $223 million to help support countries' methane-reduction efforts, said the official, who declined to be named. The source said the countries represent a range of different methane emissions profiles. For example, Pakistan's main source of methane emissions is agriculture, while Indonesia's main source is waste. Several countries most vulnerable to climate change impacts, including some African nations and island nations like Micronesia, have also signed the pledge. In the weeks leading up to the UN climate summit, the United States will engage with other major emerging economy methane emitters like India and China to urge them to join and ensure the "groundswell of support continues," the official said. 'ONE MOVE LEFT' Methane is a greenhouse gas and the biggest cause of climate change after carbon dioxide (CO2). Several recent reports have highlighted the need for governments to crack down on methane to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees C, the goal of the Paris climate agreement. Methane has a higher heat-trapping potential than CO2 but breaks down in the atmosphere faster. A landmark United Nations scientific report released in August said "strong, rapid and sustained reductions" in methane emissions, in addition to slashing CO2 emissions, could have an immediate impact on the climate. The United States is due to release oil and gas methane regulations in the coming weeks, and the European Union will unveil detailed methane legislation later this year. Larry Kramer, president of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, which contributed to the $200 million fund, told Reuters the money will "help catalyze climate action" and that reducing methane is the quickest way to help carry out the 1.5-degree goal. Durwood Zaelke, president of the Washington-based Institute for Governance and Sustainable Development, said the partnership was a "great start" for focusing the world's attention on the need to slash methane. "There's one move left to keep the planet from catastrophe — cutting methane as fast as we can from all sources," he said by email ahead of the announcement.

The world's biggest greenhouse gas-polluting countries are sending delegates to Hawaii this week for a US-hosted meeting aimed at curbing climate change without stalling economic growth. The two-day gathering, which starts on Wednesday in Honolulu, is meant to spur UN negotiations for an international climate agreement by 2009, so a pact will be ready when the current carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012. The Bush administration rejects the Kyoto plan, saying it unfairly exempts developing countries from cutting back on emissions, and could cost US jobs. Instead, Washington favors voluntary measures and "aspirational goals" to limit climate change, aided by easier transfer of environmental technology. In addition to the United States, by many counts the biggest emitter of climate-warming carbon dioxide, the conference is expecting representatives from Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and the United Kingdom. The United Nations and the European Union will also be represented. This is the second time this group has convened -- the first time was in Washington in September -- and there has been some skepticism among environmentalists about the effectiveness of this process. "The question back in September was, 'Does the fact that they're launching this process indicate some change in the position of this administration?'" said Angela Anderson of the non-partisan Pew Environment Group. The answer, Anderson said in a telephone interview, is no: "There has been no change in position whatsoever in this White House. They were hoping to sell their position to the rest of the world and that's not working." COLLABORATION AND CRITICISM James Connaughton, the head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, played down expectations for the Hawaii meeting. "I think these will be iterative discussions, which the initial goal will be to lay out a variety of options without holding any country to a particular proposal," Connaughton told reporters at a briefing on Friday. "... We're trying to do this in a collaborative way, rather than in the more classic 'You bring your number, I bring my number, and we start kicking them around.'" President George W. Bush drew criticism at the September meeting for his opposition to the mandatory limits on carbon emissions specified by the Kyoto agreement and supported by every other major industrialized country. The criticism continued in December at a global climate meeting in Bali, Indonesia, where U.S. representatives -- including Connaughton -- were booed for opposing demands by poor nations for the rich to do more to help them fight climate change. Back in Washington, the Democratic-controlled Congress last week grilled Connaughton and another top Bush administration official, Stephen Johnson, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency, over two hot-button issues: EPA's rejection of a push by California and 15 other states to set higher standards than the US government for vehicle emissions, and the administration's overall policy on climate change. Another environmental case drawing unwelcome attention is the US government's delay in deciding whether polar bears should be classified as threatened by climate change as their icy habitat melts. The postponed deadline for issuing this decision is Feb. 9 -- three days after an expected sale of oil and gas leases in the Chukchi Sea off the Alaskan coast, where thousands of polar bears live. The Hawaii meeting begins two days after Bush's final State of the Union address. Connaughton declined to say whether Bush would discuss greenhouse emissions in this major speech, but said climate change was "among the items at the top of the agenda" in presidential discussions with world leaders. "World leaders and the president are very, very engaged, and I think you'll see that continued engagement all the way through this year," Connaughton said. Bush leaves office on Jan. 20, 2009.

Trade unions are supporting deep cuts in greenhouse gases as part of a planned UN climate pact and want to ensure jobs are preserved in a shift to a green economy, a leader of a global labor group said on Tuesday. More jobs could be created than are lost if governments are serious about promoting a switch from fossil fuels to a low-carbon economy, said Guy Ryder, General Secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC). "We are aboard. It's a fragile consensus but it is there," Ryder told Reuters of an ITUC endorsement in 2008 of cuts in greenhouse emissions as part of a planned treaty to help avert rising sea levels, more heatwaves, droughts and floods. The Brussels-based ITUC, which says it represents 168 million workers in 155 countries, wants the new UN pact due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December to ensure a "just transition" for workers to a greener economy. "Copenhagen cannot simply be about the environment with the exclusion of social and employment questions," Ryder said on the sidelines of a climate seminar in Oslo. Ryder said the ITUC supported cuts in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 of 25 to 40 percent from 1990 levels for developed nations, which a U.N. panel of climate scientists has said would avert the worst effects of climate change. But recession has sapped governments' willingness to take tough action. So far in the UN negotiations, developed nations are offering greenhouse gas cuts of just 10 to 14 percent below 1990 levels. ARGENTINA, AFRICA Backed by the unions, Argentina and African nations inserted a phrase urging "a just transition of the workforce" into a draft 200-page negotiating text for a Copenhagen deal, he said. "That means that the transition to this low-carbon future must take account of the employment and social dimensions," he said. The phrase is in brackets in the latest text, meaning it faces opposition from some nations. Unions have long feared that acting to limit climate change will mean layoffs. Ryder said the ITUC did not agree to endorse the UN's 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which demands cuts by developed nations, until 2004. Stronger evidence that global warming is caused by mankind helped tip the balance toward Kyoto, along with the unions' insistence on social justice. Ryder said many UN studies showed that a low-carbon future could be achieved by "policies that would increase the quantity and quality of employment." "This will not happen automatically ... It has to be made to happen" and there should be national employment targets, he said. In the past two decades or so "the idea has been 'let's deregulate, let's privatize, let's let the markets free and the jobs will follow'. I think that orthodoxy is looking rather rocky," he said of the current economic downturn. He said many workers -- such as a Polish coal union leader he recently met -- doubted that a shift to a greener economy would mean jobs. "If you work in the Silesian coalfields this doesn't make a whole lot of sense," he said. "There is going to have to be massive social protection and investment in adjustment," he said of a global shift from fossil fuels toward industries such as wind or solar power.

Rich countries should pay tropical nations billions of dollars a year to save their forests, using donor money and global carbon markets to foot the bill, said a UK-commissioned report on Tuesday. In the longer-term, by 2030, developing countries should also start paying to help create "carbon neutral" global forests through binding targets to slow deforestation and plant trees. Clearing and burning forests for timber and farms creates about a fifth of the greenhouse gases blamed for climate change, but growing urgency to tackle the problem is dividing opinion on how to fight the problem. Tuesday's report drew criticism from some carbon traders and green groups, saying it down-played costs and skirted real world issues of corruption and land disputes. The report, "Climate Change: Financing Global Forests," firmly pinned hopes on the notion of carbon trading, where rich countries pay poor ones to cut carbon emissions, so that they can carry on polluting as normal. "Deforestation will continue as long as cutting down and burning trees is more economic than preserving them," said Johan Eliasch, author of the report and Prime Minister Gordon Brown's special representative on deforestation. The report estimated that finance from carbon markets could curb deforestation rates by 75 percent by 2030, and urged inclusion of forests in a new global climate pact slated for agreement under U.N.-led talks by the end of next year. But carbon markets would still leave a funding gap of $11-19 billion by 2020, said the report, to be met by donors currently struggling against a worldwide banking crisis. Extra pressures now on tropical forests include clearances to plant vegetable oils for biodiesel, and more cattle ranches to satisfy a richer world's increasingly meat-hungry diet. Carbon markets use a carrot approach, allowing developing countries to earn carbon offsets for chopping fewer trees than in the past, and then selling these offsets to rich countries as a cheaper option to domestic greenhouse gas emissions curbs. COSTLY Some critics said that the report's cost estimate of $33 billion a year to halve deforestation by 2030 was too small. Offsets would have to compensate farmers for not planting valuable crops such as palm oil. That implied high prices, which made one expert doubt the report's claim that forestry offsets could halve costs for rich nations to fight climate change. "Over the next decade, forest carbon credits could conceivably cut mitigation costs by 13 percent," said Eric Bettelheim, chairman of a private company Sustainable Forestry Management, citing an estimate by Environmental Defense. In addition, the report excluded the cost of planting new trees to replace the shortfall in timber supply. "It's an enormous, industrial-scale undertaking, trees take time to grow and planting trees and maintaining them is expensive," added Bettelheim, estimating the total cost to halve deforestation rates at $50-100 billion. The Eliasch report skirted the problem of corruption and illegal logging, said Simon Counsell, executive director at the green group the Rainforest Foundation. The report recommended that rich country donors spend $4 billion over five years for research, to fund local bodies, and resolve local land disputes. "It really fails to appreciate just how serious and long-term these problems of corruption and governance actually are," said Counsell, adding they would take 10 years to address. "In DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo) there's fewer than 10 people in the forestry department managing an area of forest twice the size of France. That's the reality on the ground."

Wildfires in New South Wales and Queensland states have killed four people, destroyed hundreds of homes and wiped out 2.5 million acres (1 million hectares) of farmland and bush over the past week. The fires have been fueled by tinder -dry conditions after three years of drought that experts say has been exacerbated by climate change, a factor that has sparked a sharp political debate in recent days. Firefighters have said the blazes will burn for weeks without significant rainfall. Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) said there is just a 25% chance that the country’s east coast will receive average rainfall between Dec. 1 and Feb. 28. Stoking the threat, BOM said there is more than 80% chance that temperatures will exceed average levels over the next three months. More immediately, Rural Fire Service NSW deputy commissioner Rob Rogers said fatigued firefighters face another challenging few days. “Conditions are starting to warm up tomorrow, into the weekend and then heating up early next week, a return to more gusty conditions. We’re in for the long haul,” Rogers told Australia’s Channel 7. The death toll from the fires rose to four on Thursday after police reported the body of a man was discovered in NSW bushland that had been ravaged by fire. CLIMATE POLITICS Bushfires are common in Australia’s hot, dry summers, but the ferocity and early arrival of the fires in the southern spring this year has caught many by surprise and stoked an increasingly acrimonious political debate about climate change. Prime Minister Scott Morrison has repeatedly batted away questions on that issue during the current crisis, drawing criticism from climate activists and opposition lawmakers. A group of former fire chiefs on Thursday said the government’s refusal to discuss climate change issues were impeding preparations for large-scale fires. Greg Mullins, a former Fire and Rescue NSW commissioner, said he and 23 other fire and emergency chiefs had been trying to have a meeting with Morrison since April because they “knew that a bushfire crisis was coming.” Instead, he said current fire chiefs had been locked out of discussions and were “not allowed” to mention climate change. “This government fundamentally doesn’t like talking about climate change,” Mullins told reporters in Sydney. Deputy Prime Minister Michael McCormack said earlier in the week that linking the fires to the government’s support of the coal industry was “the ravings of some pure, enlightened and woke capital city greenies”.

India, considered to be one of the world's top polluters, said on Thursday that it was not doing any harm to the world's atmosphere despite increasing emissions of greenhouse gases. Experts say unchecked greenhouse gas emissions could see global temperatures rise by 2-3 degrees Celsius in the next 50 years and could result in devastating climate change. While India is not required under the Kyoto Protocol to cut emission levels at this stage, experts say its emissions are rising due to its rapid economic development and could become a significant contributor to global warming. But the country's environment minister told parliament India's emissions were insignificant compared to those of richer nations which should take the lead in curbing greenhouse gases. "India is very little in terms of emissions and we are not the biggest polluters when compared to the developed nations," said Environment Minister A. Raja. "We are not doing any harm to the entire world. We are, in spite of the developmental activities taking place in this country, very categorical that our emissions are below three percent which is within limits," he said, referring to India's percentage contribution to total global emissions. According to a World Bank survey in May, carbon emissions from two of the world's fastest growing economies, China and India, rose steeply over the past decade. India increased carbon dioxide emissions by 33 percent between 1992 and 2002, said the bank's "Little Green Data Book," a survey of mankind's global environmental impact. New Delhi says it must use more energy to lift its population from poverty and that its per-capita emissions are a fraction of those in rich states which have burnt fossil fuels unhindered since the Industrial Revolution. But environmentalists say India does not need to invest in carbon-intensive industries. "We understand that the country is on a development path and that India still needs to provide energy to much of its population," said K. Srinivas, climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace India. "But that doesn't mean we need to rely on primary sources of energy like coal to do that. There are so many other sources of renewable energy which we should be focusing more on." According to figures from the UN Climate Change Secretariat, the top five sources of greenhouse gases were the United States, China, Russia, India and Japan. The United States' per-capita greenhouse emissions were 24 tonnes based on 2004 data. China was 4 tonnes and India 2 tonnes based on 2000 data, the secretariat said. India's annual emissions were growing about 2-3 percent, said Srinivas. The Indian subcontinent is expected to be one of the most seriously affected regions in the world by global warming, which will mean more frequent and more severe natural disasters such as floods and droughts, more disease and poor crop yields. Officials say India is taking steps to use energy more efficiently and is curbing the use of pollutants which harm the atmosphere, but it needs more financial resources and the transfer of new technologies to achieve this.

Thunberg's grassroot initiative caught on around the world, with millions rallying at weekly "Fridays for Future" protests to call on world leaders to listen to scientists about, and act to stop, climate change, and in 2019 the Time magazine named her person of the year. Thunberg, who took a sabbatical from school in 2019 before starting high school, told Reuters on Friday her movement was far from achieving its goals. "In one way of course I haven't achieved anything," she told Reuters. "In another way I have made lots of friends within the movement and we have been able to organise mass protests and it feels like more people are starting to wake up and demand change." Her first protest outside parliament in August 2018 at the age of 15 "felt quite lonely," she said. "But it also felt very good to be actually doing something." Thunberg was joined on Friday in Stockholm by several fellow activists who travelled from Europe to mark the day. "We decided to unite today ... to strike together, to plan, to look at what's up next," said activist Luisa Neubauer, 25, from Germany, where general elections are scheduled for Sept 26. "I'm also here in the midst of the German election campaign, so that's a big thing. Germany is a huge player, we have a huge responsibility, and right now all players are failing to live up to that responsibility," Neubauer said. A recent UN climate panel report said global warming was dangerously close to spiralling out of control. During her sabbatical year, which she took to advocate her cause full-time, Thunberg gave a speech to world leaders at a UN Climate Action Summit.

President Bush and Queen Elizabeth toasted the enduring Anglo-American friendship at a state dinner at the White House on Monday night honoring the British monarch near the end of six-day US visit. Only 132 guests were invited to dine with the queen and Prince Philip at the first white tie event hosted by Bush and his wife Laura. Arriving at the White House in a black Chevrolet Suburban four-wheel drive vehicle, the royal couple was met by the president and first lady, who wore an aqua gown. The queen wore a white gown with a blue sash and a sparkling crown. In toasts before dinner, Bush hailed the US-British alliance as a force for the "common good." "Together we are supporting young democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Together we are confronting global challenges such as poverty and disease and terrorism," he said. "We're confident that Anglo-American friendship will endure for centuries to come." The queen said today's trans-Atlantic leaders can learn from 20th-century century figures like Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt. "Whether in Iraq or Afghanistan, climate change or the eradication of poverty, the international community is grappling with problems certainly no less complex than those faced by our 20th century forebears," she said. "Together with our friends in Europe and beyond we can continue to learn from the inspiration and vision of those earlier statesmen in ensuring that we meet these threats and resolve these problems." Former first lady Nancy Reagan, golfer Arnold Palmer, Kentucky Derby winning jockey Calvin Borel winner and violinist Itzhak Perlman were among the guests at the dinner. The royal couple's visit to America has included ceremonies marking the 400th anniversary of the British settlement in Jamestown, Virginia, and the Kentucky Derby. Earlier they were treated to a formal arrival ceremony on the White House South Lawn, complete with a marching fife-and-drum corps. Trumpets heralded the arrival of the dignitaries. The US Air Force Band played national anthems before 7,000 invited guests on a sunny spring day. Bush noted the queen's long history of dealing with successive American governments, just barely stopping himself before dating her to 1776, the year the 13 British colonies declared their independence from Britain. Elizabeth has occupied the British throne for 55 years and is 81. "The American people are proud to welcome your majesty back to the United States, a nation you've come to know very well. After all you've dined with 10 US presidents. You've helped our nation celebrate its bicentennial in 17 -- in 1976," Bush said. Bush looked at the queen sheepishly. She peered back at him from beneath her black and white hat. "She gave me a look that only a mother could give a child," Bush said as the crowd burst into laughter. Taking the podium, the queen applauded the closeness of US-British relations. "It is the moment to take stock of our present friendship, rightly taking pleasure from its strengths while never taking these for granted," she said. "And it is the time to look forward, jointly renewing our commitment to a more prosperous, safer and freer world."

HAJIPUR, Feb 17 India (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - The white envelope filled with ten 500 rupee ($13) notes was dispatched to the electricity board official as a "goodwill gesture". Soon it came back, with a message from a subordinate. The official was not playing ball -- at least not at that price. "He refused to accept it, and now he is cooking up a problem," the factory manager said as the envelope was handed back. "I will have to pay the bugger 20,000 ($500) in the evening." The manager had wanted a second power line for an extension for his small factory in the Hajipur Industrial Area in India's eastern state of Bihar. A simple request, the official had threatened to tie it up in endless red tape, unless he was paid. The routine way the bribe was offered, and the way the episode unfolded in front of a Reuters correspondent, offers a tiny insight into the problems of doing business in a state which has become a byword for poverty, lawlessness and corruption. India's boom has not reached Bihar, a state of 90 million people almost completely disconnected from the global economy. It is the country's poorest and one of its slowest growing states, with "exceptionally low" levels of private investment, according to the World Bank. There is no sign of any foreign investment at all. Chief Minister Nitish Kumar took over two years ago promising to turn things around. Since then he has been wooing rich Indians at home and abroad, trying to attract the investment his state so desperately needs. Last December, the World Bank said he was moving in the right direction. His government had initiated comprehensive reforms, it said, improved the investment climate, stepped up public investment and improved the delivery of health and education services -- albeit from an extremely low base. The Bank loaned Kumar's government $225 million, but private investors have not been so enthusiastic. India's biggest industrialists have been visiting the state capital Patna, but so far they have kept their money firmly in their pockets. The sad fact of Bihar is that it has little or no raw materials, intermittent power, terrible roads, a reputation for kidnapping businessmen and some of the least business-friendly bureaucrats in the capitalist world. "People say things have changed, but we have yet to see that change," said the manager. "The red tape is the same, the bureaucracy is the same." Law and order may be improving but Kumar's reforms are still only scratching the surface of the problem, says Shaibal Gupta of the Asian Development Research Institute in Patna. "Why would anyone invest in Bihar?," he asked. "In a place like Bihar you have to build everything from scratch. Where is the rate of return?" A HOPELESS PLACE Hajipur is Bihar's premier industrial park. Its factories get power when the rest of the state is in darkness, but only because they pay bribes. There is no drainage -- factories just dump tens of thousands of liters of effluent every day in nearby ditches or ponds. Squatters camp on the grass verges beside the factory walls, cows munch grass and wander across the pot-holed roads. Armed guards man security gates to ward off kidnappers. "This so-called industrial area is really in a pathetic condition," the manager said. "Bihar really is a hopeless place to do business." On the wall behind his head he displays nearly two dozen licenses he needs to keep his business open, standards for health, safety, labor laws and pollution. Each costs a few hundred rupees a year to renew, plus a 10,000 rupee bribe. "Twenty-three departments have the power to shut down this unit," he said. "They create problems, make money, go back." "So much for a liberal economy." Rajesh Singh took a Masters in Business Administration (MBA) at Bombay University, before returning to Bihar to set up a tiny factory on his family's farmland to manufacture jams, juices, sauces, pickles and canned fruits. "I realized things in Bihar were not very good, so I decided to start an agri-venture," he said. "It was a mix of good potential and good intentions." But Singh has found the odds stacked up heavily against A1 Farm Solutions. His friends and even his father tried to convince him out of the idea, before his bank manager took over. "The banker was telling me I was a fool to leave my job and start a business here," he said. "That is the attitude to coming back, to dissuade you." It took Singh five years to get a bank loan, of just 500,000 rupees ($13,000). To get it, he needed to offer 3 million rupees as security and have 250,000 parked in fixed-term deposits. Today, his loan has been extended to 4 million rupees -- still, in his terms, "a meager amount", equivalent to just 10 days of raw material and labor costs. "I had a lot of orders from the UK, from Sainsbury's for lychees, but I couldn't complete them because bankers are not ready to back us," he said. "I am educated and I have assets. If I can't get finance, how can ordinary Biharis get finance?" If bankers were not hard enough to cope with, Singh has also found himself sucked into the divisive caste-based politics and society of Bihar. His high-caste parents feared they would be made outcastes because he employs Dalits or "untouchables" in a food processing factory, since upper-caste Indians are barred from eating anything which has touched a Dalit hand. Then a lower-caste boy was killed on his farm when he fell under a tractor trailer. A local politician tried to exploit the issue to get Dalit votes, filing a police complaint in which he claimed the boy had been shot in the head. Although everyone knew this was untrue, the accident cost him a year, he said. "No one was willing to work for us, we couldn't get financing," Singh said, adding that all the time the police had been demanding money to drop the charges. As we traveled down the pot-holed road to Singh's factory, a 35-km, three hour trip on a "state highway", he looked around at the congestion, the poverty, the crumbling infrastructure. "Look at this," Singh said. "Someone has to come back... but at times you feel like asking 'what am I doing with my life'." Is anywhere in the world more challenging to do business? "Maybe Somalia," he said. "They are shooting at you there."

Past and predicted emissions from power plants, factories and cars have locked the globe on a path towards an average temperature rise of almost 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times by 2050, it said."This means that climate change impacts such as extreme heat events may now be simply unavoidable," World Bank President Jim Yong Kim told a telephone news conference on the report, titled "Turn down the Heat, Confronting the New Climate Normal.""The findings are alarming," he said.Sea levels would keep rising for centuries because vast ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica thaw only slowly. If temperatures stayed at current levels, seas would rise 2.3 metres (7 ft 6 in) in the next 2,000 years, the report said.Average temperatures have already risen by about 0.8 degree(1.4F) since the Industrial Revolution, it said."Dramatic climate changes and weather extremes are already affecting millions of people around the world, damaging crops and coastlines and putting water security at risk," Kim wrote in the report.As examples of extremes, he pointed to the hottest November day in Australia during a recent Group of 20 summit "or the five to six feet of snow that just fell on Buffalo" in the United States.Still, the worst impacts of global warming could be avoided by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the report said.For example, a rise of 2 degrees (3.6F) in average world temperature over pre-industrial times would mean a reduction in Brazilian crop yields of up to 70 percent for soybean and up to 50 percent for wheat in 2050.Officials from almost 200 nations will meet in Peru from Dec. 1-12 to work on a deal due in Paris in late 2015, to slow climate change.Kim defended World Bank policies that permit investments in fossil fuels in developing nations in rare cases, saying it was often for power plants to supply electricity vital to help end poverty."Sub-Saharan Africa has a total of about 80 gigawatts of installed (electricity generating) capacity, which is less than Spain," he said.

In a hard-hitting report published by The Lancet medical journal, scientists and health experts said climate change impacts - from heatwaves to worsening storms, floods and fires - were surging and threatened to overwhelm health systems. "That's the thing that really keeps me up at night," said Nick Watts, executive director of The Lancet Countdown, an annual report tracking connections between public health and climate change. Storms and floods, for instance, do not only cause direct injuries but can also shut down hospitals, spur disease outbreaks and produce lingering mental health problems, as people lose their homes, he said. Wildfires, similarly, hurt and uproot people, but also dramatically worsen air pollution in broad areas. California's recent wildfires, spurred by drought, have cost more than 80 lives but have also polluted air as far east as Massachusetts, said Gina McCarthy, a former head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency now at Harvard University's public health school. Kristie Ebi, a professor of global health at the University of Washington, said multiple climate change-related health impacts were often hitting at once. "We see them coming at communities all at the same time," she said. The Lancet report, produced by doctors, academics and policy experts from 27 organisations around the world, called for fast action to curb climate change and prepare global health systems for growing challenges. "A rapidly changing climate has dire implications for every aspect of human life, exposing vulnerable populations to extremes of weather, altering patterns of infectious disease and compromising food security, safe drinking water and clean air," it warned. WORKING UP A SWEAT Already, 157 million more people worldwide were exposed to heatwaves last year than in 2000, according to the report. Hotter weather led to the loss of 153 billion hours of labour in 2017, a 60 percent jump from 2000, as workers in construction, farming and other industries downed tools, often squeezing family income. In India, heat caused the number of hours worked to fall by almost 7 percent in 2017, Watts said. Richer countries also are seeing the effects of heat, the report noted. Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, for instance, appear more vulnerable than Africa and Southeast Asia, it said. That is largely because so many older people - who are particularly at risk - live in cities which trap heat and can be hotter than surrounding areas, the report said. England and Wales, for instance, saw 700 more deaths than normal during a 15-day hot spell in June and July this year, Watts said. Renee Salas, an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Hospital in the United States and an author of the report, said she recently treated a 30-year-old man felled by heatstroke while trying to work two construction jobs. "Keep in mind that for every statistic there is a personal story," she urged. Such medical cases are the "often hidden human cost of climate change", she added. HUNGER AND DISEASE Warmer conditions linked to climate change are enlarging the potential range of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever as well as other health threats, the report said. Since 1950, the Baltic region has seen a 24-percent increase in coastal areas suitable for cholera outbreaks, while in sub-Saharan Africa's highlands, zones where malaria-carrying mosquitoes can survive have expanded by 27 percent. Hotter conditions may also be giving some disease-causing microbes greater resistance to antibiotics, Salas said. And higher temperatures seem to be curbing the maximum harvest from farmland in all regions of the world, reversing an earlier trend toward ever-larger harvests, the report noted. Ebi, of the University of Washington, said rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are shrinking nutrients in cereal crops, hiking the risk of malnutrition even for those who get enough to eat. Mental health threats, meanwhile - from children worried about their future in an overheating world to families stressed by disaster losses - are on the rise, she said. Acting swiftly to curb climate change - whether by switching to clean energy, or getting more people to walk and use bicycles - would lower healthcare costs by the same amount of money needed to reduce emissions, Ebi said. "Most mitigation policies are good for health - and they're good for health now," she said.

Alok Sharma, president of the United Nations conference, was visiting a community-led project in Nairobi's flood-prone Kibera settlement that provides easy-to-understand weather forecasts via SMS, WhatsApp and radio. "The climate has changed a lot. We experience heavy rains more and this brings flooding which damages houses, brings diseases to our children and causes deaths," said Faith Ondiek, a weather forecast provider or 'Weather Mtaani' leader with the DARAJA project. "The message we want the president to take back to global leaders is that we are doing what we can to deal with climate change, but we need help. The rich nations must contribute some funds so we can improve our lives in the face of this threat." Sharma said Britain would place adaptation and resilience "front and centre" during its presidency of COP as he praised the forecasting project. "Globally as extreme weather events become more frequent and more severe we need to build resilience among the most vulnerable communities," Sharma said in a statement. Governments will submit updated national action plans to reduce planet-warming emissions and adapt to a hotter climate ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow in November. Sharma's visit aimed to show that COP26 was not just focused on the West bringing down their carbon emissions, but also on garnering the finance so that countries like Kenya could adapt, said a British official. Ministers from a number of countries will meet virtually next Wednesday ahead of the summit to identify practical next steps for climate vulnerable communities. BUILDING RESILIENCE Developed countries agreed at the United Nations in 2009 to jointly contribute $100 billion each year from 2020 in climate finance to poorer countries, many of which are grappling with rising seas, storms and droughts made worse by climate change. But only a fifth of global contributions have so far gone towards adaptation, with most support focused on cutting greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. Adaptation action includes everything from expanding green space in cities to prevent floods and moving coastal communities to safer places to capturing rainwater, providing storm warnings and giving farmers weather and crop advice via mobile phones. In Kibera, a sprawling informal settlement housing more than 200,000 people living cheek-by-jowl in makeshift homes, the change in weather patterns - in particular increased rainfall over a shorter period of time - has had a devastating impact. Due to poor drainage and garbage collection, floods are a common occurrence - not only destroying homes and possessions, but also contaminating drinking water and even causing deaths through building collapses, electrocutions and drownings. DARAJA provides localised weekly forecasts from the Kenya Meteorological Department, which are translated into Kiswahili and local slang Sheng and sent out daily via SMS, WhatsApp and radio. The forecasts provide actionable information, telling residents to avoid a particular route as it may be flooded, or advising parents not let children play near the river as heavy rains are expected. The Mtaani leaders also organise clean-ups of the river and drainage areas, ensure electrical cables are out of harm's way, and advise residents to add waterproofing materials to their homes when heavy rains are forecast. "The DARAJA project has been an effective way to get the information out," said Pascaline Chemaiyo, principal meteorologist at the Kenya Meteorological Department. "The project has formally finished, but the team members are still continuing the work as the community have found it very helpful and it has helped to make them more climate resilient."

WARSAW, Sep 28, (bdnews24.com/Reuters) - Global financial turmoil should not hamper a new world climate deal because high energy prices remain an incentive to improve energy efficiency, the UN's top climate official said on Friday. Some analysts have said the current crisis sweeping financial markets may leave no money for investments in limiting greenhouse gas emissions amid UN-led talks aimed at clinching a new international deal to tackle global warming. "I have personally not seen an economic analysis that shows the current credit crisis is having a bigger impact on the global economy than current oil prices," Yvo de Boer, head of the Bonn-based UN Climate Change Secretariat, told Reuters. But he said the uncertainty generated by the credit crunch and the lack of trust in financial markets were obstacles to developing green energy projects despite the spur of oil prices around $100 a barrel. "In spite of what's happening at the moment, I don't have the impression that lack of capital is the issue. It's investment uncertainty that has created the nervousness out there. And I think, if governments are clear in terms of climate change, that could help reduce some level of this uncertainty." "Because if you are about to build a 500 million euro power plant and you don't know if your government will go for greenhouse gas emissions cuts of 5 percent or 50 percent, then that's a very risky decision to make," he said in an interview. INVOLVING U.S., DEVELOPING NATIONS Contrary to many analysts, De Boer expressed optimism on the chances of the United States joining a new global warming accord, which is due to be agreed in Copenhagen in December 2009 to succeed the Kyoto Protocol, which runs to the end of 2012. "I think it is perfectly possible the United States will sign up to the Copenhagen agreement," said de Boer, who visited Poland to review preparations for December climate talks here. But de Boer added that the reasons Washington did not buy into Kyoto -- mainly its fears the protocol would damage the U.S. economy and the lack of targets for developing countries -- were "as relevant as they were in 1997 (when Kyoto was signed)." Kyoto binds 37 industrialized countries to limit greenhouse gas emissions by an average of 5 percent below their 1990 levels by 2008-12. It sets no target for developing countries. To entice the United States, which is being overtaken by China as the world's top greenhouse gas emitter, the United Nations has to engage developing countries. De Boer said that was only possible by safeguarding their economic growth and cutting ambitious climate policy costs. One way to attract developing countries is the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which allows an industrialized country to boost its own emission quota if it invests in clean energy technology in a developing economy. U.N. talks have been split on whether the CDM should include coal power plants with the ability to store carbon dioxide. "That debate is still going on, but my personal view is that for coal-based economies, like China and India, carbon capture and storage would be critical," de Boer said. "And I believe that there are safe ways of storing CO2 underground, like for example storing it in empty gas fields." De Boer said the talks scheduled for December in the western Polish city of Poznan involving environment ministers of the 192 U.N. member states could pave the way for a deal in Copenhagen to replace Kyoto, despite widespread skepticism.

The pace of global warming continues unabated, scientists said on Thursday, despite images of Europe crippled by a deep freeze and parts of the United States blasted by blizzards. The bitter cold, with more intense winter weather forecast for March in parts of the United States, have led some to question if global warming has stalled. Understanding the overall trend is crucial for estimating consumption of energy supplies, such as demand for winter heating oil in the US northeast, and impacts on agricultural production. "It's not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven't warmed in the past 50 years," veteran Australian climate scientist Neville Nicholls told an online climate science media briefing. "January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we've ever seen," said Nicholls of Monash University's School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne. "Last November was the hottest November we've ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen," he said of the satellite data record since 1979. The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000. Britain's official forecaster, the UK Met Office, said severe winter freezes like the one this year, one of the coldest winters in the country for nearly 30 years, could become increasingly rare because of the overall warming trend. MORE EXTREMES Scientists say global warming is not uniform in all areas and that climate models predict there will likely be greater extremes of cold and heat, floods and droughts. "Global warming is a trend superimposed upon natural variability, variability that still exists despite global warming," said Kevin Walsh, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne. "It would be much more surprising if the global average temperature just kept on going up, year after year, without some years of slightly cooler temperatures," he said in a written reply to questions for the briefing. The scientists also defended the UN climate panel after it came under attack for including an error about the estimated thaw of Himalayan glaciers in a major 2007 report. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) produces reports based on the work of thousands of scientists that are the main guides for policymakers on tackling global warming. The discovery of the error has been seized upon by climate sceptics. The 2007 report wrongly said Himalayan glaciers could all melt by 2035, an apparent typographical error that stemmed from using "grey literature" outside peer-reviewed scientific journals. Nicholls said grey literature could play a key role in the climate debate and that not all valuable data or reports were published formally in journals. Such examples included reports on extreme weather events by government meteorological agencies. "The IPCC does not exclude the use of that sort of grey literature because it would be stupid to talk about extremes, for instance, and not include that sort of grey literature," he said. The scientists said more stringent checks were needed for the next IPCC reports but that the inclusion of one or two wrong predictions didn't undermine the whole peer-reviewed IPCC process because scientific study was always evolving.

Climate activists staged protests on Saturday to add pressure on leaders, including US President Barack Obama, to agree a strong deal to combat global warming at talks this month in Denmark. Among protests, activists in Berlin, posing as world leaders, sat inside a giant aquarium that was gradually filled with water to highlight the risks of rising sea levels from melting glaciers and ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. About 20,000 people marched in London to protest against global warming before the conference, where senior officials will lay the groundwork for the summit. A Greenpeace demonstration in Paris drew 1,500 people. "We want the most ambitious deal we can get at the climate change talks," Britain's Energy Secretary Ed Miliband told BBC television from the march. In the Danish capital, delegates from 190 nations were gathering for the start of the December 7-18 meeting. The biggest U.N. climate talks in history are aimed at working out a new pact to curb global warming, replacing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, whose country is the world's number four greenhouse gas emitter, announced he would attend a closing summit in Copenhagen, joining 104 other leaders including Obama, whose country is the second highest emitter, in a sign of growing momentum for a deal. Denmark welcomed Singh's decision to attend and said that 105 leaders were now due to go. "India is a key country in the global efforts to tackle climate change," Prime Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen said in a statement. "Together these 105 leaders represent 82 percent of mankind, 89 percent of the world's GDP and 80 percent of the world's current emissions." CHANGE PLANET'S COURSE He added: "If this group of assembled leaders can agree, then their decisions can change the course of the planet." Obama on Friday dropped plans to stop off in Copenhagen on December 9 -- on his way to Oslo to collect the Nobel Peace Prize -- and the White House said he would instead join other world leaders on December 18. Governments and activists welcomed the switch, which raises pressure for a deal to combat rising emissions that the United Nations says will cause desertification, mudslides, more powerful cyclones, rising sea levels and species extinctions. But an agreement is still far off. China, India, Brazil and South Africa this week rejected a Danish suggestion to set a goal of halving world emissions by 2050, saying rich nations which have burnt fossil fuels since the Industrial Revolution must first slash their own emissions. Many developing nations at preliminary meetings in Copenhagen on Saturday were lining up with the four in opposing the Danish proposals, delegation sources said. China is the top world emitter ahead of the United States, Russia and India. The United Nations says rich nations must accept deep cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 and come up with at least $10 billion a year in aid to the poor to kick off a deal. It also wants new actions by developing nations to slow the rise of their emissions. In Berlin, the German activists -- dressed as Obama, Chancellor Angela Merkel, Chinese President Hu Jintao and wearing caricature face masks -- saw 4,000 litres of water rise to their chins to symbolise the impact of global warming. "The longer world leaders just talk and do nothing, the higher the water levels will rise," said Juergen Maier, a leader of campaign group Klima-Allianz which staged scores of other demonstrations around Germany on Saturday. In London, many protesters wore blue clothes and face paint and made their way towards the Houses of Parliament chanting slogans and blowing whistles. They carried placards saying "Climate Justice Now" and "Climate Change: The End Is Nigh." Around 1,500 people gathered in central Paris with banners saying: "Climate Ultimatum" and chanting: "Things are hotting up, act now."

Mark Field was suspended as a junior Foreign Office minister last month pending a government investigation into the incident when he grabbed a female climate change demonstrator by the neck and marched her out of the room.A spokesman for Johnson said: "The current PM considers this issue was a matter for the previous PM concerning his conduct during his time as a minister under her appointment."

Food shortages, water scarcity, heatwaves, floods and migration of millions of people will occur across Asia as a result of climate change, Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN climate panel, said on Tuesday. Pachauri was speaking after Friday's release of a report on the impacts of global warming by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which groups 2,500 scientists and is the world authority on climate change. According to the report's predictions, global warming would mean Asia would get less rainfall, affecting agricultural production and leading to food and water shortages. "What we project is substantial decreases in cereal production in Asia and... there will unfavourable impacts on rain-fed wheat in south and southeast Asia," he told a news conference. "There will be risk of hunger and water resource scarcity." Pachauri, also the head of The Energy and Resources Institute, one of India's leading environmental think-tanks, said half a degree Celsius rise in winter temperatures would reduce wheat yields by 0.45 tonnes per hectare. The average wheat yield in India is currently 2.6 tonnes per hectare, he added. Hundreds of millions of people who rely on glacier melt from the Himalayan Hindukush mountains for water supplies would also be affected, he said, adding that a quarter of a billion people would suffer as a result in China alone. Pachauri said the impact in a country like India, where almost 70 percent of the workforce is dependent on agriculture, would be very serious, with mass migration of rural communities to already overburdened towns and cities. "Given that they are not able to pursue their livelihoods, they clearly would have no choice but to move into the large cities and towns," he said. "That means greater slum populations with inadequate urban infrastructure." Rising sea levels could flood the homes of millions of people living in low-lying areas of Asia such as Vietnam, Bangladesh, India and China, said the report. Sea levels will be about 40 cm higher than today by the end of the 21st century and the annual number of people flooded in coastal areas will increase from 13 million to 94 million in Asia. About 60 million of these people will be in South Asia, along the coasts from Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Myanmar, said Pachauri. Coastal cities like Mumbai and Kolkata are extremely vulnerable, he said, adding that they required better infrastructure such as drainage systems to cope with floods and water supplies as much of their water would become more saline.

Labor returned to power after nine years in opposition as a wave of unprecedented support for the Greens and climate-focussed independents, mostly women, helped unseat the conservative coalition in Saturday's general election. "I look forward to leading a government that makes Australians proud, a government that doesn't seek to divide, that doesn't seek to have wedges but seeks to bring people together," Albanese said during his first media briefing after taking charge as the prime minister. Although votes are still being counted and the makeup of government has yet to be finalised, Albanese was sworn in by Governor-General David Hurley at a ceremony in the national capital, Canberra so he could attend a meeting of the "Quad" security grouping in Tokyo on Tuesday. India, the United States, Japan and Australia are members of the Quad, an informal group that Washington has been promoting to work as a potential bulwark against China's increasing political, commercial and military activity in the Indo-Pacific. Albanese said the country's relationship with China would remain "a difficult one" ahead of the summit with U.S. President Joe Biden and the prime ministers of Japan and India. Deputy Labor leader Richard Marles and three key ministers - Penny Wong in foreign affairs, Jim Chalmers as treasurer and Katy Gallagher in finance - were also sworn in, with Wong to join Albanese on the Quad trip. WORKING CLASS CARD Labor's campaign heavily spotlighted Albanese's working-class credentials - a boy raised in public housing by a single mother on a disability pension - and his image as a pragmatic unifier. Centre-left Labor is leading in 76 seats in the 151 seat lower house, with a few races too close to call, according to the Australian Electoral Commission. Independents or Green party looked set to win more than a dozen seats as counting of postal votes continued. So-called "teal independents" campaigning in affluent, Liberal-held seats on a platform of climate, integrity and equality, could yet hold significant sway. Independent Monique Ryan said climate was the most important issue to constituents in her seatof Kooyong in Melbourne, which outgoing Treasurer Josh Frydenberg formally conceded on Monday. "We listened to what people wanted, we listened to their values and their desires, and we put together a platform that reflected those," Ryan said. Albanese said he hoped Labor would get enough seats to govern on their own but added he had struck agreements with some independents that they not support no-confidence motions against his government. After his return from Japan, Albanese said, he would act swiftly to implement his election promises, including setting up a national anti-corruption commission and a A$15 billion ($10.6 billion) manufacturing fund to diversify Australia's economy. The swearing-in of the full ministry will happen on June 1, he said. Australian financial markets offered a muted reaction to the election verdict on Monday, with the outcome already priced in and no radical change in economic course expected. "Our economic forecasts and call on the (Reserve Bank of Australia) are unchanged despite the change of national leadership," economists at Commonwealth Bank of Australia said.

In an expansive news conference in the East Room of the White House, Biden refused to accept criticism of how his administration has handled the coronavirus pandemic, saying that “we’ve done remarkably well.” And he rejected accusations that he called lawmakers who opposed voting rights legislation racists in a fiery speech this month. Acknowledging that his $2.2 trillion social spending legislation will not pass the Senate in one piece, Biden said he would try to pass individual parts of the bigger bill in the Senate, where they might get more bipartisan support. He said he was confident that provisions on energy and the environment would get enough support to pass. He specifically noted that there was too much opposition among Democrats and Republicans to two of his key agenda items, which were central to the pledges he made on the campaign trail in 2020: an extension of the child tax credit and free community college for all Americans. He was pessimistic about voting rights, acknowledging the looming failure of legislation in the Senate. “It’s going to be difficult. I make no bones about that,” the president said, hours before Democrats’ latest attempt to pass a voting rights bill was blocked. But he added, “We’ve not run out of options yet.” He expressed more optimism that some of his spending agenda might still be adopted. “I think we can break the package up, get as much as we can now and come back and fight for the rest later,” he said. He noted that provisions on climate change and universal prekindergarten, and proposals to finance new spending might get enough support to pass. The president said he hoped to find common ground with two Democratic senators who have resisted the legislation. In particular, he said that one of those holdouts, Sen Joe Manchin of West Virginia, “strongly supports early education, 3 and 4 years of age. Strongly supports that.” He repeatedly laced into congressional Republicans, whom he accused of having no positive agenda and of conspiring to block everything that Biden has tried to do. “I did not anticipate that there would be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done,” he said. “What are Republicans for?” he asked in response to a question about his stalled agenda. “What are they for? Name me one thing that they are for.” Referring to Donald Trump, Biden asked: “Did you ever think that one man out of office could intimidate an entire party?” He said five Republican senators had privately told him that they agreed with him on various issues, only to say that they would lose in the primaries if they went public. The president declined to say who the five were. Biden accused Republicans of refusing to get “in the game” on governing the country and said the party was to blame for his inability to unify the country — as he promised — because the GOP was far more unwilling to compromise than it had been in previous years. “They weren’t nearly as obstructionist as they are now,” Biden said. He added: “I wonder what would be the Republican platform right now. What do you think? What do you think is their position on taxes? What do you think is their position on human rights?” Biden faced reporters in a formal news conference for only the second time in his presidency and less than a day before the anniversary of his inauguration amid a stalled agenda and sagging approval ratings. He was animated throughout the news conference, taking numerous questions and sparring with reporters for almost two hours. He ignored one question about his son’s connections to China and largely dismissed another on concerns about his mental fitness. He also gave a grim assessment of the likelihood that President Vladimir Putin of Russia would soon send forces into Ukraine. For most of the two hours, the president defended his record, noting record low unemployment, passage of a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus bill, millions of Americans getting vaccinated and his negotiation of a bipartisan bill to invest $1 trillion in the nation’s roads, bridges, pipes and broadband. But the president said he still intended to take a new approach in the year ahead, promising to get out of Washington more often and pledging significant help for Democratic candidates as the party fights to retain control of Congress in the midterm elections in November. “We’re going to be raising a lot of money. We’re going to be out there making sure that we’re helping all those candidates,” Biden said, promising to “go out and make the case in plain, simple language as to what it is we’ve done, what we want to do and why we think it’s important.” In response to a question, Biden said that he intended to run for a second term and that Vice President Kamala Harris would be his running mate. Biden also said he had grown tired of being drawn into endless negotiations with members of his own party during the past six months. He said his drop in popularity was partly the result of Americans seeing him acting more like a lawmaker and less like a commander in chief. “The public doesn’t want me to be the president-senator,” he said. “They want me to be the president and let senators be senators.” The president has faced a series of challenges since the summer, including a monthslong battle with two Democratic senators over his far-reaching social spending legislation and the inability to pass voting rights protections he describes as crucial to the fate of democracy in the country. He also oversaw a rushed and chaotic exit from Afghanistan. The president has not yet succeeded in meeting his own goals for combating climate change. And while he has reversed some of Trump’s harsh immigration policies, he has not yet delivered on his broader promise for a pathway to citizenship for millions of people living in the country without legal permission. And on the central promise he made during the 2020 campaign — to “shut down” the pandemic that has upended school, work and social life in the country for two years — Biden has struggled to respond to the coronavirus variants that have killed more than 250,000 Americans since the summer. The president defended his response to the pandemic, saying that his administration had succeeded in vaccinating nearly 75 percent of all adults. He said he wished he had “moved a month earlier” to ramp up testing capacity, but he rejected the idea that he should fire any members of his pandemic response team and he refused to accept that problems with testing should be seen as a major failure by his administration. “Should we have done more testing earlier? Yes. But we’re doing more now,” he said. The president took questions even as members of his party in the Senate delivered speeches on behalf of the voting rights legislation in what they already acknowledged was a doomed effort because of unified Republican opposition and refusal by a handful of Democratic senators to change the chamber’s rules. The idea of the debate was to underscore Republican refusal to deal with what Democrats insist is election subversion and voter suppression in states across the country. But the vote also highlighted the limits on Biden’s ability to pressure members of his own party to fall in line behind their president. Biden said he had not completely given up on passing some kind of voting rights legislation, and he rejected criticism from some African Americans who say he has not fought hard enough for voting protections. “I’ve had their back,” he said. “I’ve had their back my entire career. I’ve never not had their back. I started on the voting rights issues long, long ago.” Biden repeatedly urged Americans to have patience with him, acknowledging that he had “not yet” accomplished everything that he said he would when he ran for office. On improving trade with China, Biden said that “we’re not there yet.” And on the pandemic, he had the same answer: I’m not done yet. “Some people may call what’s happening now the new normal,” he said. “I call it a job not yet finished. It will get better.” © 2022 The New York Times Company

Now those cities face the daunting new challenge of adapting to extreme weather caused by climate change, a possibility that few gave much thought to when the country began its extraordinary economic transformation. China’s pell-mell, brisk urbanization has in some ways made the challenge harder to face. No one weather event can be directly linked to climate change, but the storm that flooded Zhengzhou and other cities in central China last week, killing at least 69 as of Monday, reflects a global trend of extreme weather that has seen deadly flooding recently in Germany and Belgium, and severe heat and wildfires in Siberia. The flooding in China, which engulfed subway lines, washed away roads and cut off villages, also highlights the environmental vulnerabilities that accompanied the country’s economic boom and could yet undermine it. China has always had floods, but as Kong Feng, then a public policy professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, wrote in 2019, the flooding of cities across China in recent years is “a general manifestation of urban problems” in the country. The vast expansion of roads, subways and railways in cities that swelled almost overnight meant there were fewer places where rain could safely be absorbed — disrupting what scientists call the natural hydrological cycle. Faith Chan, a professor of geology with the University of Nottingham in Ningbo in eastern China, said the country’s cities — and there are 93 with populations of more than 1 million — modernized at a time when Chinese leaders made climate resiliency less of a priority than economic growth. “If they had a chance to build a city again, or to plan one, I think they would agree to make it more balanced,” said Chan, who is also a visiting fellow at the Water@Leeds Research Institute of the University of Leeds. China has already taken some steps to begin to address climate change. Xi Jinping is the country’s first leader to make the issue a national priority. As early as 2013, Xi promised to build an “ecological civilization” in China. “We must maintain harmony between man and nature and pursue sustainable development,” he said in a speech in Geneva in 2013. The country has nearly quintupled the acreage of green space in its cities over the past two decades. It introduced a pilot program to create “sponge cities,” including Zhengzhou, that better absorb rainfall. Last year, Xi pledged to speed up reductions in emissions and reach carbon neutrality by 2060. It was a tectonic shift in policy and may prove to be one in practice, as well. A park worker cleans weeds in Diehu Park, a green space in Zhengzhou designed to help mitigate flooding, on Friday, July 23, 2021. The New York Times The question is whether it is too late. Even if countries like China and the United States rapidly cut greenhouse gases, the warming from those already emitted is likely to have long-lasting consequences. A park worker cleans weeds in Diehu Park, a green space in Zhengzhou designed to help mitigate flooding, on Friday, July 23, 2021. The New York Times Rising sea levels now threaten China’s coastal metropolises, while increasingly severe storms will batter inland cities that, like Zhengzhou, are sinking under the weight of development that was hastily planned, with buildings and infrastructure that were sometimes shoddily constructed. Even Beijing, which was hit by a deadly flash flood in 2012 that left 79 dead, still does not have the drainage system needed to siphon away rainfall from a major storm, despite the capital’s glittering architectural landmarks signifying China’s rising status. In Zhengzhou, officials described the torrential rains that fell last week as a once-in-a-millennium storm that no amount of planning could have prevented. Even so, people have asked why the city’s new subway system flooded, trapping passengers as water steadily rose, and why a “smart tunnel” under the city’s third ring road flooded so rapidly that people in cars had little time to escape. The worsening impact of climate change could pose a challenge to the ruling Communist Party, given that political power in China has long been associated with the ability to master natural disasters. A public groundswell several years ago about toxic air pollution in Beijing and other cities ultimately forced the government to act. “As we have more and more events like what has happened over the last few days, I do think there will be more national realization of the impact of climate change and more reflection on what we should do about it,” said Li Shuo, a climate analyst with Greenpeace in China. China’s urbanisation has in some ways made the adjustment easier. It has relocated millions of people from countryside villages that had far fewer defences against recurring floods. That is why the toll of recent floods has been in the hundreds and thousands, not in the millions, as some of the worst disasters in the country’s history were. The experience of Zhengzhou, though, underscores the extent of the challenges that lie ahead — and the limits of easy solutions. Once a mere crossroads south of a bend in the Yellow River, the city has expanded exponentially since China’s economic reforms began more than 40 years ago. Today, skyscrapers and apartment towers stretch into the distance. The city’s population has doubled since 2001, reaching 12.6 million. Zhengzhou floods so frequently that residents mordantly joke about it. “No need to envy those cities where you can view the sea,” read one online comment that spread during a flood in 2011, according to a report in a local newspaper. “Today we welcome you to view the sea in Zhengzhou.” In 2016, the city was one of 16 chosen for a pilot program to expand green space to mitigate flooding — the “sponge city” concept. The idea, not unlike what planners in the United States call “low-impact development,” is to channel water away from dense urban spaces into parks and lakes, where it can be absorbed or even recycled. Yu Kongjian, the dean of the School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University, is credited with popularizing the idea in China. He said in a telephone interview that in its rapid development since the 1980s, China had turned to designs from the West that were ill-suited for the extremes that the country’s climate was already experiencing. Cities were covered in cement, “colonised,” as he put it, by “gray infrastructure.” China, in his view, needs to “revive ancient wisdom and upgrade it,” setting aside natural spaces for water and greenery the way ancient farmers once did. Under the programme, Zhengzhou has built more than 3,000 miles of new drainage, eliminated 125 flood-prone areas and created hundreds of acres of new green spaces, according to an article in Zhengzhou Daily, a state-owned newspaper. One such space is Diehu Park, or Butterfly Lake Park, where weeping willows and camphor trees surround an artificial lake. It opened only last October. It, too, was inundated last week. “Sponges absorb water slowly, not fast,” Dai Chuanying, a maintenance worker at the park, said on Friday. “If there’s too much water, the sponge cannot absorb all of it.” Even before this past week’s flooding, some had questioned the concept. After the city saw flooding in 2019, the China Youth Daily, a party-run newspaper, lamented that the heavy spending on the projects had not resulted in significant improvements. Others noted that sponge cities were not a panacea. They were never intended for torrential rain like that in Zhengzhou on July 20, when 8 inches of rain fell in one hour. “Although the sponge city initiative is an excellent sustainable development approach for stormwater management, it is still debatable whether it can be regarded as the complete solution to flood risk management in a changing climate,” said Konstantinos Papadikis, dean of the School of Design at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University in Xi’an. The factories that have driven China’s growth also pumped out more and more of the gases that contribute to climate change, while also badly polluting the air. Like countries everywhere, China now faces the tasks of reducing emissions and preparing for the effects of global warming that increasingly seem unavoidable. Chan, the professor, said that in China the issue of climate change has not been as politically polarizing as in, for example, the United States. That could make it easier to build public support for the changes local and national governments have to make, many of which will be costly. “I know for cities, the questions of land use are expensive, but we’re talking about climate change,” he said. “We’re talking about future development for the next generation or the next, next generation.” © 2021 The New York Times Company