No country owns the North Pole or the expanse of the Arctic Ocean surrounding it. The Arctic region has a population of about 4 million, including more than 30 distinct groups of indigenous people using dozens of languages; they have lived there for more than 10,000 years. The area also has a unique and diverse [...]
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With the start of a new year, the eradication of hunger remains one of the world’s biggest challenges. Despite decades of aid work and development, overall world hunger remains at a serious level, and 20 countries have alarming or extremely alarming levels, says the Global Hunger Index for 2012. At the top of the list [...]
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Is the planet full? And how many plates are empty? These are the first two questions that came to my mind from the title of Lester R. Brown‘s new book, “Full Planet, Empty Plates: The New Geopolitics of Food Scarcity.” With world population now standing at 7.1 billion and projected to exceed 9.3 billion by [...]
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When hugely damaging natural disasters strike in developing nations, many deaths occur because warnings and lifesaving advice do not reach people in the path of violent storms, floods or other threats. Decades of calls for better communications and disaster preparedness could not prevent 130,000 people from dying in Bangladesh in a 1991 cyclone, nearly 300,000 [...]
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Latin America and the Caribbean have always faced the threat of hurricane intensely, but with new weather extremes related to climate change occurring amid growing urban populations, the lethal mix is bound to cause more damage and deaths every year. Urban planners are not even close to being prepared. Consider the recent havoc that [...]
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When power failures on an unheard-of scale left about 600 million people in India in the dark this year, advocates of solar and wind power could again question why a country baked in sunshine and buffeted by winds over land and sea has not moved faster to install renewable energy systems. Across the developing world, [...]
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As the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development, known as Rio+ 20, opens on June 20 in Brazil, a final document continues to be hammered out with a focus on a worldwide green economy and related environmental issues. Chronic air pollution remains a big part of the dialogue, and one major source of dirty air [...]
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United Nations international atomic inspectors confirmed that Iran is moving apace on producing nuclear fuel at an underground site, but that is not what Kwaku Aning, an official from the International Atomic Energy Agency, wanted to talk about on a visit to New York. Nor did his colleague, Geoffrey Shaw, an Australian who represents the [...]
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