Two safeguards for communities’ rights to resources can help implement the Nagoya Protocol, argues biodiversity specialist Krystyna Swiderska. As the recent UN Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20) showed, intergovernmental negotiations on the environment and development can be slow processes that lack ambition. But that is nothing new. One of the outcomes of the original Rio…
Inequality is growing in the United States, and social mobility is slowing. A study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that 62 percent of Americans raised in the top one-fifth of the income scale stay in the top two-fifths; 65 percent born in the bottom fifth stay in the bottom two-fifths. Education, long praised as…
Humans started causing climate change long before the Industrial Revolution and the beginning of the fossil fuel era. A new study shows that the echoes of the earliest human-caused carbon emissions are still present in our atmosphere. In fact, preindustrial carbon emissions, caused by deforestation as the world’s population grew, were responsible for 9% of…
The Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Barack Obama’s health care reform law has an impact in the form of key provisions that will impact US science funding in the years to come.
It’s time to get serious about science in space, and the International Space Station is the perfect place to start, NASA officials said. “We are in a position in space research and space exploration where we have to push the ball and advance forward or we’re about ready to retreat from space,” William Gerstenmaier, NASA’s…
Pottery fragments found in a south China cave have been confirmed to be 20,000 years old, making them the oldest known pottery, archaeologists say. The findings add to recent efforts that have dated pottery piles in East Asia to more than 15,000 years ago, rebutting conventional theories that the invention of pottery correlates to the…
Green technology is proving lucrative in India, clean energy investments here were worth $10.3 billion, a growth of 52% on 2011, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance. This means that India had the highest rate of growth in green technologies of any other major world economy, with wind and solar areas being where most money…
A U.S. federal court of appeals upheld the right of environmental regulators to curb harmful carbon emissions via clean car standards and limit industrial pollution from new power plants. The court rejected a series of lawsuits that had been filed against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) by the Coalition for Responsible Regulation, which included coal,…
Farmers, used to betting on the weather, are changing their tactics to cope with changes in the rules of the game
For the 50,000 visitors from 190 countries streaming in for the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, the welcome in Rio is a rank reminder of just how hard it will be to balance economic growth and environmental protection elsewhere across the globe. Rio, the host city, suffers from devastating and daunting air and water pollution.