INDIA'S ECOLOGY FACING THREAT
Sri Jairam Ramesh, minister of state for environment and forest, conceded on Tuesday that the ecology of of the country was being threatened due to the thrust on economic growth and called for a balance between the two.
Expressing shock over mindless deforestation, he said lately he had come to know that a 600-acre mangrove was earmarked for clearing up to construct an airport. Several similar developments came to his notice.
“It should have been raining here (in Andhra Pradesh) today. What happened to the monsoon? We know what is happening to the Himalayan glaciers. The situation is grim”, he warned.
The minister who took charge of his portfolio on May 29 said that a target had been set to increase the green cover in the country to 33 per cent from the present 23 per cent in the next 10 years. The country, he added, while working on increasing GDP, should focus on enhancing GPG, that is Green Product Growth to 9 per cent per annum.
Ramesh was speaking at the third and final meeting of an expert group on traditional knowledge of biological diversity at the MCR Institute of Human Resources Development, which was inaugurated by chief minister Y S Raj a s e k h a r a Reddy.
The minister said that India was losing out on patenting of its biological products to Europe and the US. There are plans to make a traditional knowledge digital library (TKDL) with over two lakh formulations on native medicines accessible to the West. Once the entities in the West know what India already has in its TKDL, they would be careful in patenting them. He asked the experts to expand the TKDL base by incorporating the oral tradition.

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Health and climate change vie for boost in Congress

Barack Obama may be pressuring Congress as no U.S. president has for decades as he aims to get two big domestic goals passed this year -- reforming health care and fighting global warming.
"It's not impossible to do both, but that would be more than a Congress has ever given a president, maybe since the first First 100 Days," said Brookings Institution senior fellow Stephen Hess, referring to the start of Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal" presidency in 1933.
A further time constraint may be the pressures imposed by the campaign next year for congressional elections in November when the seats of all 435 U.S. representatives and a third of the 100 senators are up for grabs.
Congress in the past often has shown itself to be unable to handle more than one big issue a year, but Obama and his fellow Democrats, who control the Senate and House of Representatives, see a window of opportunity this year to pass two long-standing Democratic goals.
Expanding health care to the uninsured and reducing pollution associated with climate change would have an economic impact on nearly every consumer and most U.S. companies -- from health insurers and utilities, to oil refineries, ailing automakers, steel manufacturers and small businesses.
Nonetheless, Democratic leaders are giving it a run, placing both initiatives on a fast track -- with or without much Republican support.
"The one that has the highest probability of making it is health care," said Bruce Josten, an executive vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He noted a full legislative agenda later this year, including annual spending bills, a Supreme Court confirmation and tax legislation, could crowd out a climate bill debate in the Senate.
Nevertheless, several congressional committees are pushing ahead with their review of the bill that aims to cut industry's carbon dioxide emissions 17 percent by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050 with alternative energy sources and energy efficiencies.
The bill's prospects are strengthened by an unusual coalition of environmentalists, corporations and labor unions that have joined the effort. Obama is trying to sell climate change legislation as much more than doing something good for the environment. "Green" job creation and weaning the country off of foreign oil are his major talking points.
According to several Democratic lawmakers, the White House is already working hard to woo Senate Democratic and Republican moderates who will hold the keys to obtaining the needed 60-vote majority in the 100-member Senate.
In the meantime, environmentalists are heartened that four months into Obama's presidency such wide-ranging legislation is advancing, even with its concessions to some industries.
"If it became law today it would be the most important piece of energy and environmental legislation Congress ever produced," said one activist.
HEALTH CARE IN THE LEAD
Of the two, health care might be the bill that is more likely to reach Obama's desk for enactment by year's end. Both houses of Congress hope to blend their respective bills into a compromise measure by October -- Obama's deadline.
Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy has a major role in drafting the new health care bill as head of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. The bill would require individuals and businesses to purchase insurance and prohibit insurance companies from refusing to cover anyone because of health history.
Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid said for the next five weeks, the Senate's normal three-day work week will be extended to five so a health care reform bill can be passed.
"I want to emphasize what the president said, that health care is an absolute priority," said Representative Chris Van Hollen, a member of the House Democratic leadership, when asked by Reuters about the two bills' prospects. "But we believe we're going to do both" in the House, he added.
In the midst of a deep economic recession and with medical bills contributing to an estimated 60 percent of U.S. personal bankruptcies, providing health care for those without insurance is paramount to Obama.
Fifteen years ago, then-President Bill Clinton tried to keep a campaign pledge to enact universal health care, only to fail miserably. That contributed to significant Democratic losses in the 1994 congressional elections.
Since then, the health care problem has worsened with medical costs escalating and 46 million uninsured. Democrats claim they've learned their lesson about unfulfilled promises.
They still have to find a sound way to pay for expanding health care, a tough job amid staggering U.S. budget deficits.
Republicans keep hammering away at any proposed government-run health insurance. "A government plan could undercut private health plans, forcing people off the health plans they like," Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell warned.
Behind the scenes, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pressuring her lieutenants to speed up work on the climate change legislation, which won strong backing last month from the politically diverse House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Pelosi hopes to pass this bill in June or July. Even if the legislation were to go no further this year, Obama would have a major accomplishment to tout in December, when world leaders are set to meet in Copenhagen to discuss global warming.
But the legislation likely would result in higher energy bills for American consumers, an especially difficult sell during a recession.
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Community-based adaptation to climate change

The impact of climate change is going to affect the poorest communities the most, so the focus has shifted to formalising community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change, which will help the poorest and most vulnerable" to access funding and information."Even with the best of intentions and lots of money being made available by the international community towards adaptation to climate change, it will only trickle down to the poorest and most vulnerable (as is our experience of development funding in general in the past)," said Saleemul Huq, head of the climate change group at the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).But what is CBA to climate change?Huq explained by email that CBA is "still an 'aspirational' term that (we hope) will describe the universe of adaptation to climate change activities being done by very vulnerable and poor communities (mostly in developing countries but not necessarily only there) over time. We are still at a very early stage of developing the methodology and definitions."Many such activities are taking place in Bangladesh, identified as among the countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, such as sea level rise, increased flooding, salinity, and frequent droughts in some areas.As the rains have become more intense and frequent over the years, villagers struggling with waterlogged fields in parts of southern Bangladesh have been growing food on floating islands of paddy straw, water hyacinths and other aquatic plants; hydroponics, or soil-less agriculture, is another way of adapting to "climate variability", as Huq put it.The distinction between adaptation to climate change and adaptation to climate variation is often blurred. Climate variability refers to the variations in the mean climate statistics, while climate change refers to long-term significant change in average weather, including climate variability.The focus is now on "clubbing" all community-based adaptation activities under the term "community-based adaptation (CBA) to climate change", said Huq. "So it is still a work-in-progress to define CBA to Climate Change (as opposed to CBA to Climate Variability)."A CBA project looks much like any development project - for example, water harvesting in drought conditions rather than a stand-alone response to climate change - noted an IIED policy brief written by Huq. CBA to climate change is just another new layer added to other community-driven initiatives."The adaptation element introduces the community to the notion of climate risk and then factors that into their activities. This makes them more resilient, both to immediate climate variability and long-term climate change," said the IIED brief."It should be noted, though, that the few existing CBA projects are so new that they have hardly been tested for resilience to climate variability, let alone to climate change."

Global initiative

The process was the focus of the recent Third International Workshop on CBA in Dhaka, capital of Bangladesh, organized jointly by the IIED, the Bangladesh Centre for Advanced Studies (BCAS) and the Ring Alliance of 13 policy research organisations from across the world.A Global Initiative on CBA was launched at the workshop to promote the concept and share knowledge. The initiative would not only build a support base of information for communities but would also serve the strategic purpose of advocating "specific quotas" for the most vulnerable in any new global funds for adaptation that may be agreed in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change or other global processes, said Huq."Climate change is an esoteric and initially confusing concept to many," the IIED brief acknowledged. "Communication about it must use a community's own language and terms they can understand."Studies in Vietnam and Malawi have shown that rural communities often sense the climate is changing and start adapting to climate variability by growing new hardy crop varieties, but lack of understanding was greater in areas with poor communication.The IIED brief recommended not only translating scientific texts into local languages but also using traditional means of communication such as art and theatre. One of the papers presented at the workshop highlighted the use of rural radio in the Democratic Republic of Congo to inform small-scale farmers of the challenges posed by climate change.The UK-based Institute for Development Studies has set up a website for exchanging information (www.cba-exchange.org) on CBA to inform NGOs and communities. Google Earth is also working with governments to map adaptation projects globally.

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