Improving survival and extending the longevity of life for all populations requires timely, robust evidence on local mortality levels and trends. The Global Burden of Disease 2015 Study (GBD 2015) provides a comprehensive assessment of all-cause and cause-specifi c mortality for 249 causes in 195 countries and territories from 1980 to 2015. These results informed an in-depth investigation of observed and expected mortality patterns based on sociodemographic measures.

India’s new government certainly seems to be cracking on with its job. Within two weeks of taking office, environment minister Prakash Javadekar had rolled out an online system to speed up approvals for development projects that might have environ­mental impacts. And a system for clearing permits for projects in forests is hot on its heels. But ecologists are concerned that the speed will do nothing to improve an already poor-quality system, and may, in fact, make things worse.

Following the rapid development of carbon markets, little attention has been devoted to what precisely is being traded. Some authors have speculated that carbon can be considered as a form of money (Button; House and Victor). Not only is making money from carbon possible via several market devices but this process has also enabled the construction of carbon as a form of money.

Analysis of poverty and its dimensions are various as the ways in which poverty affects the daily sustenance of the poor. Poverty, many a times is simply viewed as an issue of income. What poverty means for the poor is a wide range of dynamic aspects. This paper presents results of analysis that emanate from Participatory Poverty Assessment (PPA) which was conducted in Sohenkhera village, Chittorgarh district of Rajasthan. Using a mixture of qualitative and quantitative methods, entire households of the village were covered for the study.

The debate on the design of the Lokpal has been premised on the questionable assumption that what is needed to combat corruption is a powerful national institution to prosecute and convict the corrupt, but the debate has not drawn on the experience with the existing institutional models, namely the Lokayuktas in the states. An empirical analysis of the performance of the Lokayukta in Karnataka between 1995 and 2011 suggests that any anti-corruption agency, no matter how powerful, that is oriented towards criminal conviction is bound to fail in the absence of judicial reforms.

Ready or not, the era of big data is coming to ecology. After years of discussion and debate, the United States is moving forward with an environmental moni­toring network that promises to help transform a traditionally small-scale, local science into a continental-scale group enterprise.

The environmental problems confronting Indian cities today have arisen because millions of people have been forced to live in illegal settlements that lack adequate sanitation and other basic urban services. This is the result of two factors. The first is the legacy of the colonial city characterized by inequitable access to sanitation services, a failure to manage urban growth and the proliferation of slums, and the inadequate funding of urban governments.

An effort in southern India to raise coastal farmers out of poverty by paying them to cultivate red algae for a food additive has gone awry.