Greenhouse gases have been the big focus of most companies' environmental efforts for several years, with pollution a close second. But another equally pressing environmental issue has received much less attention: water. For most companies in the developed world, water is not much of a problem. Water bills are generally a tiny part of overheads, and unless there is a drought or flood, companies can count on it flowing from the tap.

US President George W Bush's plan to halt a rise in US greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 could undermine, rather than support, efforts to combat climate change, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel said. "Gabriel criticises Bush's Neanderthal speech" was the title of a news release from the Environment Ministry on Thursday. "Without binding limits and reduction targets for industrial countries, climate change will not be stopped," said Sigmar Gabriel, adding the United States and Europe had to lead the way in cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

The European Commission urged US President George W Bush on Thursday to be more ambitious in tackling climate change while welcoming his acceptance that the United States would need to curb greenhouse gas emissions. A spokesman for the European Union executive said Bush's plan to halt the growth of US greenhouse emissions by 2025, announced on Wednesday, fell far short of the action needed by developed countries to save the planet from potentially catastrophic global warming.

Surface melting fuelled by climate warming can trigger dramatic events on the vast Greenland ice sheet such as a lake suddenly vanishing through a crack with force of Niagara Falls, experts said on Thursday. Rising global temperatures are expected to cause an increase in meltwater in frozen expanses like the Greenland ice sheet, and this meltwater often forms sizable lakes.

A US plan to cap greenhouse gases by 2025 was dismissed as too little, too late by some delegates at 17-nation climate talks in Paris on Thursday while others welcomed it as a first firm US emissions ceiling. On Wednesday, US President George W Bush unveiled a plan to halt the growth of US emissions by 2025, toughening a previous goal of braking the growth of emissions by 2012. The United States and China are the top emitters.

Contrary to expectations, a microscopic plant that lives in oceans around the world may thrive in the changing ocean conditions of the coming decades, a team of scientists reported Thursday.

Following a one-day meeting in Tokyo, the business federation chiefs issued a joint statement urging the G8 nations to come up with measures that will encourage developing countries to participate in the framework to succeed Kyoto. "We hope there will be a forward-looking agreement on such points," said Fujio Mitarai, chief of the Japan Business Federation (Nippon Keidanren) and chairman and CEO of Canon Inc. Mitarai also said the business chiefs briefly discussed the sectoral approach Japan proposed that has so far only received mixed reactions.

Environment Minister Ichiro Kamoshita on Friday criticized the greenhouse gas-emissions cut plan just unveiled by U.S. President George W Bush, saying,

Speakers at a roundtable on Thursday stressed incorporation of the impacts of climate change into the new health policy. The daily Prothom Alo and ICDDR,B organised the roundtable on climate changes: emerging health problem and strategies to combat it at the ICDDR,B auditorium to mark World Health Day. The day was observed on April 7 with the theme

The collapse of Australia's rice production is one of several factors contributing to a doubling of rice prices in the last three months - increases that have led the world's largest exporters to restrict exports severely, spurred panicked hoarding in Hong Kong and the Philippines, and set off protests in countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Ethiopia, Haiti, Indonesia, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mauritania, the Philippines, Thailand, Uzbekistan and Yemen, the New York Times reported yesterday.