ANTHONY MCMICHAEL heads the International Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the Australian National University, and is a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. He talks to VIBHA VARSHNEY and MARIO D'SOUZA about the health risks from global environmental changes

What are the impacts of climate change on disease outbreaks?

To protect the health of humans, save other species. That's the message from Eric Chivian and Aaron Bernstein from Harvard Medical School in Boston, who say that human health depends crucially on biodiversity.

Demand for plant products has never been greater, more people, rising affluence, and expanding biofuels programs are rapidly pushing up the prices of grain and edible oil. Boosting supply isn't easy: All the best farm land is already in use. There's an acute need for another jump in global agricultural productivity-a second Green Revolution. Can it happen? Will it happen? (Editorial)

Developing countries are fighting hard to retain the right to increase farm im-port tariffs in spite of slashing them rapidly to cope with the global food crisis. Faint signs of progress in the troubled "Doha round" of global trade talks last week in Geneva were imperilled by a fresh dispute over poor countries' ability to protect their farmers with tariffs.

There's little doubt that free-market capitalism helped to get us into the mess we're in. As Nicholas Stern, former chief economist at the World Bank, puts it: climate change is "the greatest market failure the world has ever seen". The question now is whether capitalism is able to make amends. Can it provide a mechanism that rewards people for reducing their carbon emissions instead of increasing them? Or will it simply give big polluters a way of dodging their responsibilities?

the struggle for global open standards has got tougher with India saying no to Microsoft's Office Open xml (ooxml) document format. The decision comes despite attempts by Microsoft to make the

In recent months, Delhi has seen unprecedented growth in star foreign visitors flying in by night to advise us on the impending dangers of climate change and hand out

Researchers probe the secrets of how plants cope with water stress to improve crop yields.

Human-wildlife conflict (HWC) is an increasingly significant obstacle to
the conservation of wildlife. The growing body of HWC literature tends
to focus on biological, economic and local aspects associated with HWC.
The factors driving HWC at the local level are, however, shaped in turn by

The main objective of this report is to address threats to human security and well-being posed by water scarcity and quality degradation. It also aims to investigate how improved groundwater management can increase human security.

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