The world has made progress on ways to save tropical forests as part of a planned new UN pact to slow global warming, the UN's top climate official said at 160-nation talks in Ghana ending on Wednesday.

"We are still on track, the process has speeded up," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, said of the Aug. 21-27 negotiations. "There is a growing sense of urgency."

To keep coral reefs from being eaten away by increasingly acidic oceans, humans need to limit the amount of climate-warming greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, a panel of marine scientists said on Wednesday.

"The most logical and critical action to address the impacts of ocean acidification on coral reefs is to stabilize atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration," the scientists said in a document called the Honolulu Declaration, for release at a US conference on coral reefs in Hawaii.

UN climate talks in Ghana are making progress on ways to help developing nations slow deforestation and have eased disputes over use of greenhouse gas targets for industrial sectors, delegates said on Monday.

"It's moving pretty well now," Yvo de Boer, head of the UN Climate Change Secretariat, told reporters of the Aug. 21-27 talks which are defining the building blocks of a new UN global warming pact meant to be agreed by the end of 2009.

Abolishing subsidies on fossil fuels could cut world greenhouse gas emissions by up to 6 percent and also nudge up world economic growth, a UN report showed on Tuesday.

Subsidies on oil, gas or coal are meant to help the poor by lowering the price of energy but the report, issued on the sidelines of a 160-nation UN climate meeting in Ghana, said they often backfired by mainly benefiting wealthier people.
The study estimated that energy subsidies, almost all for fossil fuels, totalled about US$300 billion a year or 0.7 percent of world gross domestic product (GDP).

Sumatra's endangered elephants and tigers should get a boost from a move by Indonesia's government to expand one of their last havens, a national park on the island of Sumatra, the conservation group WWF said Thursday.
The area of the park, Tesso Nilo in Riau Province, is to be more than doubled to 212,500 acres. But the group warned that increased efforts would be vital to ensure that poaching and illegal logging did not continue.
WWF, whose headquarters are outside Geneva, said 60 to 80 elephants and about 50 tigers were believed to live in the area to be covered by the park.

One of the country's largest builders of coal-fired power plants will give investors detailed warnings about the risks that global warming poses to its business under a deal with New York's attorney general.
The agreement Wednesday between the attorney general, Andrew M. Cuomo, and the company, Xcel Energy of Minneapolis, is the first of its kind in the country. It could open a broad new front in efforts by environmental groups to pressure the energy industry into reducing emissions of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming.

Yvo de Boer said Africa was still lagging in attracting investments in green technology to help slow rising greenhouse gases and in getting help to adapt to the effects of droughts, floods, rising seas and less predictable rains.
Speaking during 160-nation Aug. 21-27 climate talks in Accra, de Boer urged African nations to insist on their interests regarding a new UN climate treaty due to be agreed by the end of 2009 in Copenhagen.

Raghvendra Rao

Indian Railways' plan to use state-of-the-art technology to operate Electrical Multiple Units (EMUs) in the Mumbai suburban area, primarily aimed at reducing greenhouse gases and earning them carbon credits, is now on track with the Railways Ministry finalising the project design and initiating the process of getting approval from the Environment Ministry.

The project essentially envisages adoption of a three-phase Insulated Gate Bi Polar Transistor (IGBT) technology on the three-phase EMUs in the Mumbai suburban area of the Western and Central Railways.

Replacing much of Australia's beef and lamb with kangaroo meat could significantly cut the continent's greenhouse gas emissions and save its native terrain. A recent study suggests phasing out some 7 million cattle and 36 million sheep from Australian rangelands

The World Bank will provide $5.524 million (of which $2.869 million long-term debt) to proposed Carbon Finance project "Lahore Composting" (Saif Group, Pakistan, the sole owner of Lahore Compost Ltd-LCL) to avoid generation of methane emission from biodegradable wastes and improve cultivated land by using compost as a natural soil conditioner.