Farmers and forest managers should be allowed to earn carbon offsets from planting and looking after trees in tropical countries, the Nairobi-based World Agroforestry Center said on Wednesday.

By YOJNA GUSAI
New Delhi

Gases blamed for global warming reached record levels in the atmosphere last year, the United Nations weather agency said on Tuesday.

Concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and nitrous oxide (N2O) touched new highs after more steady rises in 2007, and methane had its largest annual increase in a decade, the World Meteorological Organisation said.

The first project under Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under Kyoto Protocol will be commissioned on the outskirts of the capital today.

WWR Bio Fertiliser Bangladesh Ltd, a joint venture company of Waste Concern, in association with World Wide Recycling BV, a Dutch company, has established the compost plant at Bhulta on Dhaka-Sylhet Highway, about 12 kilometres off the capital.

Greenpeace protesters clashed with coal miners at a new opencast mine on Monday in an incident highlighting Poland's environmental dilemma on the eve of a major UN-led conference on climate change.

The western Polish city of Poznan will be the venue for the Dec. 1-12 conference aimed at agreeing a new global climate package to replace the Kyoto protocol which expires in 2012.

Rich nations should make the first cuts in greenhouse gases while developing countries carry on business as usual for the time being, according to a plan set out on Monday by a Harvard University project.

This is one of four proposals by the American university's Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs to negotiators who meet for UN climate talks next week in Poland.

Australian mining firms, hit by high fuel costs and falling commodity prices, could soon swap their diesel generators for 24-hour, solar-power systems, the head of a private renewable power firm said on Thursday.

Rainforest nations will lobby the United Nations to set up a single body to coordinate the use of carbon credit trading to stop deforestation at a conference next month in Poland, an official from the countries said on Tuesday.

THE Scandinavians say they're already green; the eastern Europeans say they're too poor; the Belgians say they're too small; the French say they're too nuclear; and so on. As Europe negotiates the final details of its new plan to tackle climate change, which will be published on January 23rd, arguments are raging over how the burden should be distributed.