After prolonged negotiations, what the Rio summit has produced is a weak and poorly represented commission on sustainable development

It was the Stockholm conference, held exactly 20 years ago, which put environmental issues on the global agenda for the first time. But the contours of environmental negotiapons have changed a great deal from those early days

Mumbai: Without stronger basic infrastructure, particularly better roads, water supplies, sanitation, electricity, information and communications technology and other essential services, developing countries will be hard-pressed to meet the Millennium Development Goals (MDG) targets, said Asian Development Bank (ADB) president Haruhiko Kuroda.

The MDGs are eight internationally-agreed targets,

Nearly 200 governments will say next week they are unlikely to meet a target of slowing the rate of extinctions of living species by 2010, a failure which could threaten future food supplies. Up to 5,000 delegates and some heads of state, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, will try to agree at the Convention of Biological Diversity in the German city of Bonn on ways to save plant and animal species.

The number of people in Asia infected with HIV could jump by more than 150 per cent, or 8 million, by 2020 unless more is done to combat the spread of the virus that causes AIDS, a report presented to