Environment Archive

Earlier this month, the leaders of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and host country Thailand gathered for the first-ever Mekong River Commission (MRC) summit to discuss the future of the Mekong, one of the world’s longest and most resource-rich rivers. There was much to discuss. The Mekong — which flows through China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand, and provides food, water, and transport for about 65 million people — is now at its lowest level in two decades due to a prolonged drought. Its future is also in peril due to a host of natural and man-made threats. Unless riparian states […]

Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna returned from Beijing this month with bombshell news. Krishna said Chinese authorities had finally admitted what the Indian government had long suspected: Beijing is building a massive, power-generating dam on China’s Tsang Po river, which also runs through India — where it is known as the Brahmaputra — and Bangladesh. Amid protests, Krishna reassured the public. “We have an expert-level mechanism to address the issue,” the minister said during a meeting of parliament, according to press reports. “A meeting of experts from both India and China is scheduled to take place between April 26-29 […]

Russian officials have recently accused U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan of “conniving with drug producers” and urged the coalition to pursue aggressive aerial eradication operations against Afghanistan’s opium poppy crops. Despite having spent over $1 billion on counternarcotics programs in Afghanistan since 2002, including eradication efforts, the U.S. and the U.K. have failed to curb the illicit drug industry there. Moscow’s tough stance on narcotics stems from its own internal consumption levels, which have steadily reached epidemic proportions. According to 2008 records, up to 21 percent of the world’s production of illicit opiates ended up in Russia, resulting in […]

The most likely source of political and social unrest in the Middle East over the next 20 years is not warfare or military coups — it’s water. Military threats get all the press, but water is the real game-changer. It is no secret that the Middle East is water-starved. Of the 15 most water-poor countries in the world, 10 are in the Middle East. When King Abdul Aziz ibn Saud first brought geologists to the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, they were there to look for water, not oil. What they found changed the kingdom, and changed the region. Over the […]

NEW DELHI — Emerging differences within the Indian government regarding whether to adopt a more flexible approach to climate change negotiationscame to a boil recently, when the prime minister’s special envoy on climate change, Shyam Saran, quit his post. Until now, Saran — who has been leading India’s negotiations at international forums, including Copenhagen — opposed efforts by Environment Minister Jairam Ramesh to soften India’s line on climate change methodology. Indian media have been highlighting the disagreements between Ramesh and Saran, which center around Ramesh’s attempts to update India’s basic principle of per capita emissions norms to define burden-sharing between […]

It has been a devastating few weeks for the global mining community. In late March, a flood in a coal mine in northern Shanxi province in China resulted in the deaths of more than 30 workers. Then last week, in West Virginia, an explosion at a coal mine killed nearly 30 miners. Both accidents revealed some of the safety hazards associated with mining. Meanwhile, as the United States was coping with its worst mining disaster in years, two nations in Latin America were dealing with mining tragedies of their own. Those tragedies, however, had little to do with the dangerous […]