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Changing rainfall patterns may be depleting India’s groundwater storage more than withdrawals for agricultural irrigation, says a new study published in January by Nature Geoscience. 
 
While India’s diminishing groundwater is widely attributed to over extraction, especially in the northern ag

Climate change-induced changes in snowfall patterns could imperil two billion people who rely on melting snow for their water supply — and developing countries must work to protect citizens from these variations, researchers say.

Out of 421 drainage basins studied in the northern hemisphere, a study published on 12 November identified 32, s

Energy generated from rubbish could power an estimated 40 million households across Africa by 2025, proposes a study.
 
Using existing data on refuse and urban population growth, the researchers measured the total energy potential of all Africa’s urban solid waste from both incineration and methane produced from landfill sites.

“Our an

The Philippines is on high alert as a thickening haze from Indonesian forest fires has reached its southern and central islands, causing flight cancellations and health warnings.

Weather officials say monsoon winds, combined with wind patterns created by Typhoon Koppu, which recently hammered the northern island of Luzon, could be causing the “smaze” – smoke and haze -- to drift from Indonesia to the Philippines 1,200 kilometres away.

The health department ha

This week, the UN member countries have gathered in Bonn, Germany, to negotiate a preliminary draft that will form the backbone of an agreement to be finalised in December. The agreement will outline a global strategy for climate change response over the next few decades, in an effort to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius.

After a difficult start in Germany, when developing countries contested the first version of the draft, the text was amen

Countries must share technological solutions to manage freshwater resources together, says a UN University report.

Although 200 water treaties have been signed in the past 50 years, water remains a significant source of potential conflict in places without adequate cooperation,

African rivers emit a vast amount of greenhouse gases, a major paper on this understudied topic reveals.

As rivers carry organic matter from the land to the oceans, bacteria turn it into greenhouse gases. While previous analyses had quantified emissions of these gases from rivers in Brazil, Europe and North America, the study in the journal Nature Geoscience last week (20 July) largely fills the African gap.

It used measurements

Chile is set to jointly host the world’s largest array of gamma ray telescopes.
 
About 100 dishes are now planned to go in the Atacama Desert — close to the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Paranal — to form the southern hemisphere part of the US$330 million Cherenkov Telescope Array (CTA). The northern hemisphere component of around 20 dishes will go on La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands in the Atlantic, the CTA board

Household air pollution may have caused around 4.3 million premature deaths from respiratory diseases in 2012, mainly in developing countries, according to a medical paper.

Such pollution dramatically increases the risk of both children and adults contracting chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

A global initiative to help developing nations prepare for the impacts of climate change will be piloted in Bangladesh, Colombia and Ethiopia, following its launch in the United States last week.

The Climate Services for Resilient Development partnership has more than US$34 m