December 11, 2014 |
NEW DELHI: Half of the deaths due to pneumonia in children aged less than five years in India can be attributed to household air pollution, according to World Health Organisation. Over 60 per cent of homes in World Health Organisation (WHO) South-East Asia Region still use solid fuel for cooking. In India, this amounts to some 700 million people. "Member States now need to develop national databases on household fuel use and emissions and design programmes aimed at encouraging the use of improved cooking stoves, fuels and good cooking practices," Dr Poonam Khetrapal Singh, WHO Regional Director for South-East Asia said adressing representatives of member states to target the implementation of the new Guidelines for indoor air quality here today.
June 9, 2014 |
As the government prepares new policies for a better, more prosperous India, it would do well to take a look at a small report brought out by The Energy and Resources Institute (Teri) on the costs of environmental inaction . It puts numbers to the cost that the nation bears on account of air pollution, unsafe drinking water and lack of sanitation , and to the scale of the problem of solid waste management as India urbanises. The cost of outdoor air pollution is estimated to be Rs 1,00,000 crore.
February 18, 2015 |
BEIJING: Setting off fireworks to celebrate Chinese New Year may be a centuries-old tradition, but the country's authorities are urging people to light fewer of them this week as cities fight a losing battle against relentless, toxic air pollution. Dozens of cites in China have outright banned lighting fireworks today and tomorrow, while others have reduced the number of fireworks vendors allowed to operate. In Beijing, people received text messages from their phone companies advising against setting off fireworks while local government-run media repeated the warnings in newspapers and on websites.
February 19, 2015 |
WASHINGTON: The US plans to expand air quality monitoring to some of its missions in countries like India, Vietnam and Mongolia to help raise awareness about the dangers of pollution. The initiative announced yesterday by the State Department and the Environmental Protection Agency builds on the monitoring service that began five years ago at the US Embassy in Beijing. "15 years ago, the EPA created a web-based platform called AirNow to give our citizens information in real time about the quality of the air that they're breathing, and they can make an informed decision about whether it is a good day to go for a run or whether they want to go outdoors at all or send their kids to a park to play," Secretary of State John Kerry said.
February 4, 2015 |
NEW DELHI: Terming as "unacceptable" that majority of kids in the Delhi were suffering from respiratory problems owing to poor ambient air quality, Delhi High Court today said it intends to take up the issue of air pollution if the Supreme Court is not already dealing with it. "Look at the poor ambient air quality in Delhi. There are lot of factors contributing to it. Over 50 per cent of children in the national capital are suffering from respiratory problems. This is unacceptable," a bench of justices Badar Durrez Ahmed and Sanjeev Sachdeva said.
November 11, 2014 |
NEW DELHI: Noting that air pollution insdie households, caused by use of traditional cookstoves, was responsible for around 5 lakh deaths in India every year, experts recommended adoption of improved cookstoves. The issue was raised at the India Clean Cookstove Forum (ICCF) 2014 here today where experts from various sections, including government and industry deliberated over challenges hindering the large-scale adoption of improved cookstoves (ICS) in the country. The number of deaths is is second only to tuberculosis (TB)
November 8, 2014 |
NEW DELHI: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls for phasing out fossil fuels like coal by the end of the century, and substantial emission reductions over the next few decades to prevent irreversible impacts of climate change. But India, which depends on coal for nearly 65% of its energy, can't move to a non-coal trajectory for its power. With technology like carbon capture and storage still at an experimental level, India plans to make coal washing mandatory as part of its effort to tackle climate change and air pollution, and the environment ministry is busy simplifying the clearing process for setting up coal washeries.
December 3, 2014 |
In May this year, a WHO report revealed that Delhi was the world's most polluted city. So which other cities suffer particularly bad smog. It turns out India dominates the list, with more than half of the world's 20 most polluted cities.Including cities in Bangladesh and Pakistan, South Asia has a shocking 85 per cent of them. Not surprisingly, air pollution is the fifth largest killer in India, the cause of 6.2 lakh deaths last year. The most polluted cities were determined by the annual mean of particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns, considered the most harmful for health.
December 25, 2009 |
NEW DELHI: With India aiming to emulate China in taking aggressive domestic measures to control emissions, the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) on Thursday released a study ranking the environmental pollution in 88 industrial clusters across the country. The study formulates a comprehensive environment pollution index (CEPI) on the basis of water, land and air pollution. All available data on water and air pollution, biodiversity conservation, land degradation, ecological damage and waste management has been used to make this assessment.
February 12, 2015 |
By Edward Wong BEIJING: Foreign companies in China are struggling with growing issues, including a perception that their businesses are less welcome than before. Such problems have been building in the past year, and they were underscored in survey results released Wednesday by the American Chamber of Commerce in China, which also found for the first time in the survey's 17-year history that most companies were having greater troubles recruiting executives because of air pollution.