High levels of black carbon pollution in the north-eastern Indian city of Guwahati is responsible for accelerating glacier melt in the Himalayas, according to new research by scientists.

A two-day international conference on South Asia’s water resources will be held in Dhaka on January 4-5, 2013.

While policy makers, experts, and activists meet for the UN conference Rio + 20 this week, thousands of miles away in north-east India’s Assam state, 22 farmers are languishing in the Lakhimpur jail for taking up cudgels to protect the environment.

Over 100 heads of state and government will most probably sign later this week an agreement that was supposed to take the world on a more sustainable and equitable development path, but which is now so full of compromises that it is mostly meaningless.

A political resolution to be signed by over 100 heads of government neared completion in Rio de Janeiro on Monday. But the agreement that was supposed to chart the course of the earth will fail to do so in many significant respects, unless there is a change of heart at the last moment.

The largest international gathering of them all got underway in Rio de Janeiro this Wednesday June 13 with no agreement on how the world could be made more liveable and sustainable at the same time.