'And what about after 2012?', when the Kyoto Protocol climate change treaty’s first period of commitments ends, was the question floating around an international meeting of legislators held over the weekend in the Mexican capital.

Since arriving in Cape Town five years ago, Erina Manyene (not her real name) has eked out a meagre living picking up shifts doing laundry and cleaning other people’s homes in the city’s leafy southern suburbs.

Food production will have to increase by 70 percent to feed the expected world population of 9 billion by 2050, says a report released Monday by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). Agricultural output in developing countries will have to double, the report says.

Most people would not think twice about throwing out old plastic bags, empty soda cans, scrap metal and used shampoo bottles. But for the students of Cavite Institute in the Philippines, trash like these have become their ticket out of poverty.

Japan’s prolonged economic woes seem to have helped worsen the country’s problem with domestic violence.

Ezequiel Estay began collecting glass bottles in 1991 after losing his job with the Chilean media conglomerate Copesa. Now, years later, he heads Chile's National Movement of Recyclers and is a leader of the Latin American Recyclers' Network, which is questioning the climate benefits of the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).

Global agriculture contributes in the region of 17 percent to the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, but according to the World Bank, climate smart agriculture techniques can both reduce emissions and meet the challenge of producing enough food for a growing world population.

Zhou Hongxia thought the King’s Scholars classroom was cold and damp and rather dark, the wooden benches carved and stained with the ink of hundreds of students that have filed through it over the centuries.

At the end of the first week of climate negotiations under way in this Mexican Caribbean resort city, it seems a distant possibility that the nearly 200 national delegations will agree on renewing the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.

On Monday, Dec. 6, a district court in Texas will be asked — for the first time in that U.S. state's history — to decide whether the death penalty is unconstitutional based on the 'disproportionately high risk of wrongful convictions' in Texas.