News stories by Amantha Perera, page 12

COLOMBO, Jul 22 (IPS) - For many Sri Lankans, the effects of climate change can be summed up in one word: rainfall.

COLOMBO, Jul 17 (IPS) - A bloody civil war was reaching its climax but this Tamil family, who had already experienced the conflict intimately, had one last decision to make that would prove to be the hardest one of all.

COLOMBO, Jul 06 (IPS) - If you hold a Pakistani or Afghan passport, be prepared for an unusually lengthy immigration process on entering neighbouring Sri Lanka. Immigration authorities in the island tell IPS they have set up special procedures to check passengers from these two countries.

, Jul 01 (IPS) - The works starts now, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon said at the conclusion of the summit on sustainable development in Rio last week. This was about the only UN statement that civil society groups seem to agree with. It is on the precise task at hand that they differ.

When it comes to expressing the threat to food security posed by changing climate patterns and extreme weather events in Asia and the Pacific, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) does not mince its words.

Addressing a group of journalists during a workshop in Bangkok, Ali Raza Rizvi, Asia head of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN)’s regional climate change and resilience programme, noted that many Asian countries have become ‘disaster friendly’.

The year 2011 was one of extremes for the small Sri Lankan village of Verugal.

Krishnaveni Nakkeeran has fled the country of her birth twice and returned twice in the last two decades. The 36-year-old mother of four from the northern Jaffna peninsula in Sri Lanka first fled the bloody civil war to India when she was just 16 years old in 1990.

Reacting to a series of deadly crocodile attacks, the Sri Lankan government has drawn up plans to capture the free-ranging beasts and confine them to parks. Conservationists oppose this move.

The fear was palpable for Mohideen Ajeemal when he heard the news of an 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the coast of Indonesia on Apr. 11. The last time an earthquake of similar magnitude hit the same area, Ajeemal lost two of his children, a young daughter and an infant son, when massive tsunami waves crashed onto his house on the eastern coast of Sri Lanka on the morning of Dec. 26, 2004.