News stories by Julio Godoy, page 11

European governments failed to help along an international treaty to stop global warming at the United Nations climate change summit in December, but their engineering and power industries see business opportunities in renewable energy sources and their smart management.

Biodiversity, already decaying fast as a result of climate change and intensive farming, is under further threat by genetic modification (GM) of seeds, says a leading German ecological activist.

After the wave of de-privatisation of water services facilities that started across the world two years ago, municipalities in Europe are now buying back the electricity utilities they sold to private investors in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

The global financial crisis led many European economists and civil society activists to believe that the neo-liberal paradigm in social and economic policies across the industrialised world and many developing countries had passed away, victim of its own flaws.

Less than a month after the world's heads of governments failed to sign an international treaty to address climate change at Copenhagen, they are back at making pious speeches, this time in favour of protecting biodiversity, endangered by global warming and other causes.

Africa, the continent already most affected by hunger and food scarcity, is likely to see its woes increased due to climate change and the changing rain patterns it provokes, experts and scientists say.

Every single person should set a cap of a total of 110 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions over the next four decades to avoid irreversible and uncontrollable consequences of climate change, under a new proposal.

Concerns have risen with the inauguration of the new government that Germany will cut back on its commitments on international development.

A future global climate change treaty must limit the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million (ppm), and not 450 ppm, the currently proposed level, Samuel Fankhauser told a meeting of pro-environment legislators from the eight most industrialised countries and emerging economies here. But they felt the goal was not feasible.

Reconstruction of some of Berlin's historic buildings that were damaged during World War II or by the Communist regime that earlier ruled East Germany, is raising troubling questions about Germany's past, and its future.