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New York - The world's 20 most advanced economies should discuss investment of 1 per cent of global gross domestic product - about 750 billion dollars - into five sectors to build an environmentally sustainable global economy, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) said Thursday. Such an amount could finance a 'Global Green New Deal,' drawing on the idea of the New Deal launched by US president Franklin D Roosevelt to help put an end to the Great Depression in the 1930s.

NAIROBI (Reuters) - World leaders meeting in London in April should kick-start a "Green New Deal" to fight climate change and revive the crippled global economy on a sustainable basis, a major U.N. environment meeting was told on Monday. High on the agenda for more than 100 environment ministers gathered in Kenya this week will be how to draw attention to "green" issues amid job losses and worldwide financial turmoil. The U.N. Environment Programme (UNEP) says political efforts to curb pollution, protect forests and avert global warming have failed, and the world needs to learn from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt's...

NAIROBI, Kenya – The new U.S. government abruptly reversed years of Bush administration policy Monday by calling for a legally binding international treaty to reduce mercury pollution, which a senior American diplomat called the most important chemical problem in the world today. Some 6,000 tons of mercury enter the environment each year, about a third generated by power stations and coal fires. Much settles into the oceans where it enters the food chain and is concentrated in predatory fish like tuna. Children and fetuses are particularly vulnerable to poisoning by the toxic metal, which can cause birth defects, brain damage...

WASHINGTON, DC, November 12, 2008 (ENS) - When the leaders of the G20 countries gather in Washington this weekend for a special summit on the global financial crisis, pressure will be on to seek solutions in the growth of a new green economy. Today in Washington, Gary Gardner and Michael Renner, senior researchers with the environmental research organization Worldwatch Institute, issued a detailed proposal that they hope will focus the attention of the G20 leaders on what they are calling a "Global Green Deal." "The challenge for global political leadership, including U.S. President-elect [Barack] Obama, is not merely to kickstart...

In previous parts of this series (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) I’ve shown how a political agenda took over climate science primarily through the UN and specifically the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The agenda was spread to the world at the 1992 Rio Conference. Periodic Reports from the IPCC maintained the focus on CO2 and increased the political pressure. Please understand I am not claiming a conspiracy, but rather a cabal, which is defined as a secret political clique pushing a political agenda; in...

The United Nations has just issued yet another scaremongering assessment of the world’s environment. It was put together by the UN’s principal environmental agency, known as the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). The best way to engineer transformation of the current legal system to global governance of the environment, under the auspices of the UN, is for its “experts” to first create the mass perception of an imminent cosmic cataclysm if humanity continues on its present course.[1] The UNEP report, known as “Global Environment Outlook: Environment for Development (GEO-4)”, covers not just global warming. It covers all dimensions of environmental deterioration...

The United Nations' Cash for Kim Jong Il scandal is now six months old, so it's a good time to assess progress, if that's the right word. The evidence of misdeeds at the U.N. Development Program in North Korea continues to mount, but there's still no "urgent" and "external" inquiry, as ordered by Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in January. Now the U.S. has uncovered evidence that in addition to transferring millions of dollars in cash that may have gone to help prop up Kim's grotesque regime, the UNDP also transferred dual-use technology. It did so without bothering to secure a U.S....

SINGAPORE (AFP) - More than 600 business executives and experts began meeting in Singapore on Thursday to discuss how the corporate world can help tackle the threat of climate change. The two-day Global Business Summit for the Environment is the first major international conference focusing on business and the environment in Asia, according to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP). UNEP organised the event with the United Nations Global Compact, an initiative that brings companies together with UN and other agencies to support environmental and social principles. The meeting comes two days after the UN Security Council held a groundbreaking debate...

PARIS (AFP) - French President Jacques Chirac opened a Paris conference on world environmental governance with a call for a green "revolution" to meet the challenges of global warming. "Soon will come a day when climate change escapes all control. We are on the verge of the irreversible," Chirac told the meeting, which began just hours after the release of a key United Nations scientific report on global warming. "Faced with this emergency, the time is not for half measures. The time is for a revolution -- a revolution of consciousness, a revolution of the economy. A revolution of political...

I confess I was afflicted by a profound world-weariness following the release yesterday of the latest gloomy machinations from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The U.N.'s global-warming caravanserai, founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Program, had this time pitched camp in Paris, in order to issue the "Summary for Policy Makers" relating to Working Group One of its "Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007." This is the group that focuses on "The Physical Science Basis" of climate change, and its summary was greeted with the usual razzmatazz, the Eiffel Tower's 20,000...

GENEVA (Reuters) - The hole over Antarctica's ozone layer is bigger than last year and is nearing the record 29-million-square-km (11-million-sq-mile) hole seen in 2000, the World Meteorological Organization said on Friday. Geir Braathen, the United Nations weather agency's top ozone expert, said ozone depletion had a late onset in this year's southern hemisphere winter, when low temperatures normally trigger chemical reactions that break down the atmospheric layer that filters dangerous solar radiation. "The ozone depletion started quite late, but when it started it came quite rapidly," Braathen told journalists in Geneva. "It (the hole) has now risen to a...

In a recent interview, U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations John Bolton described the UN as hopelessly out of touch and stuck in a Twilight Zone-style "time warp" where "there are practices, attitudes and approaches that were abandoned 30 years ago in much of the rest of the world." [1] Bolton's cutting analysis perfectly captures the latest controversy to hit Turtle Bay—Secretary-General Kofi Annan's appointing German activist Achim Steiner as Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) just months after Steiner helped award Annan $500,000. [2] Steiner, whose four-year term of office will begin next month, was part...

Pretoria - South Africa and President Thabo Mbeki have been listed as "Champions of the Earth", the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) said on Tuesday. It described Mbeki and South Africa's people as outstanding leaders in the field of environment. They were setting an example for the world to follow, Unep said. "The people of South Africa have not just made substantial progress in the sustainable development of their own country, they have provided leadership and support for the continent as a whole." Unep lauded South Africa for the rate at which it was putting recommendations of 2002 World Summit...

Toxic waste sickening Somalia04/03/2005 20:12  - (SA)   Related Articles Toxic waste on Somali beaches    Nairobi - Very toxic waste washed on to Somali's coastline by last December's tsumani have spawned diseases bearing symptoms of radioactive exposure in villagers along the shorelines of the shattered African nation, UN Environment Programme said on Friday. Citing initial reports, Unep spokesperson Nick Nuttall told AFP that "there are indications that harzardous waste, radioactive waste, chemical waste and other substances, (in containers) which have been dumped on the Somali coastline, were damaged by the tsunami". United Nations officials said the deadly waves, which originated off...

A United States decision to block upgrading of the status of UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and talks on a mercury ban has left the United Nations (news - web sites)' environment arm with clearer priorities in its campaign to clean up nature, diplomats say. The UN Environmental Program's chief Klaus Toepfer said the Nairobi meeting, which was watered down by US opposition to the possible mercury ban, ended up with governments offering fresh pledges to increase the body's funding.(AFP/File/Simon Maina) A week-long conference of UNEP's top board, which ended in the Kenyan capital Nairobi on Friday, also failed to launch...

Former Federal Reserve Board chairman Paul Volcker, who heads the inquiry into corruption in the United Nations' defunct oil-for-food program, has just issued a sobering interim report. He concludes that the program was "tainted, failing to follow the established rules of the organization," and that "political considerations intruded." But the U.N.'s problems don't stop at Oil-for-Food — as if that weren't enough. Those of us who study ongoing U.N. agencies' deliberations on regulatory issues find obvious and egregious flaws in them, even when they do follow established rules. The U.N.'s systematic sacrifice of science, technology, and sound public policy to...

NAIROBI, Kenya - Scientists will begin investigating environmental "hot spots" in Iraq (news - web sites) as part of a long-term strategy to clean up the country after ten years of war and instability, the U.N. Environment Program said Tuesday. The U.N. agency has coordinated the training of Iraqi scientists in the latest laboratory and field testing techniques to collect information on suspected hazardous sites, officials said. The work will begin soon, a spokesman said. "We estimate that there are more than 300 sites in Iraq considered to be contaminated to various levels with a range of pollutants," said Klaus...

As if our nation's free-market ideal isn't damaged enough -- witness, if you will, the generally lengthy permitting process for businesses and the prevalence of zoning laws, environmental mandates, eminent domain abuses and hefty tax burdens that plague our would-be entrepreneurs and developers in nearly every county, city and state across America. Now comes the United Nations, with its Global Compact Center and its Responsible Investment Initiative. Announced in July at the four-month-long "Universal Forum of Cultures in Barcelona 2004," both these programs are thinly veiled attacks against capitalism that, left unchecked, will result in a ceding of private and...

NEW LONDON Hundreds of young environmentalists from 40 nations will converge on New London later this month for a United Nations-sponsored conference on environmental issues. When the environmentalists, age 10 to 13, finish talking about water pollution, energy conservation, needs of indigenous people and other issues, their resolutions will be passed along to the United Nations for debate. The conference is the fifth held by the United Nations Environment Programme since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio De Janiero recommended involving children in environmental causes. It will be the first to be held in the United States. "It was shown...

UNITED NATIONS, June 24 (UPI) -- Chief executives from around the globe Thursday agreed at the U.N. Global Compact Summit that "business should work against corruption in all its forms, including extortion and bribery." The anti-corruption measure joins the nine other principles in initiatives promoting good corporate practices covering human rights, labor and the environment. The convention is the first globally agreed instrument to provide sweeping measures regarding the prevention of graft, its criminalization and international cooperation against it as well as recovery of illegal assets. The summit was the largest and highest-level gathering of its kind ever held at...