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'Brown Clouds' Are World's Newest Environmental Threat By TINI TRAN AND JOHN HEILPRIN / AP WRITER Friday, November 14, 2008 BEIJING - A dirty brown haze sometimes more than a mile thick is darkening skies not only over vast areas of Asia, but also in the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, changing weather patterns and threatening health and food supplies, the UN reported. The huge smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds." Cars drive through thick smog on a street in Beijing in September 2008. Enormous brown clouds of pollution hanging over Asia are killing hundreds of thousands of people, melting glaciers, changing weather patterns and damaging crops, the United Nations said. (Photo: AFP) When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the UN Environment Program and released Thursday. "All of these points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet," said Achim Steiner, head of Kenya-based UNEP, which funded the report with backing from Italy, Sweden and the United States. Brown clouds are caused by an unhealthy mix of particles, ozone and other chemicals that come from cars, coal-fired power plants, burning fields and wood-burning stoves. First identified by the report's lead researcher in 1990, the clouds were depicted Thursday as being more widespread and causing more environmental damage than previously known. Perhaps most widely recognized as the haze this past summer over Beijing's Olympics, the clouds have been found to be more than a mile (kilometer) thick around glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. They hide the sun and absorb radiation, leading to new worries not only about global climate change but also about extreme weather conditions. "All t

Growing inequality, environmental decline and "teetering" economies mean the world must change the way it does business, a UN report concludes.

UN 'concerned' by world population growth trends

We all know that adapting to climate change is going to cost us -- but that doing nothing will ultimately cost us even more -- however, a new report from the International Institute for Environment and Development says that the real costs of adaptation are likely to be 2-3 times greater than those estimated by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change :

Article doesn't say much specifc, but it gives an overview of a new idea.

Introduces idea of a GNH  (Gross National happiness).  Not a new concept, but made the news anyway.  Could present as another alternative to GNI and HDI.

Better World Flux was created as an entry for the World Bank Apps for Development competition. The site aims to raise awareness for the UN Millennium Development Goals by letting users visualize and share stories that are hidden in the World Bank Open Data.

Britain will overtake Germany as the country with the highest population in Europe, the United Nations predicted yesterday.

A UN representative has said relying on foreign aid to achieve the Millennium Development Goals did a disservice to Africa, and has called on African governments to find alternative funding sources and clean up their act

UN aid agencies are suggesting wealthy industrialised nations should perhaps rethink their policies on immigration and asylum in the wake of the latest tragedy in the Mediterranean, writes the BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva.