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"Shell spending millions of dollars on security in Nigeria, leaked data shows Internal documents reveal oil company spent $383m over three years protecting staff and installations in Niger delta region"

Climate change: a development challenge Climate change: building the resilience of poor rural communities Desertification Fighting water scarcity in the Arab countries Fighting rural poverty: the role of ICTs Food prices: Smallholders can be part of the solution The future of world food security Land tenure security and poverty reduction Linking land and water governance Remittances Rural finance: Small amounts making a big difference Women

'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

Concerns over immigration and security have prompted the US government to erect more than 1,000km of fencing along the Mexican border. But the contentious plan which cuts through private property in some areas has sparked anger among some US homeowners and farmers. Al Jazeera's Nick Spicer reports from Brownsville, Texas, along the Mexican border.

high-powered group of senior Republicans and Democrats led two missions to China in the final months of the Bush administration for secret backchannel negotiations aimed at securing a deal on joint US-Chinese action on climate change, the Guardian has learned.

The new kid on the energy block, shale gas, may be worse in climate change terms than coal, a study concludes. Drawn from rock through a controversial "fracking" process, some hail the gas as a "stepping stone" to a low-carbon future and a route to energy security.

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