Feature Article

Performance-based financing: the need for more research - Round Table Discussion.

Over the past 15 years, performance-based financing has been implemented in an increasing number of developing countries,
particularly in Africa, as a means of improving health worker performance. Scaling up to national implementation in Burundi and
Rwanda has encouraged proponents of performance-based financing to view it as more than a financing mechanism, but increasingly
as a strategic tool to reform the health sector. We resist such a notion on the grounds that results-based and economically driven

Overfishing of large-bodied benthic fishes and their subsequent population collapses on the Scotian Shelf of Canada’s east coast and elsewhere resulted in restructuring of entire food webs now dominated by planktivorous, forage fish species and macroinvertebrates. Despite the imposition of strict management measures in force since the early 1990s, the Scotian Shelf ecosystem has not reverted back to its former structure. Here we provide evidence of the transient nature of this ecosystem and its current return path towards benthic fish species domination.

Nitrogen (N) limits the productivity of many ecosystems worldwide, thereby restricting the ability of terrestrial ecosystems to offset the effects of rising atmospheric CO2 emissions naturally. Understanding input pathways of bioavailable N is therefore paramount for predicting carbon (C) storage on land, particularly in temperate and boreal forests. Paradigms of nutrient cycling and limitation posit that new N enters terrestrial ecosystems solely from the atmosphere. Here we show that bedrock comprises a hitherto overlooked source of ecologically available N to forests.

At AstraZeneca we are proactively addressing the problem of pharmaceuticals entering the environment as a result of our
manufacturing discharges (Nature 476, 265; 2011). (Correspondence)

Even as residents of Jaitapur in Ratnagiri district continue to oppose the proposed nuclear power plant, the Maharashtra government is mulling the idea of revising the compensation to the families affected by it.

For more than two decades, Huta Ram Baidya has led the Save Bagmati River campaign. An affable, octogenarian activist and Nepal’s first agricultural engineer, his views have been widely circulated in the country’s regional language press, radio, television and on websites. He tells Aditya Batra that the river’s extreme degradation bears testament to extreme cultural and environmental loss in the Kathmandu valley.

Read More - http://www.downtoearth.org.in/content/civilisational-loss

Khan Market in boulevard Delhi is said to be the most expensive real estate in India, maybe even in the world. But in this richest shopping destination, buyers do not want to pay for parking their vehicles. The shopkeepers’ association has taken the local city council to court, saying it has the right to free parking. In court, it ridiculed the connection between parking and car restraint—how can pricing of parking spaces bring down car usage in cities? The very idea was farfetched, said its lawyer to the judge. Standing in the court, I could see the judge was also bemused.

While international discussions began in earnest in 1992 with the creation of a United Nations (UN) convention on the topic,1 global climate change politics
has recently risen sharply in political importance, infusing diplomatic discussions well beyond the boundaries of the UN Framework Convention on Climate

The Supreme Court has temporarily stayed an order of the Madras High Court, asking resort owners near Mudumalai Tiger Reserve in Tamil Nadu to vacate the land. In April, the high court had given resort owners three months to hand over the land with them to the state to pave the way for an elephant corridor in the Nilgiri mountains. The corridor would connect Mudumalai to the Sathyamangalam forests in the east of the Segur plateau.