Every culture has its own traditions surrounding the birth of a child. While we celebrate newborn girls by sending pink dresses and dolls, in the village of Piplantri in Rajasthan, India, they celebrate by planting 111 trees. That’s right, every time a little girl is born in Piplantri, 111 trees are planted in her honor! In most Indian villages, the birth of a daughter ...

United Nations (UN) Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, has commended Thursday’s Joint Presidential Statement on climate change by the leaders of the People’s Republic of China and the United States announcing that both countries will sign the Paris Agreement at a special ceremony at the United Nations on 22 April, the first day the Agreement is open for signature. He further welcomed ...

Health and environment experts want governments at all levels to allocate more resources to help cushion the effect of extreme weather condition in the country predicted by the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NIMET). NIMET had recently in its annual rainfall prediction told Nigerians to get ready for more hot days, warm nights and heat waves this year. The experts believe that the ...

Zaha Hadid, the Iraqi-born British architect was the first woman to be awarded the Pritzker Prize – architecture’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize – in 2004. She died on Thursday morning in Miami, aged 65. In the course of her outstanding career, her use of unusual shapes became apparent in early competition proposals for The Peak terminus in Hong Kong ...

British architect Zaha Hadid has died aged 65, following a sudden heart attack. Ms. Hadid, the designer of buildings including the London Olympic Aquatic Centre and the MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Arts, suffered a heart attack on Thursday morning while being treated for bronchitis at a Miami hospital. A statement released by her office said: “It is with great sadness that Zaha Hadid Architects have confirmed that ...

US designers Yitan Sun and Jianshi Wu have proposed transforming Manhattan‘s Central Park into a sunken landscape encircled by a below-grade megastructure with office, housing, retail and cultural space. Titled “New York Horizon,” the project won first place in the eVolo Skyscraper Competition, which invites architects and designers to conceive futuristic towers. The annual ideas contest began in 2006. Sun and Wu have proposed ...

The Environmental Rights Action/Friends of the Earth Nigeria (ERA/FoEN), member organisations of Friends of the Earth International (FoEI) and community-based groups from the Niger Delta have called on the Nigerian government to match talk with action in the implementation of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Assessment on Ogoniland. At a recent meeting on the non-implementation of the UNEP assessment ...

Ako Amadi, Head of Community Conservation and Development Initiatives (CCDI), in a recent chat with Augustina Ogbonna-Armstrong, sheds some light on the relationship between deforestation and harmattan, a dry and dusty north-easterly trade wind which blows from the Sahara Desert over the West African subcontinent into the Gulf of Guinea between the end of November and the middle of March. ...

Relevant government agencies have been urged to adopt policies aimed at restoring the coastal marine ecosystem in order to check possible reduction in fishing yield caused by the effects of El Nino, a phenomenon that brings about changes in the atmospheric system. Associate Professor of Environmental Planning and HOD, Department of Geography, Nasarawa State University in Keffi, Dr Nasiru Idris, who made ...

The Nigerian Textile Manufacturers Association (NTMA) has expressed its support for ‎the environmental release and commercialisation of genetically modified Bt Cotton for Nigerian farmers. The GM cotton is said to be resistant to pests’ invasion. A position paper signed by the NTMA Acting Director-General, Hamma Kwajaffa, noted that while the Nigerian textile industry is a strategic non-oil sector and the largest ...