Category: News & Announcement

I attended one of three major biodiversity planning meetings this February, originally scheduled for China, but relocated to Rome. The day I arrived, there were three cases of the coronavirus COVID-19 in northern Italy. Two days later there were 21, and five days later there were 229. I left the fifth day, without even attending the primary workshop. A colleague teased me, and I worried that I had over-reacted. From my early training in public health, I suspected this was not just a distant wave, but an unstoppable tsunami that…

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As the municipal waste disposal system came to a virtual halt in several areas of the city during the ongoing lockdown, environmental experts voiced concern, calling it a ‘recipe for disaster’ amid the coronavirus health crisis.“We are simply inviting a disaster if we stop municipal waste disposal in Karachi during an epidemic, as resultantly, issues related to public health will worsen,” pointed out National Forum for Environment and Health president Naeem Qureshi in a statement on Monday.He stressed that waste disposal should not be stopped in a city like Karachi,…

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This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. KARACHI, Pakistan, July 10— Once Karachi was the cleanest city in the East, with tidy streets. At midday the British drove ‐to beach huts for a swim in the cool Arabian Sea. The…

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More than 20 cities across mainland China have been overloaded with medical waste, with Wuhan, the centre of the Covid-19 outbreak, producing up to six times more medical waste than usual, authorities said. Medical waste treatment facilities in 28 other cities are working at full load, the Ministry of Ecology and Environment told a press conference on Wednesday, without specifying what the other cities were. Hospitals in Wuhan, home to 11 million people and 80 per cent of those who died from Covid-19, produced more than 240 tonnes of medical…

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Singapore — Pakistan has cut its April LNG cargo deliveries as the country’s coronavirus lockdown eats into domestic natural gas consumption, while Bangladesh could be the next country in South Asia to push back on LNG shipments after it introduced a lockdown last week. Nationwide closures now pose major risks to South Asia’s LNG imports after a 21-day shutdown prompted Indian gas companies and ports to make force majeure declarations last week, raising concerns about surplus cargoes being dumped on the spot market. Pakistan has long-term contracts for the import of…

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