http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/09/world/asia/09gated.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

By SOMINI SENGUPTA
Published: June 9, 2008GURGAON, India--- When the scorch of summer hit this north Indian boomtown, and the municipal water supply worked only a few hours each day, inside a high-rise tower called Hamilton Court, Jaya Chand could turn on her kitchen tap around the clock, and water would gush out.

The same was true when the electricity went out in the city, which it did on average for 12 hours a day, something that once prompted residents elsewhere in Gurgaon to storm the local power office. All the while, the Chands' flat screen television glowed, the air-conditioners hummed, and the elevators cruised up and down Hamilton Court's 25 floors.

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India has always had its upper classes, as well as legions of the world's very poor. But today a landscape dotted with Hamilton Courts, pressed up against the slums that serve them, has underscored more than ever the stark gulf between those worlds, raising uncomfortable questions for a democratically elected government about whether India can enable all its citizens to scale the golden ladders of the new economy.

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Gurgaon, a largely privately developed city and a metonym for Indian ambition, has seen a building frenzy to satisfy people like the Chands. The city's population has nearly doubled in the last six years, to 1.5 million. The skyline is dotted with scaffolds. Glass towers house companies like American Express and Accenture. Not far from Hamilton Court, Burberry and BMW have set up shop.

State services, meanwhile, have barely kept pace. The city has neither enough water nor electricity for the population. There is no sewage treatment plant yet; construction is scheduled to begin this year.

India has long lived with such inequities, and though a Maoist rebellion is building in the countryside, the nation has for the most part skirted social upheaval through a critical safety valve: giving the poor their chance to vent at the ballot box. Indeed, four years ago, voters threw out the incumbent government, with its "India Shining" slogan, because it was perceived to have neglected the poor.

PORT MORESBY, 8 June 2008 (IRIN) - The 1,500 residents of Carteret Island, an atoll of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, are fast becoming the world's first climate change refugees.

Sea levels around the atoll have risen 10cm in the past 20 years, inundating plantations, and the situation is deteriorating, islanders told IRIN, saying they urgently need assistance to be relocated to higher ground.

"Food gardens and coconut groves have been destroyed and children are going to school hungry," Ursula Rakova, chief executive officer of Tulele Peisa, a local NGO advocating for the rights of islanders, told IRIN when asked about the rising sea levels on Carteret Island.

Many of the island's inhabitants have run out of food and their staple, coconuts, are being wiped out as the sea level rises.

"It is extremely difficult now for food crops to grow on the atolls. Salt water seeps through the land making it impossible for food to grow," Rakova said. "Breadfruit is seasonal and not as plentiful as it was 30 years ago and fruits are getting smaller in size ... bananas struggle to grow in the salt-inundated land."

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LAKE CHAD, 7 June 2008 (IRIN) - The UN Secretary-General's Special Adviser on conflict, Jan Egeland, is travelling in the Sahel this week to draw attention to a region the UN says is experiencing the worst effects of climate change in the world. He is sharing his thoughts and experiences every day with IRIN. This is the fifth and final instalment, this time from Lake Chad, Niger.

When I embarked on this mission I think there were those who asked why a Special Adviser on Conflict Prevention should go on a trip to see climate change and environmental disasters. Well, this trip has convinced me that there is a very clear link between climate induced resource competition and conflict, and I will be using what I have seen here to convince sceptics ahead of the Copenhagen meeting in 2009.

Today we visited what was once Lake Chad in eastern Niger, which as recently as the 1960s covered a total 25,000 sq km, of which 4,000 sq km were inside Niger. Since the droughts that have been recurrent since the 1970s the lake has now has shrunk to nothing inside Niger.

This is a very dramatic environmental crisis, with enormous consequences for hundreds of thousands of people. For me the visit was epitomised by an old customs boat which is now stranded in the middle of the desert, a desert covered in sea shells. Next to the boat I visited an old fishing village where the fishermen no longer have a lake to fish in and have instead tried to make it as farmers harvesting meagre crops of millet and beans to keep their families alive.

It took us five hours to get to Lake Chad - three hours of air time and two hours on invisible desert roads, but it was worth it because we were there in the presence of the Ambassadors to Niger from the US, France, Germany, Denmark, Egypt and the European Community and we saw together both the scale of the problem, and that there is a feasible solution to it.

There is now a Lake Chad Basin Commission consisting of all the countries around Lake Chad - Chad, Cameroon, Niger, Central African Republic and Nigeria. These countries in a recent summit agreed to study whether water can be brought from one of the abundant Congolese rivers to the River Chari, which is now the only remaining source of water for Lake Chad.

For the full article, please visit: http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=78626