This week's highlights

• Climate change
  If you lived on a small island, you are likely to be a lot more nervous about rising sea-levels than if you lived a long way inland. Certainly the 36 members of the Alliance of Small Island States are acutely aware of the dangers they will be facing if global warming is not taken seriously. The Alliance is proposing a legally-binding protocol that requires industrialised countries to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 20% from 1990 levels by the year 2005.

  This is far from unreasonable. Scientists in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are saying that greenhouse gas emissions must be reduced by at least 60% to stabilise the world's climate - and we all know that the industrialised countries are the chief culprits. Just Europe (West and East) emits over a third of the planet's greenhouse gases: more than South America, Africa and Asia put together - even including China.

  EarthAction reports on the Berlin Climate Summit,] where global warming and other climate change issues are currently being debated (warmly, no doubt) - and suggests questions to ask our own governments.

  For example:
  

  'Given that transport is one of the sectors making the largest contribution to carbon dioxide emissions, what steps is the government planning to encourage use of public transport and discourage use of private automobiles?'

  Another of our partners, the [Transport Research Laboratory, is an organisation that looks at how transport systems can be developed in less environmentally-damaging ways.

• Broadcasting on migration and racism
  Worth checking out this week are a whole set of radio and TV programmes - coincidentally? - on (UK) radio and TV on migration and on racism. We've linked some of them back to our Expert Overview on migrants and refugees, building up this picture still further.

  Keep writing in!

  
  Anuradha Vittachi
  

  Editor

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