Residents of Islampur, a remote village in the northern Bangladeshi district of Naogaon, were stunned one night last summer when the darkness was suddenly illuminated by electric lights coming from a village home. Why the surprise? The community has no connection to the country’s power grid. The owner of the house, Rafiqul Islam, is one of around 15 million Bangladeshis whose homes are now powered by solar home systems, or SHS, under a government scheme to provide clean power to communities with no access to grid ele...

Man-made flood protections, not climate change, are the main culprit in sea-level rise in southwest Bangladesh, according to new research conducted for the U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research. The report from a team of scientists at Vanderbilt University is the first part in a wide-ranging, $7.5 million analysis of environmental stress and human migration scenarios in the low-lying South Asian nation. Published this week in Nature Climate Change, the initial study finds that embankments constructed since the 1960s are primarily t...

Amid reports that the US may curb President Barack Obama’s early morning schedule during his visit to Delhi later this month, air pollution monitoring agencies said the levels of ‘PM2.5’ or fine, respirable particles that get lodged in the lungs are likely to be in the range of moderate to high in the period while he’s here. Air quality, because of the high pollution in the city, is routinely rated by the US embassy pollution monitor as “poor” — in other words, unhealthy. It’s in that context there is speculation that the US authorities here could seek to curtail Obama’s “outdoor activities” during his visit.