Millions of people in up to five West African countries will face a food crisis in early 2012 if early warning systems are ignored, the United Nations and aid officials say.

The UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), together with the World Food Programme (WFP) and British charity Oxfam, said this week that failed harvests and low food reserves in the Sahel, and particularly the countries of Chad, Mauritania, Burkina Faso and Mali, would affect up to 11 million people.

Dec. 1 (Bloomberg) -- Solar technologies such as photovoltaic panels, water heaters and power stations built with mirrors could provide a third of the world’s energy by 2060 if politicians commit to limiting climate change, the International Energy Agency said.

Energy from the sun could play a key role in de-carbonizing the global economy alongside improvements in efficiency and imposing costs on greenhouse-gas emitters, the agency said in a report today.

Sustainability has not only become a science in the past 25 years, but it is one that continues to be fast-growing with widespread international collaboration, broad disciplinary composition and wide geographic distribution, according to new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory and Indiana University.

20 September 2011 – Warning that a lack of access to affordable and clean energy is jeopardizing the achievement of the global targets to combat poverty and disease, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon today launched a major new initiative to make sustainable energy universally available.