According to a copy of the final text obtained by Reuters, the 16 nations of the East Asia Summit "commit to the common goal of stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations in the long run, at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Japanese Prime Minister Yasuo Fukuda pledged 200 billion yen ($1.83 billion) in loans over the next five years for environmental projects in Asia, officials said on Wednesday.

The projects include sewage disposal and sulphur dioxide scrubbing from power plant smoke stacks.

But it cautioned that emissions had risen since 2000 in many nations -- especially in former Soviet bloc countries where economies were picking up after the collapse of smokestack industries in the early 1990s.

The Voluntary Carbon Standard (VCS), one of several sets of international guidelines introduced recently, aims to certify the validity of voluntary offsets, or VERs, bought by consumers and corporations seeking to reduce their planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions, or 'carbon footprint'.

Lawford Palani, Chikwawa district commissioner, told Reuters that about 20 villages have been destroyed following persistent rains and hailstorms in the area, about 50 kilometers west of the country's commercial capital Blantyre.

OSLO (Reuters) - Governments have promised to try to avert "dangerous" climate change expected to bring about rising seas, droughts and floods, but have yet to agree on a common definition of where the danger starts.

"Virtually all electricity by 2020 (must be) from low carbon sources," Brown told a meeting of environmental activists and businessmen in London.

Commission Vice President Margot Wallstrom said the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and the International Maritime Organization should "develop a much more ambitious policy for climate change."

Recycling the heat that spews from industrial smokestacks may be one of the biggest opportunities for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, yet not many climate-savvy entrepreneurs are aware of it. When it comes to energy conservation, "[b]y and large, the world ignores the biggest, single most cost-effective, most profitable thing to do, which is recycle the energy that we’re wasting,"says Thomas Casten, chairman of the Illinois-based company Recycled Energy Development (RED).

The latest report on the state of global warming from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ((IPCC) warns that without action soon climate change may cause abrupt and irreversible impacts.

(Glaciers, like those on Greenland, may experience rapid meltdown and cause sea levels to rise. Once gone glaciers won’t freeze up again. Droughts similar to that now being experienced in the southeast US may be more frequent and perhaps permanent. Populations without water to support them will have to move, never to return.)