LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Work is to start on a new global standard for measuring food loss and waste, which experts hope will help reduce the significant amount of food that does not get eaten because it is spoiled or thrown away.

The World Resources Institute (WRI) said on Monday it would bring together representatives from academia, the private sector, government and civil society groups to develop an international “Food Loss and Waste Protocol”. The first version is due to be ready by mid- to late-2015.

The levels of gases in the atmosphere that drive global warming increased to a record high in 2012.

Global climate change and pollution from the use of fossil fuels killed nearly 5 million people around the world in 2010, according to a report released earlier this year by climate change advocacy group DARA. By 2030, this figure will rise to nearly 6 million deaths, the group’s second annual climate vulnerability monitor estimates. Total global costs, which were estimated at more than $600 billion in 2010, are expected to rise to $4.35 trillion by 2030.

  WORCESTER, England — Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new commonplace.

Emerging diseases are in the news again. Scary viruses are making themselves noticed and felt. There’s been a lot of that during the past several months — West Nile fever kills 17 people in the Dallas area, three tourists succumb to hantavirus after visiting Yosemite National Park, an Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo claims 33 lives. A separate Ebola outbreak, across the border in Uganda, registers a death toll of 17.