The World Bank has been widely criticized for funding numerous environmentally damaging projects around the globe. Pictured: Construction of the Sardar Sarovar Dam, a controversial World Bank-funded project on the River Narmada, India that flooded thousands of acres of land and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. (Media credit/International Rivers via Flickr)

Originally created to finance the rebuilding of Europe after World War II, the World Bank later took on a larger mandate to try to alleviate poverty around the world. Unfortunately, many of the Bank’s policies and practices in intervening years clashed with conservation priorities. But the more recent onslaught of global warming threats, along with greater overall public environmental awareness, has forced the World Bank to factor sustainability concerns into how it encourages development moving forward.

According to the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), a non-profit think tank, the World Bank has been widely criticized for funding a series of environmentally damaging projects in the 1980s, including the building of dams on the Narmada River in India, road building into the Brazilian Amazon and transmigration (re-settlement) efforts in Indonesia. “These projects have led to a variety of adverse impacts in borrower countries, including deforestation and displacement of indigenous peoples,” reports the group.

In response to the criticism, the World Bank adopted a set of policies and procedures in the late 1980s to better assess the potential adverse environmental impacts of its projects. The Bank further developed a series of polices to guide investment in such areas as forestry and energy. “For example, the bank’s forestry policy prohibits the institution from financing logging in primary tropical forests,” adds IPS.

Other highlights of the Bank’s first round of greening included the creation of a special unit to oversee environmentally and socially sustainable development, and the recruitment of staff with technical environmental credentials to supplement its professional core of economists. IPS reports that with these changes in place, the bank has been able to start developing a portfolio of environment-sector projects “ranging from support for national environmental agencies to investments in national parks.”

But an independent internal review of the World Bank’s sustainability impacts between 1990 and 2007 found that even these new sustainability-oriented policies fell flat. Researchers found that the bank’s private-sector funding arm, the International Finance Corporation, was still promoting the expansion of livestock herds, soybean fields and palm oil plantations—all which accelerated deforestation in the tropics, hastening the pace of climate change for the rest of us.

“They need to begin to see the inextricable link between sustaining environment and reducing poverty,” said Vinod Thomas, director of the World Bank group that performed the review. “It is clear now from the Amazon to India that if environmental sustainability is not raised as a priority, then all bets are off.”

The World Bank tried to address many of these concerns with the release of a beefed up Environment Strategy in 2001, but analysts remain critical of the organization’s performance and general commitment to sustainability. In June 2011 the World Bank will release a new Environment Strategy which it will use as a sustainability roadmap for its projects over the coming decade. The focus of the Bank’s sustainability work will be mitigating climate change through the promotion of clean energy technologies.

In the aftermath of the massive quake and resulting Tsunami that struck Japan late last week, certain game development studios in the region are beginning to go back to work, and the effects are clear.

Upcoming Sony racer Motorstorm: Apocalypse has been pushed back indefinitely from it’s March 17 release date in Japan (though UK and US release dates are still in question.) Also scheduled to release on the same day, Sega has pushed back the highly anticipated Yakuza: the End to an unknown release date.  Little known developer Irem has also canceled Disaster Report 4; which features the player investigating a destroyed city after a natural disaster.

Though the delays may seem sporadic, a closer look shows a very distinctive pattern. All three games feature destroyed cities, with Yakuza striking incredibly close to home, following the story of a zombie attack in the destroyed fictional city of Kamurocho, which is based off Tokyo. Japanese entertainment companies are undoubtedly pulling any media that has to do with destruction, or disasters in the wake of the horrific events.

Capcom has also delayed the upcoming DLC for Marvel VS Capcom 3, while Microsoft has canceled an upcoming Japanese press tour.

The mystery of the deformed frogs is a news story that pops up every now and then on the evening news or PBS “" supposedly, we like to be reminded every few months about how each of us is personally responsible for slowly but surely ruining the entire planet. Up until this point, scientists had proposed that the chemicals we were leeching into the environment and therefore into the frogs’ watery homes was interfering with their development, causing frogs to be born without limbs, with extra limbs, or other abnormalities.

While in pictures these malformed frogs were obviously eye catching for the environmentalist crowd, it turns out there’s actually a much more benign and biological explanation beyond all the fear mongering. The missing limbs and the extra limbs actually have two completely separate causes. While some scientists are still firmly entrenched in the “chemical cause” camp, biologists Stanley Sessions and Brandon Ballengee observed tadpoles in the wild for a few years, and noted that the tadpoles were actually being predated on by dragon fly nymphs.

The scientists observed back in their lab that the dragon fly nymphs would, more often than not, eat only parts of the tadpoles, usually just removing a limb. The tadpoles would then return back, and grow up, sans said limb. Despite missing parts of their bodies, many of the tadpoles were still able to grow up, metamorphosizing into frogs, who managed to live quite a long time.

While frogs with missing limbs have a rather mundane explanation, the frogs with extra limbs have a much more exotic explanation. Sessions established that the frogs had been infested by small parasitic flatworms called Riberoria trematodes. These works burrowed into the rapidly developing tadpoles and actually rearranged the cellular structure of the frogs as they were developing, resulting in their leg precursor cells to actually spawn multiple limbs.

Of course, the fact that this problem turned out not to be our fault doesn’t mean we’re off the hook. Pollution is still a problem, even if its effects aren’t as obvious as a three-legged frog.

In my college days I used to walk from my North End apartment to the Emerson College campus, which, for the most part stretches around the corner of Boylston and Tremont, just south of Boston Common.

Each time I made that walk, I was startled by a wondrous juxtaposition. From the century-old colonial architecture scattered throughout the city, to the tiny cobbled stone roadways that take one from Quincy Market to Little Italy, a stroll through Boston can truly seem like a trip to our simpler, storied past.

That is with one notable and unfortunate exception: Boston City Hall.

This monstrosity in architecture is in the heart of Boston proper at the Government Center Plaza, just a stones throw away from Fanuel Hall. The building is nine-level, horizontally-oriented brutalist design ( by Kallmann McKinnell & Knowles). It is a rectangle, I guess, but is an inverted pyramid in elevation.

It is doubtful a tourist would last 10 minutes in the Hub, without coming face-to-face with this albatross that was planted in some of city’s most treasured real estate more than 40 years ago. One cannot help but wonder: How is it possible that city officials allowed this to happen? Exactly how potent was the LSD that was evidently handed out at planning meetings in the early-1960s when this attempt to merge “Old and New Boston” first started.

Ugliness can be interpreted in countless different ways, but according to a recent report by VirtualTourist.com, the planet is starting to reach a consensus on at least one thing: no building on Earth is less attractive than Boston City Hall.

Virtual Tourist observed that the building gets routinely criticized for “its dreary faƒ§ade” and “incongruity with the rest of the city’s more genteel architecture.” They listed City Hall as one, in their top ten list of the “Worlds Ugliest Building.”

This is not the first such dishonor for the building. In 2004 the Project for Public Spaces identified it as the worst single public plaza worldwide, out of hundreds of contenders.

Here is the rest of Virtual Tourists list of the World’s Ugliest Buildings.

2. Montparnasse Tower; Paris, France
3. LuckyShoe Monument; Tuuri, Finland
4. Metropolitan Cathedral; Liverpool, England
5. Port Authority Bus Terminal; New York City, New York
6. Torres de Colon; Madrid, Spain
7. Liechtenstein Museum of Fine Arts; Vaduz, Liechtenstein
8. Scottish Parliament Building; Edinburgh, Scotland
9. Birmingham Central Library; Birmingham, England
10. Peter the Great Statue; Moscow, Russia

(Photo Credit: Kjetil Ree (Creative Commons Attribution Sharealike 3.0)