-Down to Earth The food most associated with Biodiversity Loss also tends to also be connected to unhealthy diets across the globe As the global population has doubled to 7.8 billion in about 50 years, industrial agriculture has increased the output from fields and farms to feed humanity. One of the negative outcomes of this transformation has been the extreme simplification of ecological systems, with complex multi-functional landscapes converted to vast swaths...

-Down to Earth The region, with eight per cent of India’s total geographical area, has 25 per cent of India’s forest cover India’s northeastern region — comprising Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura — is a unique biodiversity hotspot. The region, however, faces many environmental problems. Successive Indian forest surveys in 2015, 2017 and 2019 reported net deforestation of 628, 630 and 765 square kilometres in the region respectively. This...

-Down to Earth Water bodies have become even more critical in current times when cities are facing the challenge of rapid, unplanned urbanisation Lakes and wetlands are an important part of urban ecosystem. They perform significant environmental, social and economic functions — from being a source of drinking water and recharging groundwater to supporting biodiversity and providing livelihoods. Their role becomes even more critical in the present context, when cities are facing the...

-Vikalp.ind.in During the late 1950s when villages near the Kyasanur Forest in Karnataka started to become crowded, farmers began to clear the forest to find new land for agriculture as well as for construction of houses and roads. This brought them to close contact with the primates in the forest. When Kyasanur Forest Disease (KFD) outbreak took place among monkeys, the virus did not take much time to jump species and...

-The Hindu Business Line Kochi (Kerala): In a significant attempt to protect coastal wetlands in the wake of the climate crisis, a mobile app has been developed to collect the complete datasets on smaller wetlands across the coastal region of the country. The app was developed by the Space Applications Centre (SAC) of the ISRO upon the request of the Central Marine Fisheries Research Institute (CMFRI) in line with a memorandum of...