-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...
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We Need to Rethink our Economics to Avoid Future Epidemics -Debanjana Dey & Taposik Banerjee
-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...
More »Planting forests no panacea for the climate crisis: IPCC -Tarun Gopalakrishnan
-Down to Earth The IPCC’s Special Report on Climate Change and Land says land-based carbon sinks are not limitless The carbon cycle is classically described in terms of ‘sources’ and ‘sinks’ of emissions. The electricity sector, which converts fossil fuels into light and heat, is a source (as are most human activities since the dawn of the industrial age). Identifying sinks is trickier. We know that, as a general principle, more forest cover...
More »Land and climate change, explained: What the new IPCC report says, why it matters -Amitabh Sinha
-The Indian Express This is the first time that the IPCC, whose job it is to assess already-published scientific literature to update our knowledge of climate change science, has focused its attention solely on the land sector. Pune: A new report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released Thursday presents the most recent evidence on how the different uses of land — forests, agriculture, urbanisation — are affecting and...
More »India has 20 river basins, all over-exploited -Sushmita Sengupta & Rashmi Verma
-Down to Earth Over 60 years after the country got its first plan to rejuvenate the rivers, not a single basin has been spared from overexploitation All the 20 river basins of the country share the story of the Cauvery: how human interference has changed every river’s form and flow pattern over the past few decades. Water in the country’s three major rivers — the Indus, the Brahmaputra and the Ganga — has...
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