-India Water Portal Gender-transformative approaches are needed for climate adaptation, to lessen the stresses that force people to migrate. A crowd of people jostling by the ticket counter at Jhansi railway station in Uttar Pradesh; men and women, some with families in tow, boarding trains to Delhi, Lucknow, Mumbai and other big cities. These are common sights during the summer months at Jhansi, a major town and railway junction. People from rural...

-The Indian Express The environment ministry needs to be clear about its role — its mandate is to create and sustain a regulatory framework that prevents the plunder of our natural resources, not actively accelerate the pace of environmental devastation. The draft Environmental impact assessment (EIA) notification 2020 proposed by the Ministry of Environment, Forest and climate change has met with massive opposition. As the (hard-won) extended public consultation period draws to...

-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...

The Indian Express The BJP-NDA members, while underlining that environment is an important issue, are learnt to have suggested that the committee can discuss the final draft once it is released. The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Science and Technology, Environment, Forests and climate change began discussing the draft Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) 2020 notification despite objections raised by some BJP-NDA members at a meeting on Friday. The ruling alliance members, it is...

-The Indian Express Heatwaves, floods, droughts: Every decade between 1951-2015 had 7.4 warmer days and 3.1 warmer nights than the annual averages for daily maximum and nightly minimum respectively. The first ‘Assessment of climate change over Indian Region’, released by the Ministry of Earth Sciences recently, warns of tropical cyclones, thunderstorms, heat waves, floods and droughts in India unless mitigation measures are adopted soon. The projections are for the decades leading to...