-PTI New Delhi: The harvest-ready kharif crops of this year are in good condition and have not been affected by recent heavy rains in some parts of the country, Agriculture Secretary Shobhana K Pattanayak said today. The minor losses due to rains in the isolated pockets was factored in during the first projection made last month with respect to total kharif (summer) foodgrains output for the 2017-18 crop year (July-June), he said. According...

-IndiaClimateDialogue.net In north Bihar, where floods devastate standing crops with increasing regularity in an era of climate change, a marginalised community is fighting all odds to protect an indigenous flood-resistant variety of rice. Sahorwa village is caught between the embankments of two major rivers in north Bihar. Between the Kosi river’s western embankment and Kamla Balan river’s eastern embankment, this village of 110 Musahar families remains flooded for seven to eight months...

-The Telegraph New Delhi: An independent academic study has found India's emissions of methane, a major greenhouse gas that drives global warming, are consistent with the government's estimates and have shown little growth over the past five years. The study has found that India's average emissions of methane emissions - mainly from paddy fields and cows, among other sources - were about 22 trillion grams per year between 2010 and 2015, consistent...

-Scroll.in Notified in September, the rules will facilitate the development of wetlands as real estate, industrial sites and garbage dump After ignoring repeated directions from the Supreme Court to notify stricter rules to protect the country’s wetlands, the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has gone and done just the opposite. On September 26, it published the Wetlands (Conservation & Management) Rules, 2017 – replacing the older rules dating back to...

-IANS With the central and state governments, and even the National Green Tribunal (NGT), coming down heavily on stubble-burning in Punjab and Haryana, farmers in both the states say they have few options available to avoid burning the crop residue. With a bumper paddy crop expected in the two agrarian states this kharif season -- likely in excess of 22.5 million tonnes -- the crop residue that will be burnt by farmers...