On 6 February, 2023 Southern Turkey and the adjoining areas in Syria were hit by a 7.8 magnitude earthquake followed by several aftershocks. The tremors have flattened buildings and destroyed roads and other infrastructure. At least 35,000 casualties (UPDATE) have occurred across Turkey and Syria, with the vast majority being in the former nation. A news report cited the Turkish environment minister saying that 24,921 buildings across the region had collapsed. What...
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PS Vijayshankar, an expert on sustainable farming and water resource management, interviewed by Shreehari Paliath (India Spend)
-India Spend India's transition to sustainable farming has to be calibrated and orchestrated well, drawing lessons from the successes of India's Green Revolution and the recent crisis in Sri Lanka, says sustainable farming expert P.S. Vijayshankar Bengaluru: The production-centric intensive agriculture brought about by India's Green Revolution in the 1960s, using high-yielding seeds, fertilisers and high levels of groundwater utilisation, helped India achieve food self-sufficiency by the 1970s, but has created a...
More »Pioneering thoughts -Ramachandra Guha
-The Telegraph Radhakamal Mukerjee: an ecological pioneer In 1922, a professor at Lucknow University named Radhakamal Mukerjee published a book called Principles of Comparative Economics. Reading the book one hundred years later, I was struck by the attention it paid to the impact of the natural environment on the social and economic life of Indian villages. Mukerjee was perhaps the first Indian scholar to recognise the vital importance of common property resources...
More »India has reason to celebrate the increase in its Ramsar sites, but it is not enough to conserve its existing wetlands -Shahzada Iqbal and Orus Ilyas
-TheLeaflet.in As India celebrates an increase in its total number of Ramsar sites to 75, this brings into sharp relief the deteriorating state of natural wetlands across the country, especially in urban areas. —– Why were wetlands in the news recently? EVERYONE is careful about consuming clean and pure water to protect their kidneys from malfunctioning. But what about the earth’s kidneys, the wetlands? According to the Press Information Bureau, on August 13, India...
More »Latest wetland mapping data underscores the need to step up conservation action -Ritesh Kumar
-India.Mongabay.com * India’s 2022 Wetlands Change Atlas mapped 231,195 wetlands, covering 4.86 percent of the country’s geographical area. The Atlas concluded that the number and extent of these wetlands have increased during the 2006/7-2017/18 period. * Given that mapping wetlands is a complex task, 2022 Atlas likely presents the lower bound of the actual wetland extent in the country and the overall number is higher than what is recorded. * It is high...
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