In 2019, the illegal wildlife trade reached staggering levels. Pangolin scales and ivory were being trafficked in massive quantities from Africa to Asia, exposing a network of crime syndicates operating at an industrial scale. The sheer volume of these shipments marked a disturbing milestone, one that revealed the global reach …
MUD IS a versatile building material that has been used to make some extraordinary architectural marvels -- from 1,000-year-old ksars (forts) in Morocco and 6,000-year-old arches, vaults and domes in the Nile Valley to multi-storeyed houses of adobe, sun-baked bricks of mud and straw, which is the traditional building material …
IN 1988 the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) allotted 2.1 ha of land in Nand Nagri in east Delhi to the Mud Village Society (MVS) to build a model colony of environment-friendly mud-houses. However, the project seems to have run into rough weather and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) has …
AMIT MITRA A LARGE number of the over 700 mud houses built by the Karnataka Housing Board (KHB) at Yelahanka near Bangalore are showing signs of falling apart. This is a major setback to a project that described by V Suresh, a HUDCO director who was then KHB chairman, once …
MUD IS no longer inferior. As a building material, it can be strengthened and stabilised to function as a viable alternative to concrete and steel. Traditional mud-building methods include mixing specified quantities of rice husk, cow dung or lime with raw earth. One of the oldest techniques is the wattle- …
ARCHITECTS hoped to establish mud as a viable building medium when they set out to build the country's first major environmentally-sound building. The mud headquarters in Delhi of Development Alternatives (DA) headquarters was built to prove a point, recalls Shrashtant Patara, a DA architect. "It was one of the first …
S GOPIKRISHNA WARRIER IN 1976, the biogas lab of the Centre for the Application of Science and Technology to Rural Areas (ASTRA) was constructed on the Indian Institute of Science (IIS) campus in Bangalore with unique building blocks. They were not conventional kiln-fired bricks but stabilised mud blocks. Fourteen years …
CHINA came of commercial space age with the launch of the Australian telecommunications satellite, Optus B1. This was their second attempt at launching the satellite. The first, in March, failed as a short circuit cut off fuel flow to the rocket engines. China has for years been trying to break …
ABOUT 10 million ha of trees have been planted as part of a 'Green Wall' scheme, to address the problem of desertification, in North China. By the end of the century, the government plans to complete construction of the 7,000 km 'Green Wall' which stretches from eastern inner Mongolia to …
IN TIBET, solar energy is being used increasingly to heat homes, cook food, run television sets, milk cows, shear sheep and, of course, provide light. Tibet gets 3,000 hours of sunshine each year, compared with New Delhi, which gets 2,525 hours annually. In an area slightly in excess of one …
China, this fortnight, detonated its biggest nuclear test ever. The explosion, about 70 times as powerful as the one at Hiroshima, is seen as a sign of China's nuclear prowess. And also as a slight to the US which has been putting India under the cloud for its missile programme. …
In the past decade there has been extensive research into tropical intraseasonal variability, one of the major components of the low frequency variability of the general atmospheric circulation. This paper briefly reviews the state-of-the-art in this research area: the nature of the Madden-Julian Oscillation, its relation to monsoonal and extratropical …
The UN sponsored discussions to prepare a global convention on climate began in February in USA. The aim is to prepare a legally binding convention to curb gaseous emissions leading to a much feared climate destabilisation. This convention is being seen as the world's greatest commitment to the environment and …
The idea that developing countries like India and China must share the blame for heating up the earth and destablising its climate, as espoused in a recent study published in the United States by the WRI in collaboration with the UN, is an excellent example of environmental colonialism. The report …
Records of hemispheric average temperatures from land regions for the past 100 years provide crucial input to the debate over global warming. Despite careful use of the basic station data in some of these compilations of hemispheric temperature, there have been suggestions that a proportion of the 0.5
Very different global rules are needed for human wellbeing Averting climate change does not need emission reduction pledges, timetables and a common legal framework. Climate governance cannot be considered only in terms of environmental damage because it is now a part of the economic debate around the competition for scarce …
India’s solar power policy is now entering round two. And there is much that needs to be reviewed and reworked as the business of solar energy has seen massive turbulence in India as well as globally. In the first phase (2010 to 2013) of the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission …
For growing economies the stress has to be on patterns of natural resource use and not on the status of natural resources; that is, dealing with the causes rather than the symptoms of the problem of climate change. The time has come for rapidly growing Asia to distinguish between the …
The theme of this years’ World Environment Day is lifestyles and an opportunity to reflect on the central issue of global environmentalism - how a continually growing economic system can fit within a finite ecological system. In an interdependent world the patterns, trends and drivers of global change are at …
@Bh_Chandra President Obama yesterday gave the most important speech on climate change in his tenure so far. In the words of Al Gore, it was the best “by any president ever”. It is a different matter that all the big cable news operators in the US chose to ignore this …
Redistribution has been kept out of the agenda of the United Nations, and a new global agenda, goals and rules to share responsibility and prosperity can lead to a new world Mukul Sanwal[1] There is an ongoing debate within the United Nations whether a sustainable development and a security lens …
