Order of the National Green Tribunal in the matter of In Re: News Item titled "Are missing palm trees causing more lighting deaths in Bihar appearing in ‘The Times of India’ dated 29.05.2025". The original application was registered suo-motu based on the news item titled "Are missing palm trees causing …
Almora in Uttranchal is facing an acute water crisis, which has been exacerbated by rapid, unplanned urban growth and the mismanagement of vital natural resources that has led to the drying up of natural sources of water. This summer, the Kosi river, one of the major sources of drinking water, …
Threatened hardwood from Southeast Asia is landing up as flooring in the us with illegal trade going unchecked, says a report of the Washington-based Environmental Investigation Agency (eia). us home-improvement stores are selling flooring made of merbau, a deep, luxurious redwood found mostly in Indonesia and Southeast Asia, according to …
Arney Mising, Arney Hazong, and Angonibari are among the over forty villages in Assam's Dhemaji district that have dropped off the map. The ravaging waters of the Brahmaputra and its tributaries have consumed them. Several hundred other villages in this flood-prone district are threatened with a similar misfortune. The woes …
Two recent studies conducted in the Amazon basin show deforestation increases malaria risk. In the first, researchers from Peru and the US found the population of Anopheles darlingi the major malaria vector in the Amazon basin was 200 times higher and frequency of biting 278 times higher in deforested locations …
For over a decade, Orissa has been teetering from one extreme weather condition to another: from heatwaves to cyclones, drought to floods. The state has been declared disaster-affected for 95 of the last 105 years. Why is this happening? Is it the result of global warming and climate change? Richard …
In the Himalayas, subsistence largely depends upon resources derived from natural forests due to the free and easy access to these and simplicity in their use. Sikkim has 43% of its total geographical area under forest cover, of which 34% is under dense forests. The burgeoning human population and family …
The case of the effort to build a small dam in Bhulaveda in Paschim Midnapur district of West Bengal shows that in struggles between government agencies and local self-government, the losers are often the villagers themselves.
Land degradation is as a result of broad range of scales and factors, which include biophysical, climatic, demographic and socio-economic. The aim of this paper was to provide an analysis of wetland utilisation, ecosystem degradation and their effect on the Lake Victoria (Kenya) ecosystem. This involved analysis of socioeconomic and …
As disturbed forests increase in protected areas in the tropics there is a clear need to assess their conservation values through studies of their vegetation and animal communities. However, Thai protected area managers lack data on how ecosystems respond after human disturbances. It was therefore the aim of this research …
Sloth bear (Melursus ursinus) is one of the widely distributed large mammals in India. At the same time, the sloth bear has suffered as much as other large mammals from human impacts on forested areas. The North Bilaspur Forest Division, Chhattisgarh, which an un-protected area, harbours a large number of …
Secondary succession in tropical areas following recent human disturbances is becoming more common. This is particularly evident in regions of tropical rainforests, long valued by conservationists for their remarkable species diversity. In Southeast Asia, as in the neotropics, central Africa and South Asia, tropical forests have been logged for timber, …
A World Wide Fund for Nature's (wwf) study has estimated that every day an equivalent of 270,000 trees are flushed or thrown away in the form of tissue papers. The report compared the record of the five largest European tissue producers
How many people does it take to get a government logging company to lay off 27,000 hectares? In Europe, three. For that is the number of Finnish herders who complained to the un Human Rights Commission about logging by Metasahallitus, the government's logging company, in a key reindeer pasture. The …
Brazilian police recently arrested a gang of 35 people who forged thousands of logging permits and sold them to transport millions of dollars worth of hardwood timber in the Amazon. This operation is the fifth such operation since 2003. Brazil's government claims that checks on illegal logging and tighter law …
The government of Orissa lifted a 1992 ban on felling of trees in 11 of its 50 forest divisions in September this year. "The move was not based on any scientific assessment. The forest department (fd) has not analysed the impact of the ban,' says B B Pandey of the …
Ground truthsWheeling-dealing for CDM benefits Close to Godhra town in Gujarat is a factory of the Gujarat Fluorochemicals Limited (gfl). The mammoth factory has a unique claim to national, and global, fame: it is India's first project to be approved under the Clean Development Mechanism (cdm). It has successfully met …
a recent Supreme Court (sc) order on monetary compensation for a forest that is cut for non-forest purposes has raised more questions than it answers. Is the Central fund that an earlier order wanted set up to collect this money even constitutionally acceptable? What are the custodial arrangements to set …
