More than a fifth of the world's migrating species are at risk of going extinct as a result of climate change and human encroachment, according to this report by the United Nations. Migratory species globally are facing critical challenges, with nearly half in decline and over 20 per cent threatened …
WE TEND to forget that Steven Spielberg's celluloid extravaganza Jurassic Park was inspired by a book of the same name by Michael Crichton. In the novel, when Dodgson of the Biosyn Corp learnt that the rival bioengineering concern, InGen Inc, were secretly developing a park packed with dinosaurs, brought into …
STARK mountainous desert areas need no longer wear dead white. The possibility of reclaiming areas like Ladakh and Lahaul and Spiti has materialised in the form of a tree called the seabuckthorn. Tenacious as a mountain goat, the shrub-tree is a blessing for the region: it checks soil erosion, yields …
WHAT could the consequences be of the rapid extinction of plant and animal species, as witnessed this century? A team of researchers at the Centre for Population Biology, of the UK's Imperial College at Silwood Park says that it has demonstrated experimentally, for the first time, that the loss of …
US PRESIDENT Bill Clinton has proposed a package of measures that would afford additional protection to Alaska's wetlands, but also ease some of the present restrictions on wetlands use. Environmentalists term the measures a tepid series of steps that will just open up opportunities for the abuse of a fragile …
ALLEGATIONS of illegal practices in the prawn trade in Chilika -- Asia's largest brackish water lake -- have been confirmed by a five-member 'fact-finding' committee set up by the Bhubaneswar High Court. The committee was set up in response to writ petitions filed by three primary fisherfolk cooperative societies challenging …
IN A CORNER of Gujarat lies the Gir national park, perhaps the last home in the wild for the Asiatic lion. The range of the park has shrunk progressively from vast stretches of Asia to its present, forest department-protected 1,200 sq km. For thousands of years, the Maldharis and their …
THE BOOK focuses on a new environmental agenda for cities, followed by details on environmental problems in the home, workplace and neighbourhood. The treatment of the subject makes interesting reading of a much debated topic. For a change, concrete suggestions emerge for tackling environmental problems, especially health problems. Despite the …
RESIDENTs of oil-rich Rivers State in Nigeria are protesting the environmental impact of years of oil exploration. "Oil spills and blowouts have made our farmlands infertile, polluted our streams and fishing lagoons and damaged ecosystems beyond repair,'. complains Ken Saro-Wiwa of the Movement for the Survival of Ogoni People, which …
THE BRITISH blamed the improvidence of the Indian peasantry for the destruction of India's forest wealth. Even with Independence, the bureaucracy continued to toe this line and with such effect that in the 1950s, the new forest policy asserted local people should not enjoy special rights over forests in their …
SERIOUS differences over biodiversity management surfaced during an Indo-British workshop held recently in New Delhi to prepare a blueprint for conservation of biodiversity in different Indian ecosystems. With the British wanting easy access to information on genetic resources and the Indians doubting the ability of "those from other cultures" to …
TO MOST people, mountains conjure a vision of a world of plentiful resources, populated by content and happy people. But this idyllic vision of mountain life is far removed from reality, for life in the mountains is a grim tale of a relentless battle against declining land productivity and ever …
THE SOUTH Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) ratified the setting up of a technical committee on environment at its July 8-9 foreign ministers' meet in Colombo. This gives permanent status to the ad hoc committee set up in November last to examine the recommendations of the SAARC secretariat report …
EVERY time an American family decides to take its car out, the resulting carbon dioxide adds to the existing stock in the atmosphere for at least a hundred years. When the polar cap cannot bear the trapped heat, it will melt and drown the distant country of Maldives or Bangladesh. …
THE MINISTRY of environment and forests (MEF) has merged the two separate committees on wetlands and mangroves to constitute a National Committee on Wetlands, Mangroves and Coral Reefs. But if the new committee is to achieve any success in saving these precious ecological resources, it will have to solve the …
THIS was one storm that the meteorologists couldn't predict. When Vasant Gowariker, scientific adviser to the Prime Minister, and a team of meteorologists from the India Meteorological Department (IMD), announced in early April that the coming monsoon will be on the lower side of normal, the prediction drew a great …
EL Nino refers to the warm current that flows southward along the coasts of Ecuador and Peru, between January and March, which marks the end of the local fishing season when the sea temperature falls. Some years, however, the temperature continues to remain high. This anomaly, which occurs every two …
Nearly 50% of terrigenous materials delivered to the world's oceans are delivered through just twenty-one major river systems. These river-dominated coastal margins (including estuarine and shelf ecosystems) are thus important both to the regional enhancement of productivity and to the global flux of C that is observed in land-margin ecosystems. …
Preparations for the Rio+20 United Nations conference on sustainable development have begun, but the first round of preparatory meetings did not address important issues such as sustainable resource use, production and consumption. The Rio+20 United Nations (UN) conference on sustainable development, to take place in Rio de Janeiro in June, …
Background The difference between countries is whether international cooperation is to be based around the “green economy” or around the “green economy in the context of sustainable development and eradication of poverty”. The former implies that all countries can move towards more sustainable pathways without compromising growth, while the latter …
The task for global governance in dealing with climate change is to focus on the interconnectedness between carbon dioxide emissions, standards of living and global ecological limits. The interdependence between countries makes the global commons, or carbon sinks, a shared economic resource as well as an unprecedented global environmental crisis, …
