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Government has expressed its inability to adopt suggested technical measures to curb animal casualties The state government, which in 1991 promised to decongest the stretch, has not been able to keep its promise (Photo: S H Patgiri) The Assam government has issued an affidavit stating the hurdles in complying with a directive of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) that asked for the installation of sensor-operated and automatic traffic barriers in the Kaziranga National Park. These barriers can help to control the movement of traffic on the traffic corridor on National Highway 37 that passes between the national park and has been criticised for animal casualties. In the affidavit submitted before the principal bench of NGT on March 12, Assam had informed the tribunal of the steps taken by it in response to the latter’s directive of February 5. This was when the NGT had directed the state government to ensure fixation of sensor operated automatic barriers and speed check came...

Opportunity to truly reform mining governance to balance economic growth with social justice and environmental safety has been lost Photo by Chandra Bhushan The upper house of Parliament on Friday passed the controversial mining bill, which is perceived as anti-people and pro-miners. The Mines and Minerals (Development & Regulation) (Amendment) Bill (MMDR), 2015, tabled before Parliament to amend the mining Act of 1957, was passed on the strength of 117 votes; 69 members voted against it and two abstained from voting. The members of Janata Dal (United) walked out in protest as voting started. 

As power lines and roads slice up forest cover, it becomes clear that a knowledge economy must tackle development with a wider perspective than that of mere short-term gains In just two meetings in August 2014 and January 2015, the National Board for Wildlife considered projects involving over 2,300 hectares of land in and around wildlife sanctuaries and national parks. In four meetings between September and December 2014, the Forest Advisory Committee considered diversion of over 3,300 hectares of forests for 28 projects. All the proposals were for linear projects and most of them are likely to be cleared. Linear infrastructure projects — roads, trains and power lines that make long intrusions into forests and stretch ribbonlike over thousands of kilometres — are the new threat to our forests, in addition to submergence by dams or clearing for mining and agriculture. The Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change has been gradually diluting the norms for such projec...

Threats from various sources have contributed to a 70 per cent decline in the bird’s population in Canada An ivory gull (Photo: Abigor/flickr) Mercury pollution has risen nearly 50-fold in the feathers of a breed of Arctic bird over the past 130 years, says a BBC report that quotes a few scientists. The researchers, according to the report, analysed feather samples of the ivory gull (Pagophila eburnea) from the Canadian Arctic and western Greenland from 1877 to 2007. They found the bird had been exposed to mercury for decades. Scavenging on the carcasses of whales, seals and other mammals killed by predators such as polar bears was the primary source of mercury consumption. Days before this, in January, the very rare Arctic bird was spotted in US' Quincy, bringing many bird watchers to the city. Meanwhile, in a study published in PLOS One, it has been highlighted that since ivory gulls avoid flying over open water, scientists suggest birds may vary their migration rout...

A nesting site of the extremely rare white-bellied heron has been discovered in a remote part of the Namdapha Tiger Reserve in Arunachal Pradesh. It is estimated that there are only 250 white-bellied herons (Ardea insignis) left in the world and only about 50 left in India. “This is the first nesting site of the white- bellied heron to be discovered in India. Before the discovery of this site, Bhutan was (thought to be) the only country in the world to have a breeding population of the white-bellied heron,” Gopinathan Maheswaran, the scientist who is in charge of the bird Section of the Zoological Survey of India told The Hindu. According to Mr Maheswaran, who has spent years in the wilderness looking for rare birds, there are very few people in the country who have encountered the white-bellied heron. Declared a critically endangered species under the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), it is an “extremely shy” bird which feeds on fish in ...

   Residents and technicians look at the bones of the dinosaur, which palaeontologists say is the largest set of remains of the extinct animal ever found to date.Photo: Reuters Palaeontologists in Argentina’s remote Patagonia region have discovered fossils of what was likely the largest dinosaur ever to roam the earth. The creature is believed to be a new species of Titanosaur, a long-necked, long-tailed sauropod that walked on four legs and lived some 95 million years ago in the Cretaceous Period. The dinosaur “weighed the equivalent of more than 14 African elephants” or about 100 tonnes, said Jose Luis Carballido, a palaeontologist at the Egidio Feruglio Museum in the southern Argentine city of Trelew. “This is a true paleontological treasure,” Mr. Carballido said in a statement on Friday on the museum website.

The U.N.’s expert panel on climate change on Sunday highlighted the disconnect between international goals to fight global warming and what is being done to attain them. Emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases must drop by 40—70 per cent by 2050 to keep the global temperature rise below the 2—degree C (3.6—degree F) cap set in U.N. climate talks, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said. The opposite is happening now. On average global emissions rose by 2.2 percent or 1 gigaton a year between 2000 and 2010, outpacing growth in previous decades to reach “unprecedented levels” despite some efforts to contain them, the IPCC said. “There is a clear message from science- To avoid dangerous interference with the climate system, we need to move away from business as usual,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, one of three co-chairs of the IPCC working group looking at ways to fight climate change. The panel didn’t get into w...

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has given its starkest warning of the likely impact of climate change. The IPCC’s

Indian deltas are sinking, and no, it is not because of sea level rise. “Humans are sinking deltas four times faster than the sea level is rising,” says American professor of oceanography and geology at the University of Colorado, James Syvitski. A proliferation of large dams that starve deltas of sediment, groundwater mining that causes land compaction, and artificial levees that affect river courses, have been responsible for the subsiding of major Indian deltas including Ganga-Brahmaputra, Krishna-Godavari, Brahmani and Mahanadi, Prof. Syvitski demonstrated in his lecture ‘The Peril of Deltas on the Indian Subcontinent: Welcome to the Anthropocene,’ at the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme held here recently. “The Krishna delta is perhaps the worst off because large dams are preventing almost any of the river’s sediments from reaching it,” he later told The Hindu. In a research paper co-authored by Professor Syvitski and published ...

As conservation of wild species becomes more successful, higher levels of human-wildlife conflict are being reported in many parts of the country. The outcome of such encounters is a distressing number

Stone quarrying, encroachment of forest land and increasing number of private resorts in the buffer

Asia’s biggest botanical garden will come up in Naya Raipur with the Chhattisgarh government

Projects falling within wildlife zones back in the reckoning Several project proposals which were taken off the list for forest clearance as they fell within wildlife zones or were awaiting comprehensive assessment will be considered afresh by the Forest Advisory Committee of the Ministry of Environment and Forests in January. The proposals include exploration for coal in Singrauli, Madhya Pradesh, in zones that were earlier identified by the ministry as being part of a wildlife corridor. There is also a proposal to permit iron ore excavation in Saranda, Jharkhand, where permission for mining was blocked after the area had been identified as an elephant reserve. Yet another proposal is for the 700 MW Tato-II Hydroelectric Project on the Siyom in Arunachal Pradesh without a cumulative assessment study the ministry earlier mandated for the river basin. The Forest Advisory Committee is the statutory authority under the Forest Conservation Act. It is headed by the seniormo...

The relaxed norms for river sand-mining may kill the rivers of Kerala, besides reducing the availability of drinking water. The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has done away with the norm of environment clearance for river sand-mining for sites below the extent of five hectares. Sites with a mining lease area between five hectares and 25 hectares would be appraised on the basis of a pre-feasibility report and an application in the prescribed format, it said. The decision will have far-reaching consequences in Kerala, where rivers have been exploited to the hilt. As all sand-mining areas in Kerala are below five hectares, the new order would impact States such as Kerala most, according to those in the sector. Mining plan