News

Global warming has already increased the risk of major disruptions to Pacific rainfall, according to our research published today in Nature Communications. The risk will continue to rise over coming decades, even if global warming during the 21st century is restricted to 2℃ as agreed by the international community under the Paris Agreement. In recent times, major disruptions have occurred in 1997-98, when severe drought struck Papua New Guinea, Samoa and the Solomon Islands, and in 2010-11, when rainfall caused widespread flooding in eastern Australia and severe flooding in Samoa, and drought triggered a national emergency in Tuvalu. These rainfall disruptions are primarily driven by the El Niño/La Niña cycle, a naturally occurring phenomenon centred on the tropical Pacific. This climate variability can profoundly change rainfall patterns and intensity over the Pacific Ocean from year to year. Rainfall belts can move hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilometres from their norm...

Rising sea levels due to human-induced climatic change is one among the many issues plaguing the world. A new study conducted by a group of ocean scientists and statisticians from the Earth Observatory of Singapore and the Rutgers University of New Jersey (US) shows that natural consequences were at play behind the rise in sea level, 6000 years ago in Southeast Asia. The implications of this study are profound as natural causes can further aggravate the effects of rise in sea level combined with human-assisted climate change. To arrive at this conclusion, these researchers studied coral microatolls—circular coral colonies—at two sites on the opposite ends of Belitung Island in Indonesia. Microatolls paint a clear picture on the changes in sea level. Aron Meltzner, the lead author of this study explains the coral’s role: “These microatolls are annually banded, so we can count the bands like tree rings, and figure out where the lowest tides were each year”. By looking at these rin...

Tamil Nadu’s new jallikattu law presents complex constitutional issues on how we treat animals. It raises more questions than answers, some of which are likely to be at the core of the Supreme Court’s consideration Do animals have rights? If so, how are these rights to be administered, and against whom can they be enforced? If not, do human beings nonetheless owe an obligation to treat animals with care and compassion? Are any of these responsibilities inalienable, and to what extent can our Constitution be extended to include within its mandate a binding duty to ensure the safety and security of animals? Some of these questions are likely to be at the core of the Supreme Court’s consideration, when it hears arguments on the validity of Tamil Nadu’s new law that permits the practice of jallikattu in the State. Despite the court’s judgment in 2014, in Animal Welfare Board of India v A. Nagaraja, where it struck down an earlier effort to legalise jallikattu, its verdict on the fresh...

The passage of legislation by Israel that would legalise nearly 4,000 Jewish settler homes on private Palestinian lands in the West Bank flies in the face of international law and norms. That the vote comes weeks after the UN Security Council demanded that Israel stop all settlement activity in the Occupied Territories, and an international conference attended by more than 70 countries urged both sides in the conflict to resume talks, shows Israel’s disregard for international opinion and institutions. The legislation allows the Israeli government to expropriate private Palestinian land if the land-owners are unknown. If known, they will be compensated in cash or kind. However, the legislation, which for the first time since the annexation of East Jerusalem seeks to extend Israeli law to the West Bank, can be overturned by the judiciary. Israel’s Attorney-General has said he wouldn’t defend the bill in the high court as it is “unconstitutional and violates international law”. However,...

Krasnoyarsk Krai region in northern Siberia is one-fourth the size of Canada. Cruelty against reindeer in the north of Krasnoyarsk region is becoming more evident with each passing day as poachers adopt novel methods to kill. Going by the statistics, the current population of wild reindeer has come down to anywhere between 400,000 and 500,000, which is a stark decline from one million in the year 2000. The reindeer population in Taimyr Peninsula (administrative part of Krasnoyarsk region) is the largest wild herd in the world, but a new projection stokes fear of a further decline in population to as low as 150,000 in 2020. Poachers, reportedly, shoot reindeer in the head from boats when they cross rivers on a seasonal migration from Evenkia to the Taimyr Peninsula. The corpses are then dumped along the Khatanga River. The poachers also chase reindeer on snowmobiles. Pregnant females carrying embryos weighing 3-4 kg often suffer miscarriages. Mass abortion has been reported by vete...

Global warming has already increased the risk of major disruptions to Pacific rainfall, according to our research published today in Nature Communications. The risk will continue to rise over coming decades, even if global warming during the 21st century is restricted to 2℃ as agreed by the international community under the Paris Agreement. In recent times, major disruptions have occurred in 1997-98, when severe drought struck Papua New Guinea, Samoa and the Solomon Islands, and in 2010-11, when rainfall caused widespread flooding in eastern Australia and severe flooding in Samoa, and drought triggered a national emergency in Tuvalu. These rainfall disruptions are primarily driven by the El Niño/La Niña cycle, a naturally occurring phenomenon centred on the tropical Pacific. This climate variability can profoundly change rainfall patterns and intensity over the Pacific Ocean from year to year. Rainfall belts can move hundreds and sometimes thousands of kilometres from their norm...

Polluted water and inadequate water supply, sanitation and hygiene cause around 80% of diseases and one in four deaths in developing countries. The world is recognising that existing strategies simply aren’t working. We are starting a five-year project early this year to implement an innovative water-sensitive approach to revitalise 24 informal settlements in Fiji and Indonesia. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the project aims to turn informal settlements into independent sites that: recycle their own wastewater; harvest rainwater; create green space for water cleansing and food cultivation; and restore natural waterways to encourage diversity and deal with flooding. Working with local slum communities, the project will design and deliver modular and multi-functional water infrastructure. This will be tailored to their settlements. Providing secure and reliable water and sanitation services and flood management should improve public health and create more resilient communi...

One of the success stories of affirmative action in India has been the implementation of reservation of seats in local body elections for women, to the order of 33% or more. The importance of democratising the public sphere by inclusive participation of women in a largely male-dominated society cannot be stressed enough. In rural areas the quota has helped improve local governance, enhancing outcomes in delivery of civic services related to drinking water supply, sanitation and irrigation, among others. In urban local bodies, the visible impact has been more quantitative in terms of representation rather than qualitative, with success being linked to emphasis on gender sensitisation by civil society and political parties. It is therefore unfortunate that the Nagaland government, after initial steadfastness to hold the long-delayed urban local body polls on February 1, declared the elections as “null and void” after some tribal bodies, opposed to reservations for women, sought to disru...

For the first time in six meetings this fiscal, the Reserve Bank of India has shifted its policy poise, moving to ‘neutral’ from an ‘accommodative’ stance. The central bank’s Monetary Policy Committee has opted to sit pat on rates and choose to give itself time to “assess how the transitory effects of demonetisation on inflation and the output gap play out”. The decision came just a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi told Parliament that the government’s move to withdraw high-value currency notes had been undergirded by the premise that the economy was “doing well and thus our decision was taken at the right time”. The RBI’s emphasis on caution suggests that not only has the economy suffered short-run disruptions — as the central bank said in December — but that the long-term impact may be far more enduring and hard to predict than anticipated. The policy statement issued by the six-member MPC also projected the second successive downward revision in economic growth as measured by...

            Dengue spreads its tentacles                                               More than 28,000 cases of dengue have been reported in the country, and it is not even October. This vector-borne disease has reached alarming proportions in Kerala, Telangana, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal. With 24 deaths reported so far, West Bengal is the worst-affected state. Last year, the death toll was 14. Already, 5,600 cases have been reported. The number of cases will increase in the coming six weeks before the incidence of the disease is expected to fall. Casualties have been higher in areas where stagnant water is a perennial problem. The civic agencies are being blamed for the alarmingly high number of dengue deaths this year. Uttar Pradesh, which has seen a three-fold jump in dengue cases as compared to last year, suffers from the same probl...

As we mark International Tiger Day today, conservationists around the world are gloating over the number of wild tigers that has gone up to 3,890, from the 2010 estimate of 3200, according to the World Wildlife Fund and the Global Tiger Forum. This is a 22 per cent increase in the population of big cats in the wild, and India has the biggest role to play in that. While in 2010, the tiger population in the Indian forests was estimated at 1,411 adult tigers, the report released in 2014 showed that the number has shot up to 2,226, making India the country with the highest number of tigers in the wild. While conservationists and the forest department in the country deserve accolades, the film industry is also doing its bit. T R Bijulal, a Divisional Forest Officer (Nainital), is releasing his debut film—Mission Tiger—today. The film stars popular Bollywood actor Vijay Raaz in a pivotal role. It has been directed by Dipu Karunakaran, who was the assistant director to filmmaker Priyadarsh...

Silent Valley National Park reinforces the fact that forests and their resident biodiversity are our greatest wealth Since the day I was assigned to write about Kerala’s Silent Valley National Park, a 90-sq km stretch of tropical evergreen forest tucked in the Western Ghats, I have been asked a question over and over again: why is it called Silent Valley? It is a peculiar name in a country like ours. There are more than 100 national parks in India, most of them named after either a physical feature like a river or a mountain; a historical or mythological place or character; an animal; or a former prime minister. Only two names inspire the imagination: the Valley of Flowers National Park in Uttarakhand and Silent Valley. In a booklet titled “Storm Over Silent Valley”, senior environmental journalist Darryl D’monte notes its widely accepted etymology. The valley was originally known as Sairandhri, another name for Draupadi, the wife of the Pandavas. And the river flowing through it ...

In yet another case of shifting goal posts and diluting strict norms, the Centre has reportedly decided to relax the December 2017 deadline for more than 400 thermal plants in the country to comply with the new emission norms notified in December 2015. It has also decided to dilute the standards it had set. Since the new norms were notified more than a year ago, none of the thermal power plants has managed to comply with them, even though a recent study by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment revealed that coal-fired power sector was one of the most resource wasteful and polluting sectors in the world. See: Green Rating of Coal-based Thermal Power Plants This non-compliance doesn’t echo the optimism Finance Minister Arun Jaitley expressed during his budget speech last week about promoting clean energy. What’s the excuse for non-compliance? In December 2015, the Environment Ministry had laid down emission norms for Nitrogen and Sulphur oxides (NOx and SOx) for t...

The Union Ministry of Rural Development (MoRD) puts on hold the consideration of bringing parity of MGNREGS wage with minimum wages of states as its proposal has not got an in-principle approval from the Finance Ministry. According to the MoRD, the finance ministry has called for further deliberation over this issue before its implementation. According to one estimate, it will create an additional burden of around Rs 10,000 crore per year on state exchequer. Earlier this year, the MoRD had sent proposal for the implementation of S Mahendra Dev committee recommendation to bring parity between MGNREGS wage and minimum wage of the state. Then UPA government constituted a committee under S Mahendra Dev in 2013 which had recommended a one-time parity between MGNREGS wages and consumer price Index-Agriculture labourer (CPI-AL). Later, parity would be shifted to consumer price Index- rural labourer (CPI-RL). The panel suggested yearly revision of MGNREGS wage as per CPI-RL. Current...

A day after the National Green Tribunal said that not even a drop of Ganga had been cleaned and public money had been wasted, Union Minister of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation Uma Bharti announced setting up of a Committee of Secretaries to speed up Namami Gange Programme on February 8. The committee will meet once every fortnight. In the first meeting of the empowered task force, Bharti expressed dissatisfaction over slow progress in obtaining NoCs from various states. The minister also said that she will form state and district level Ganga committees. Giving an overview of Namami Gange’s progress, Bharti said that 42 sewage infrastructure with total capacity of 327.93 million litres per day (MLD) projects are under execution. Of these, eight will be sewage treatement plants which will cost Rs 348.76 crore. As per the minister, treatment capacity of 33 MLD was created till December 2016. On the action against industrial pollution, the minister added th...