Long before Mumbai’s relentless summer even began this year, the city was already simmering. In March, Mumbai was hit by a severe heatwave, with the temperature reaching a five-year high of 40° Celsius. As rapid urbanisation and a flurry of infrastructure projects replace dense tree cover with steel and mortar, heatwaves seem to have gone from being rare occurrences to an annual threat.   The Mumbai Metro Rail Corporation Limited (MMRCL) cut a whopping 3,093 trees in Aarey Colony to make way for Mumbai’s Aqua Line ( Metro 3). For environmentalist Stalin Dayanand, this is not just a temporary problem.…

During the Open City biodiversity datajam held in December 2025, our group examined the ecological trends around Bengaluru’s lakes. Our analysis suggests a majority of waterbirds are declining across the city's lakes. Earlier, we addressed crucial questions on how migrant and resident waterbirds are surviving across 14 of Bengaluru’s lakes, how the shape of the lakes influence microhabitats, and how a scoring system can be used to record the decline in lake quality and bird populations. The last of our four-part series turns its attention to an individual site. As part of this study of waterbirds in 14 city lakes,…