Environment

It is that time of the year in when winter smog sets in and air pollution spikes in Delhi. Delayed withdrawal of rains and consequent deferment of stubble burning this year had made October one of the cleanest in the last few years. But the onset of winter conditions – cool and calm wind, temperature inversion, rapidly increasing farm fires and overall trapping of regional pollution – has created conditions that may trigger the season’s first smog episode soon.   The SAFAR (System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research) programme of Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology had already predicted…

Chennai saw record downpour over the weekend, with many parts receiving levels of rainfall not seen since 2015. Many parts of the city have been inundated after the heavy spell that followed the onset of the northeast monsoon. Water-logging has made roads dangerous and unnavigable in many parts of the city. Water entered homes and other buildings and residents in low-lying areas has to be evacuated on emergency as a result of the urban floods. As in many other Indian cities, in Chennai too, a wide range of issues are responsible for urban flooding. The host of problems at the…

After I swallowed the anchor (a naval term for retirement), I settled down with my wife and two kids in an independent house in a suburb of Bengaluru. I was thrust into managing one's own resource in terms of electricity, water and waste we generate unlike the days when the navy took care of all this. My home is designed to be capable of generating its own power with minimal need of utilising power from the grid, and taking care of its water needs through proper conservation techniques, also a cool home which is not energy guzzling. The principles that…

Birds in India migrate from Northern latitudes to escape cold temperatures during winter. Some arrive during monsoons to breed and some are passage migrants that take a pit stop in the country around October-November and March-April, during their journeys elsewhere. Some are local migrants that move within the country according to their breeding cycle.  We should appreciate the long journeys which migratory birds take in order to complete their life cycle. In terms of migration routes of birds, Navi Mumbai lies near one of the paths of the Central Asian Flyway.  Starling, Buntings, Rosefinch, Stonechat and Pipits migrate to Mumbai…

On September 24th, Prof. Ashish Verma, Convenor, IISc Sustainable Transportation Lab (IST Lab) released a voluminous 479-page report co-authored with Hemanthini Allirani from IST Lab, recording air quality index and several other indicators of Quality of Life (QoL) due to 'pedestrianising urban streets' - essentially closing roads to traffic. This is a part of the Innovating for Clean Air (IfCA) programme, a joint initiative between India and UK to pilot air quality improvement initiatives in Bengaluru. Being the first such initiative in Karnataka, the initiative is named ‘Church Street First', based on the location of the study. Church Street was…

Plastic pollution in oceans is overwhelming. A standard garbage truck in New York holds about 13.6 metric tons of trash after it’s been finely packed. This equates to nearly 600,000 garbage trucks full of trash per year, 50,000 garbage trucks of trash per month, 1,600 per day, and more than one full garbage truck per minute getting dumped into the ocean, with no plan for removal, directly threatening the ecology. What are the solutions? Many environmentalist groups are working to solve the ocean plastic problem by removing plastic that has accumulated over time. While this is one of many ideal…

Many Bengalureans don't think of the city as a biodiversity hub. But school students who participated in the 'Biodiversity in my Bengaluru backyard' contest challenged this notion. The contest was organised by Citizen Matters, in collaboration with the conservation magazine Mongabay-India and the apartment management software platform ADDA. Students in grades 9-12 were invited to submit articles or photos/videos of biodiversity in their premises. The best entries were announced at a virtual event on September 18th. Read more: "To protect nature, start at home": Bittu Sahgal Best entries - 'Article' category The following students were selected for submitting the best…

The Mumbai Climate Action Plan (MCAP) is due to be implemented by the end of this year. A joint effort of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai (MCGM), the Government of Maharashtra and WRI India, the draft version will be showcased at the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 26) in November. The general public was invited to give  feedback and suggestions till September 20th. The plan is to work in two ways. The first - mitigation - will concentrate on the sectors of energy and buildings, sustainable mobility and waste management, chosen for their significant contribution to greenhouse…

There is nothing ‘smart’ about a phone whose manufacture involves large-scale evaporation of waterbodies, destruction of large forest areas, production of radioactive waste and poisoning of potable water sources. There is nothing particularly ‘wise’ about humans sacrificing their planet to the fleeting pleasures of tweeting, liking and uploading images via their smart phone internet round-the-clock through enormous heat producing, energy guzzling data centres. This pushes the planet towards the impending irreversible destruction caused by rising global temperatures. The planet is dying. Reducing energy consumption is absolutely necessary to apply the brakes on rising temperatures. It has become the norm to hold industrialists and…

Naresh Chandra Singh, 46, is a native of Kharghar who hails from Manipur in the Northeast of India. A childhood endowed with nature allowed him a natural passion for the environment and its preservation. A job in American IT consulting firm Gartner led him to set up a base in Kharghar, which introduced him to the vast natural landscape of the district and Navi Mumbai as a whole. The slow degradation of nature in Navi Mumbai in the context of rapid urbanisation has compelled him to fight for the precious biodiversity that surrounds and sustains the area. In 2018, he…