In the vast saffron-growing land of Pampore, a national highway (NH44) cuts through the middle. Ishfaq Ahmad, a saffron grower, is pondering the future of this land. His eyes are…
The water-loving evergreen tree, hijol, adapted to floodplains, has been traditionally managed over millennia as family and community forest in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin. A new study that works out the impact…
On a sunny December afternoon in Medhipamua village along the banks of the Brahmaputra river in Assam’s Dhemaji district, men, women and a few children gathered under a tin-roofed, open,…
Away from the city noise, the Sallar forest in southern Kashmir’s Anantnag district retains an essence of spring even in the harsh December winter. The diffused sun rays with fog,…
Reflected in key goals and targets, ecological connectivity will be decisive, as countries move to implement the freshly minted Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, which, among its key targets, calls for…
At the 68th International Whaling Commission conference (IWC68) in Slovenia in October, member nations adopted a resolution to support international negotiations on a treaty to tackle plastic pollution. Countries will…
Every day, for the last 14 years, 52-year-old Hemangi Kubal sails out to sea at 1 a.m. to start her workday as the sole fisherwoman of Malvan taluka – a…
An MBA graduate, an engineer, and a Self-Help Group (SHG) member – that's the diversity of entrepreneurs taking up cage aquaculture in Odisha under the state’s Reservoir Fishery Policy. The…
After marathon negotiations and a clutch of protests, including a “die-in” by global youth and a walk-out by developing countries over a funding stalemate, nearly 200 nations struck a historic…
As Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity debate the issue of access and benefit-sharing from digital sequence information on genetic sources (DSI) at the UN Biodiversity Conference (COP15), a…
After multiple postponements due to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments began the final round of negotiations at the United Nations Biodiversity Conference (COP15) in Canada to thrash out a landmark deal…
Off the tourist trail and away from the resorts that crowd Munnar’s lush hills in the Western Ghats is a two-storey red-brick building that overlooks tea gardens, eucalyptus plantations, mountains…
At his 38-acre coffee estate at 3,800 ft, overlooking the pristine Baba Budan giri (hill) in Chikmagalur district of Karnataka, I.S. Umeshchandra is working on creating a database of rainfall…
Sheikh Mohammad Sultan, a saffron grower in his sixties is uncertain about the future of the saffron industry in the Kashmir valley. Sultan and his family, while plucking saffron flowers,…
Right after the monsoon spell, the coastlines of India’s western states, from Maharashtra, Gujarat, and Goa to Karnataka, are lined with dark, sticky balls. These are tarballs, a “seasonal phenomena”…
Thirty-five-year-old Ramaprasad Maiti, a resident of a Sundarbans island, has moved houses 17 times in his lifetime as erosion tore them down and washed them into the river one by…
A clutch of recent modeling efforts suggests pathways that India could take to move to a fully renewable energy-driven electricity system by 2050, but concerns about cost and storage remain.…
Sunil Patil, a farmer from Chikhali, a village in Maharashtra's Kolhapur has three buffaloes and seven cows, producing an average of 100 litres of milk per day. However, since 2018,…
Large grass-eating mammals such as yak and ibex play a crucial role in stabilising the pool of soil carbon in grazing ecosystems that are a big part of the Earth’s…
The India Meteorological Department (IMD)’s declaration of India’s overall monsoon conditions, as drought, surplus, and normal, at the end of the season often ignores the rainfall variations over different times…