A parliamentary standing committee has recently urged the Government of India to renegotiate the Indus Water Treaty (IWT) with Pakistan, as climate change and environmental impact assessment (EIA) issues are…
In the last week of December 2020, a video of a leopard scaling fences and roaming the streets in the Bagh-e-Mehtab locality near Srinagar, startled people in Kashmir valley. It…
In the past few months, some videos that showed the demolition of houses of tribal people in south Kashmir’s forests were widely circulated and created fear among nomadic families who…
Kolahoi Glacier, the largest glacier in Kashmir Himalayas which feeds two major tributaries of the River Jhelum - Lidder and Sindh - has further reduced in area over three years,…
Before the semi-autonomous status of the north Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir was abolished by the Union Government on August 5, 2019, the Scheduled Tribes and Other Traditional Forest…
After August 6, 2019, when the Government of India scrapped the semi-autonomous status of the former Himalayan state of Jammu and Kashmir and divided it into two union territories, recent…
Haji Abdul Gaffar, 74, recalls the time when his village (Batpora-Budgam) and all the adjacent villages used to be lush green and free of pollution. It was around 40 years…
“People now prefer plastic for everything,” rued Ghulam Rasool Ganie, as he deftly worked on a wicker basket, at his residence in Sogman Lolab, some hundred kilometres north of Srinagar,…
Gunshots crack into the air as dusk falls. A young man from Zainakote village in Srinagar district, bumps into two other local youth who are strolling on the eastern shore…
Until three years ago, farmers in Dhundi, a village in Gujarat’s Kheda district south-east of the state’s capital city Gandhinagar, knew only one way of mechanical irrigation in their farms…
After dithering over it for years, Jammu & Kashmir’s Department of Forest, Ecology and Environment uploaded the draft of the State Environment Policy (SEP) 2018 on its website in the…
The dance of Chartses, a mating jig of the black-necked crane, is an important feature of every cultural programme or festival in Ladakh where the bird is revered among the…
In his 1895 book, The Valley of Kashmir, Sir Walter Lawrence, who served in the Indian Civil Service in British India and was posted as the Settlement Commissioner of Kashmir,…
If anything is emblematic of lack of proper planning for tourism management and disregard for Kashmir’s ecological resources, it is the master plan for infrastructure development in one of Kashmir’s…
When Kashmiris talk about the significance of forests, they instantly refer to one of the most popular sayings of the 15th Century Kashmiri saint and poet, Sheikh ul Alam: “Ann…
On March 4, Jammu & Kashmir Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti tweeted the image of Kashmir’s iconic hangul (Cervus hanglu hanglu), also known as Kashmir red deer and Kashmir stag, and…
With a Masters’ Degree in Journalism and Mass Communication, Athar Parvaiz
is an award-winning environmental Journalist based in the Himalayan state of Jammu & Kashmir. His articles appear in a number of national and international news outlets like Thomson Reuters, Inter Press Service, Hindustan Times, Business Standard, The Thirdpole, scidev.net, India Climate Dialogue, Scroll.in, IndiaSpend, The Wire, The Quint, rediff.com and many Srinagar-based English newspapers.
Over the past several years, Athar has extensively written on environment and climate change. He has covered the global climate change negotiations twice from Copenhagen and Paris and has participated in a number of international and national environmental conferences besides earning over a dozen fellowships mostly on environment and climate change. He tweets
@AtharParvaiz and can be contacted on [email protected]
