COP26, the United Nations climate change conference this year, emphasised the urgency to limit global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, both via emission reductions and the sequestration of…
On a cold winter morning in late 2009, Dilip Konwar, a sprightly man in his late forties, scrambled up a bamboo ladder and peeked into the dark insides under the…
On Monday, the Indian government referred the Biological Diversity Act Amendment Bill (2021) to a Joint Parliamentary Committee (JPC). The Bill was developed to amend certain provisions of the Biological…
The northern Indian states of Punjab and Haryana garner a lot of attention during the paddy harvesting season every year, starting in October. The short window between the harvesting of…
Assam’s tea growers are battling many challenges — high production costs, low profit margin, labour problems, and of late, coal shortage. Amid all this, they have found a window of…
Mid-October saw extreme weather events, specifically unusually heavy rains in some parts of India. In Kerala, heavy downpours — an excess of 135% for the first 19 days of the…
Sukmani Nag, a resident of Dhodrepal’s Patelpara hamlet in the Bastar district of the central Indian state of Chhattisgarh, oozes confidence as she speaks about solar-powered irrigation, at a meeting…
Kerala was the first Indian state to launch large-scale oil palm cultivation in 1971. The south Indian state is now planning to boost its palm oil plantation and production. India…
Parmeshwari Devi is a farmer who owns agricultural land in the Khunti district of Jharkhand. A few years ago, she would often lament that she was not able to fully…
When the night’s darkness descends over the waters of Son Beel, the largest wetland in Assam and the second largest in Asia, Rotish Das, 33, sets out to catch fish…
Prashant Kumar Chatar is an intermediate student from Dhanurjaypur panchayat, which is on the periphery of the Hadgarh Wildlife Sanctuary where an elephant corridor was identified by the Odisha government.…
Extreme rainfall deficiencies were not the only causes of famines in semi-arid regions of southern India in the 18th to 20th centuries, according to research that blends paleoclimate reconstruction and…
Vanlaldika, a temporary forest guard in Dampa Tiger Reserve, one of the last remaining tiger habitats in Mizoram, has been cultivating oil palm for the past seven years. Vanlaldika, hails…
Arecanut and coconut plantations sweep across the landscape and eventually into forests that creep up the hills of the Western Ghats. At a distance, windmills perched on a hillock oversee…
Senior Zoological Survey of India scientist Dhriti Banerjee has straddled two different worlds of research — physiology of drug abuse and working on the use of insects in forensic investigations…
If depleting groundwater resources was one of the reasons why the Madurai bench of the Madras high court passed a landmark judgement in 2014 to remove all eucalyptus and wattle…
One of the key targets of the first draft of the Global Biodiversity Framework published recently is to conserve at least 30% of global land and sea areas as protected…
The impact of climate change on India’s food systems has been long evident, with about 194 million people struggling for food and nutritional security today. Between 2017 and 2019, 18…
Kuttanad in Kerala is a picture perfect location with vast waters surrounding its palm-fringed emerald islets. This region of the Alappuzha district in Kerala lies more than two metres below…
Over five years ago, farmers groups in Goa proposed that four species – the Indian wild boar (Sus scrofa cristatus), rhesus macaque (Macaca mulatta), gray langur (Presbytis entellus) and the…
