The Spiti Valley of Himachal is a trans-Himalayan desert where people survive on only one farming season. The Spiti river is the lifeline for agricultural communities in this region. But…
Udaipur, in the state of Rajasthan, has allured a variety of people for centuries, right from the British imperialists in India to Hollywood celebrities. But its popularity reached a new…
Every summer, the population in the northern union territory of Ladakh swells significantly. With a local population of about 274,000 people, the number doubles as around 300,000 tourists visit the…
The past two decades have seen an increase in environmental activism in the Nilgiris, as well as other parts of Tamil Nadu and Kerala. It has evolved from protests, dharnas…
Humans are testing the limits of most species’ survival, with their planet-wide changes. As urbanisation, deforestation, loss of wildlife, and human-wildlife conflicts continue to spiral up, there is a need…
India is a mega-biodiverse nation. It is home to 7-8% of the recorded species of the world. Its marine ecosystems are equally biodiverse: of the 32 animal phyla known to…
Beneath the current crisis that is brewing in the Lakshadweep, there is another unspoken crisis unfolding that threatens the very habitability of the islands, and calls into question the fevered…
A tree-planting frenzy has taken over many countries to counter climate change. In July 2019, Ethiopia announced that they planted more than 350 million trees in one day. A month…
It is not just severe pollution that is threatening the Yamuna river. Excessive and unsustainable sand mining along with instances of illegal mining are inflicting irreparable damage on the river…
Blue sheep, locally known as bharal, are wild mountain ungulates which are, in fact, more closely related to goats than sheep. They reside in the Himalayas and are the main…
They may be hundreds of kilometres away from the Indian mainland, but the rich forests and the biodiversity in the strategically important Andaman and the Nicobar Islands (ANI) face pressures…
On February 4, 2020, images of a rare oriental darter struggling to free its beak from a piece of plastic went viral. The incident was reported from Palwal in Haryana…
Unsustainable sand mining practices are rampant in India. Despite a set of guidelines in 2016 to curb the practice, illegal and unsustainable sand mining has continued to be common, spurring…
Tonnes of fish caught through unsustainable fishing are being used by the fish meal and fish oil (FMFO) industries which supply feed to global aquaculture chains. These are wreaking havoc…
As Indian government’s Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MOEFCC) has appealed to the Supreme Court to dissolve the Dahanu Taluka Environment Protection Authority (DTEPA) stating that their work…
The floodwaters in Assam have receded. Among the most telling images of the devastation it caused on helpless animals, was that of a group of one-horned rhinos huddled on a…
That single-use plastics in oceans can affect coastal habitats, marine organisms and even seafood, is today well documented. But can small fragments of plastic bags and straws change large-scale oceanographic…
Fifty-two-year-old Moreshwar Namdeo Koli is a fisherman whose family has been fishing in the Arabian sea off the Mumbai coast for the past three generations. His is among the 15,000…
“The most extreme thing about the ocean is its sheer, inconceivable size. In that enormous volume – the biggest habitat on earth – lives a kaleidoscope of animals, plants, microbes…
Mumbai’s coastline and green spaces are under threat from a series of infrastructure projects that could impact the marine ecology, flora, fauna and the last remaining green lungs of the…
