The onset of summer months means a bumper harvest of cashews in the Nayagarh district of Odisha. A cash crop, cashew is highly profitable for farmers, but this was not…
Five decades ago, findings of the first tiger census set alarm bells ringing in the government. The count of tigers had plummeted to 1,827, which was a sharp decline from…
Buoyed by a “geographer’s heart”, environmental geographer Ruth DeFries started using satellite data in the 1990s to generate global vegetation maps to feed climate models. Unraveling drivers of deforestation in…
The Forest (Conservation) Amendment Bill 2023 was introduced in the Lok Sabha on 29th March, to amend the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980 (FCA). It was sent to the Joint Committee…
Certain categories of forest land will no longer be legally protected, as proposed by the Forest (Conservation) Amendment Bill, 2023, that the union government introduced in Lok Sabha on March 29.…
The Western Ghats of India are broadly divided into three subdivisions — the northern, central and southern — separated by the Goa gap and the Palghat gap respectively. Due to…
Fencing is a key conflict mitigation strategy in the Mysore Elephant Reserve in Karnataka, which sees regular cases of human-elephant conflict. Putting up fencing accounts for a significant proportion of…
For the first time in the history of the Conference of Parties (CoP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) the cover decision text – increasingly seen…
In a relief to environmentalists and local indigenous population concerned about India’s hydropower ambition in the Dibang river valley region of Arunachal Pradesh, the Forest Advisory Committee (FAC) of the…
“It was around seven in the evening. During a routine inspection in my field, I discovered a herd of seven-eight wild boars. They were big, some 2.5-3 feet in height.…
India's finance minister has announced two major programmes for mangrove plantation and wetlands conservation in the country's latest annual budget, drawing a mixed response among the conservation academics who welcomed…
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…
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,…
“Nobody wishes to be a killer. To be held responsible for any being’s death can be traumatising. Let alone an elephant, even the death of a dog, a goat or…
Women from the Tharu tribal community, living in 46 villages of Dudhwa National Park in Uttar Pradesh, are the forefront of the fight to their community’s right to the forest.…
Extinction is the termination of all members of a species and it occurs because of environmental forces, overexploitation or evolutionary changes. What can fossils tell us about extinction? They provide…
When life inside a rainforest is so enchanting, what would life on its roof be like? Where the crown of the rainforest trees bursts forth to brush against the atmospheric…
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…
When diatom hunter Karthick Balasubramanian was invited to a research expedition on the Blue Mountains of Mizoram, little did he know the trek would result in producing the first dataset…
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…
