Every few weeks, 53-year-old agricultural entomologist Rajendra Hegde addresses a large gathering in Bengaluru, where he puts forth a proposition: imagine walking up to your rooftops or balconies and foraging…
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 2022 Assam floods, following record-breaking rains, were the worst that the state has seen in the last decade. Soon-after, some districts faced a drought-like situation forcing farmers to work…
Climate-driven food and water insecurity is expected to increase with increased warming, reiterates the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. Water scientist Aditi Mukherji and one of the…
The old houses of the Kashmir Valley are living examples of climate-resilient and sustainable architecture. When a massive flood hit the valley in 2014, a major part of downtown Srinagar,…
India is among the frontrunners in terms of exposure of its infrastructure to the vulnerabilities of climate change, according to a recent global physical climate risk report, prepared by the…
Exploring the geological history of Earth is fascinating work. That is what paleoclimatologists do. In order to understand climate change or to recognise it, we need to first understand what…
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,…
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 Konkan region, along India’s west coast, has been a tourist attraction for several years now. Nestled between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea, this region has beaches, waterfalls,…
A 700 to 800 metres stretch of mangroves to the west of Pakhiraloy ferry ghat on an island in the Indian Sundarbans, part of a plantation project in 2020, was…
The sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change substantiates the adverse impact of human-induced climate change on ecosystems and human systems with high confidence. The unprecedented heatwaves…
Srinivas Behera’s family in Mangalajodi village on the northern banks of the Chilika lake in Odisha along India’s east coast has been engaged in the fishing business for as long…
Kalpana Sethi, 30, exuberantly shows around her two-acre land, which was once a wasteland but now aids in her children’s education. Situated on a moderate slope, in the Bisoi village…
“There was water till my waist,” recalls Tarun Rajkhowa, a 70-year-old resident of Guwahati city’s Rukminigaon area. In mid-June this year, when incessant rains inundated parts of the city, Rajkhowa…
It is late April 2022. At Namche Bazaar, a town in the Everest region of Nepal at an elevation of 3555 metres above sea level (m a.s.l), life, and business…
Parts of Assam and Meghalaya are among zones in India that are prone to the greatest rainfall-driven soil erosion, says a study that provides a national-scale assessment of rainfall erosivity…
Leaving Panaji, Goa's capital city, for the airport, one drives past a large swathe of lifeless bare trees standing in a shallow black water swamp. This was once a verdant…
Baby mangroves with leathery leaves peep out through lush meadows of grass that greet the Bay of Bengal. Soon enough these densely clumped blades and tufts of salt-tolerant grasses, in…
