Category: Environment

“A pathway to the left leads up to a rather extensive plateau for the hills, and forms a very pleasant resort for picnics… There is plenty of room for a good foot-race, and the scenery around, from most points, magnificent. Ponies … can go up all the way.” — Guide to Masuri, Landour, Dehra Dun,...

The United Nations has declared 2026 to be the ‘International Year for Rangelands and Pastoralists’. In 2022, a group of scientists from institutions in Tanzania, Zambia, the U.K., the U.S., Germany and Canada wrote an open letter urging the parties of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) to broaden their goals to be...

Cities around the world are getting hotter for two reasons: the climate is warming and urban areas often trap heat more than the countryside. Planting more vegetation, especially trees, has become a popular ‘nature-based’ way to cool cities. But how much does this really help? To answer this, researchers from Australia, China, Saudi Arabia, and...

Over the last two decades, a small shelf of Indian nonfiction has treated the city itself as an environmental object. Jyoti Pande Lavakare’s Breathing Here is Injurious to Your Health and Siddharth Singh’s The Great Smog of India explored North India’s atmospheric pollution as a human-made crisis with human costs sustained by official short-termism and...

Oszkár Nagyapáti climbed to the bottom of a sandy pit on his land on the Great Hungarian Plain and dug into the soil with his hand, looking for a sign of groundwater that in recent years has been in accelerating retreat. “It’s much worse, and it’s getting worse year after year,” he said as cloudy...