Exactly 20 years ago, forest rangers in Chitwan National Park in Nepal nabbed a farmer, Shikharam Chaudhary, who they believed helped his son bury, in his own backyard, a stolen rhino horn. The rangers interrogated him and waterboarded him in prison. Days later, Chaudhary died. No horn was found. But the large and wealthy global...
Tag: Environment
Trump is pulling the US out of the UN FCCC. What does it mean?
US President Donald Trump has signed a presidential memorandum withdrawing from 66 organisations, including the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UN FCCC is the global treaty under which the UN conducts the annual Conference of Parties (COP) climate talks and under which the...
Trump is pulling the U.S. out of the UNFCCC. What does it mean?
U.S. President Donald Trump has signed a presidential memorandum withdrawing from 66 organisations, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UN FCCC) and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UN FCCC is the global treaty under which the UN conducts the annual Conference of Parties (COP) climate talks and under...
Trump pulls U.S. out of key climate treaty, science body: White House
President Donald Trump is withdrawing the United States from a foundational climate treaty and the world’s leading global warming assessment body, as part of a sweeping exit from the United Nations system, the White House announced on Wednesday (January 7, 2026). A total of 66 international organizations were named in a White House memorandum as...
Trump withdraws U.S. from key climate treaty, deepening global pullback
U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from a bedrock climate treaty was slammed on Thursday (January 8, 2026) by the EU, which vowed to keep tackling the crisis with other nations. The White House on Wednesday (January 7) flagged the U.S. exit from 66 global organisations and treaties — roughly half...
Jabarkhet: can private reserves restore wildlife and keep tourism gentle?
“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,...
Not just forests: why grasslands also belong in national climate plans
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...
Green paradox: planting trees will cool a megacity unless it’s dry
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...
What Delhi’s wilderness says about the city’s politics
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...
How Central Europe’s ’water guardians’ are fighting desertification
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...
