Tag: Environment

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...

Once upon a time, the thunder of footsteps from lakhs of mighty rhinoceroses echoed across the savannahs, grasslands, and tropical forests of Africa and Asia — but things have gotten pretty quiet lately. As of 2024, fewer than 28,000 rhinos remain on the planet, all five species combined. Relentless poaching has been a major threat...

Dressed in an orange puffer jacket, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Iizuka stepped into a storage freezer to retrieve an ice core he hopes will help experts protect the world’s disappearing glaciers. The fist-sized sample drilled from a mountaintop is part of an ambitious international effort to understand why glaciers in Tajikistan have resisted the rapid melting...

On successive weekends in November, hundreds of Delhi residents gathered at India Gate holding placards saying “I miss breathing” and “right to live, not just survive”. Winter’s onset once again plunged the National Capital Region into a dense smog, with the air quality index refusing to exit the ‘severe’ (301-400) or ‘very poor’ (201-300) levels....

The western tragopan (Tragopan melanocephalus) is one of India’s rarest pheasants and the state bird of Himachal Pradesh. It was once found across parts of Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, and Uttarakhand, but now survives in small fragmented pockets. Studies in the forests of Kazinag and Limber in Jammu & Kashmir have revealed that while...

This year is set to be the world’s second or third-warmest on record, potentially surpassed only by 2024’s record-breaking heat, the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said on December 9. The data is the latest from C3S following last month’s COP30 climate summit, where governments failed to agree to substantial new measures to...

“Wastelands”. That’s how India’s biodiverse semi-arid grasslands and savannas have been undervalued ever since the British colonial era. For the masters, the woody forests of the subcontinent fuelled industrialisation, while the grassy biomes served no purpose in their timber-driven colonisation. Much of post-independence policy and jurisprudence drew heavily from the erstwhile rulers and “wastelands” made...