Category: Environment, Forest and Climate change

Kids suffer most in one of Earth’s most polluted cities

National Geographic || BETH GARDINER || March 26, 2019

In winter, coal stoves and power plants choke Mongolia’s capital, Ulaanbaatar, with smoke—and lung disease.

ULAANBAATAR, MONGOLIACoal is everywhere in Mongolia’s frigid capital. It sits beneath the towering smokestacks of power plants in piles as big as football fields. Drivers haul it through town in the open beds of pickup trucks. Vendors stack yellow bags of the stuff along roadsides, and jagged pieces spill from metal buckets in the round felt yurts where the poorest families burn it to keep out the bitter cold. Read more

Why we desperately need the Aravallis if we want to survive

Dailyio || Neha Sinha || March 27, 2019

The Aravallis are much more than an aesthetic setting to the National Capital Region. It is the natural entity that protects us from desertification, holds crucial water reserves and protects us from global warming.

Pretty things across the world are replaceable.

Irreplaceability, on the other hand, comes only if something is valued, seen as a unique entity, its own thing, an identity which has sovereignty, a place of dignity. North India’s Aravalli hills are not remarkably pretty. They do not have the sumptuous, plump orchids of the East Himalayas growing from bowers of trees. Nor the flaming red rhododendrons of the West Himalayas. They do not have biodiversity in numbers like that of the Western Ghats. To the untrained eye, the hills could look replaceable, even dry and barren. Read more

Cost of rising air pollution

By Altaf Patel, Mumbai Mirror | March 26, 2019

Unless authorities soon take corrective measures, people will see their quality of life diminish further.

The right to breath clean air is one of the most fundamental rights in the world. Clean air is critical to healthy human life. Pollution affects our health in myriad ways. From respiratory illnesses to damage to sexual organs to cardiovascular problems, the long-term effects of breathing poor quality air are well documented.

According to a new report, seven of the world’s 10 most polluted cities are in India. They include Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Noida and Patna. The study, by the software company AirVisual and NGO Greenpeace, ranked New Delhi at 11, making it the world’s most polluted capital, ahead of Dhaka and Kabul. Read more

Protect ocean ecosystem, tap blue economy, says Venkaiah

The Hindu || Prakash Kamat || March 24, 2019

‘Initiate programmes to harness ocean reserves sustainably’

Vice President of India M.Venkaiah Naidu on Sunday cautioned against the further degradation of oceans and their ecosystem. He was visiting Goa.

“India should fully tap the enormous potential of the blue economy to achieve higher growth and initiate appropriate programmes for sustainable harnessing of ocean reserves,” Mr. Naidu told students and officials at the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) here. Read more

In an ancient land, a forest’s impending destruction threatens India’s future

Scroll.in || Samar Halarnkar || 24 March 2019

Opening Chhattisgarh’s Hasdeo Arand to mining will hasten the devastation of the Adivasi people and the country’s natural resources.

In the heart of India, there is a land called Gondwana. Geologists borrowed the name to provide an identity to Gondwana or Gondwanaland, a prehistoric supercontinent that gave birth to India before humans evolved. It is also a name derived from some of India’s most ancient people, a tribe called the Gonds. Read more

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