excavate.in - Dig Deeper

A pod of narwhals (Monodon monoceros) in central Baffin Bay.

Biodiversity

As Arctic ship traffic increases, narwhals and other unique animals are at risk

A recent study assessed the vulnerability of 80 populations of Arctic marine mammals during the “open-water” period of September, when sea ice is at its minimum extent, to understand the relative risks of vessel traffic across Arctic marine mammal species, populations and regions. The study found that more than half (53 percent) of these populations – including walruses and several types of whales – would be exposed to vessels in Arctic sea routes. This could lead to collisions, noise disturbance or changes in the animals’ behaviour.

13/11/2018

Agriculture

Sinnar farmers breathe life back into irrigated farming

Falling agricultural income, accumulated power bills, spiraling farm loans, acute dependence on water tankers and the resultant migration to cities in search of livelihood are now referred to in the past tense in the 19 villages of Sinnar taluka in Maharashtra’s Nashik district, thanks to the unique participatory action of water management involving local farmers, an NGO, corporate donors and the state’s irrigation authorities.

05/11/2018

Climate Change

New UN report outlines ‘urgent, transformational’ change needed to hold global warming to 1.5°C

A landmark report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, commissioned at the breakthrough 2015 summit that brokered the Paris climate agreement, outlines what’s at stake in the world’s bid to limit global temperature rise to 1.5℃.

27/10/2018

Climate Change

Artists lead cultural response to climate crisis

As climate change starts impacting every facet of life, artists become the cultural leaders in their response to it, helping people understand what is happening beyond the science.

20/10/2018

Biodiversity

‘Citizen science can help reduce wildlife mortality’

In an interview with Manu Moudgil, Dr. Andheria (President of the Wildlife Conservation Trust) talks about various aspects of wildlife conservation, including mitigation measures along linear infrastructure, fragmentation of forests and implementation of the Forest Rights Act.

15/10/2018

Forests

Soligas in tiger reserve win battle over forest rights

Soligas are an indigenous tribe of Karnataka, inhabiting the peripheral forest areas near Biligiri Rangana Hills (BR Hills) and Male Mahadeshwara (MM Hills) in Chamarajnagar district. Traditionally they have been dependent on the forests for their livelihood. The Soligas are also called the children of bamboo because the word is believed to mean that they originated from bamboo.

When the government declared the forests they live in a protected reserve, the Soligas created history by becoming the first tribal community living inside the core area of a tiger reserve in India to get their forest rights officially recognized by the court of law.

12/10/2018

Decoding Nature

Why does Nemo the clownfish have three white stripes? The riddle solved at last

Nemo, alias Amphiprion ocellaris, belongs to the clownfish group, which includes about 30 species. Their colour pattern is characterised by a yellow, orange, brown or black colour with vertical white stripes composed of light-reflecting cells called iridophores.

In addition to other physical characteristics, clownfish species are distinguished by their number of vertical white stripes. Thus, some species have no stripes (Amphiprion ephippium), only one (Amphiprion frenatus) or just two (Amphiprion sebae). Amphiprion ocellaris, the famous Nemo, has three stripes. What can explain the difference in the number of bands between these species?

11/10/2018

Agriculture

Why land degradation in India has increased and how to deal with it

Land degradation can exacerbate climate change and threaten agricultural productivity, water quality, biodiversity, sustainable development, and the living conditions of humans and wildlife, among other effects. Globally, a third of our land is degraded, affecting 3 billion people, and it is expected to worsen with rising demand for food.

07/10/2018

Collateral Damage?

Climate and conflict in South and Southeast Asia

A recently published paper by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has focussed on the under-researched topic of how climate change impacts may affect violence in South and Southeast Asia. Titled “Climate change and violent conflict: Sparse evidence from South Asia and South East Asia”, the report highlights how little work has been done in looking at climate change and its possible impact on security in the most densely populated regions on the planet.

28/09/2018

Biodiversity

China’s primates could disappear by end of this century, study warns

China has some 25 species of primates, of which 15 to 18 have fewer than 3,000 individuals surviving in the wild, according to a new study. Expanding suitable habitat for primates is critical, the researchers say, as is prioritising a network of protected corridors that can connect isolated primate subpopulations. By Shreya Dasgupta Most primates in China could be wiped out by the end of this century, a new study warns. China is the second-most primate-rich country in Asia, with 25 known species of non-human primates, including lorises, macaques, langurs, snub-nosed monkeys, and gibbons. Since the 1950s, though, primate populations have declined drastically,

27/09/2018

Agriculture

Rainforest coffee better for taste and biodiversity, but needs policy support for farmers’ income

Kodagu district in Karnataka, which was battered by the recent rains, is the starting point of Kaveri river and home to most of India’s coffee production. The native coffee-growing ecosystem has comparable tree diversity as the rainforest in which it is grown. It is also good for the climate, since it has similar carbon storage. But, there is a decline in both biodiversity and carbon storage as the coffee ecosystem moves from Coffea Arabica to C. Robusta, and as exotic silver oak trees replace the native shade trees.

10/09/2018

Climate Change

India’s traditional wisdom in coping with extreme weather

In large parts of the subcontinent where floods or droughts are annual or recurring events, people in rural areas have evolved location-specific strategies to deal with the disasters and unusual weather.

07/09/2018

Water Resources

In waterless Ladakh, women show the way

The Women’s Alliance of Ladakh (WAL), while making efforts to protect Ladakh’s environment and preserving its culture, is persuading farmers of the cold desert to practise organic farming and traditional water harvesting as farmers face water scarcity because of low snowfall in recent years. “It seems water is gradually vanishing from this place. We need to be prepared for water-related challenges ahead,” said 60-year-old Tsering Chondol, President of WAL, which counts some 4,000 women in 114 villages of Ladakh as members.

01/09/2018

Climate Change

How a melting glacier over 7000 km away influences monsoon in India

Changes in remote Arctic such as glacial and sea ice melting, affect Indian monsoons as they contribute to its year-to-year variability that translates into devastating floods and droughts.

29/08/2018

Collateral Damage?

Kerala Flood Of 2018 Less Intense Than Deluge Of 1924: So Why Was Damage As Great?

So why was the flood of 2018 as devastating as the 3,368 mm rainfall that Kerala received 94 years ago? That’s because Kerala has reduced its capacity to deal with such extreme floods by allowing illegal stone quarrying, cutting down forests and grasslands, changing drainage patterns and sand mining on river beds, said experts.

26/08/2018

Agriculture

Making sunlight liquid – a brief history of sunflowers

Fields of sunflowers are now a common sight all over the world – but this has only been the case relatively recently.

17/08/2018

Biodiversity

Climate change increases human-wildlife conflict in Sikkim

Recent changes in climatic conditions in the heavily forested Himalayan state of Sikkim could be fuelling human-wildlife conflict around protected areas in the province.

16/08/2018

Collateral Damage?

Is the upcoming Char Dham highway speeding towards environmental disaster?

The upcoming 900 kilometre-long Char Dham highway project, is being seen as a strategic attempt to bolster preparation of India’s security forces at the India-China border, apart from increasing tourist volume. But while it will facilitate the smooth movement of pilgrims and defence forces, it could be at the cost of the environment in the fragile hill state. According to experts, unchecked construction of the all-weather highway may end up triggering disasters in the ecologically sensitive Uttarakhand region.

13/08/2018

Agriculture

As India Struggles With Climate Change, Farming Couple Learns To Cope And Flourish

“Year by year, the quantity of rainfall is decreasing,” said Shyamrao Patil, 55, a lungi-clad, generously mustachioed wiry farmer who has learned to read the changing seasons and–most importantly–adapt to them in a country where climate change has started affecting the livelihoods of a fifth of the population, or 263 million people, that depends on farming.

08/08/2018

Collateral Damage?

The Laos disaster reminds us that local people are too often victims of dam development

Not only do large developments interfere with ecosystems, but they often affect local communities even in the absence of catastrophe. This was indeed the case for the Xepian-Xe Nam Noy project, which had already cost many villagers their land and livelihoods before disaster struck.

02/08/2018

Biodiversity

Village youth in Western Ghats enrich sacred grove

A bunch of passionate young men are saving big trees uprooted in the Sahyadri Mountains by transplanting them at their village’s sacred grove. And that’s just one part of their conservation work.

31/07/2018

Collateral Damage?

In Malaysia, an island drowns in its own development

Malaysia’s Penang Island has undergone massive development since the 1960s, a process that continues today with plans for transit and land-reclamation megaprojects. The island is increasingly facing floods and landslides, problems environmentalists link to paving land and building on steep slopes.

29/07/2018

Agriculture

Saving the world’s only floating national park and its dancing deer

Manipur’s iconic Loktak Lake and its floating islands (phumdis), the last natural refuge of the critically endangered Sangai deer or the Indian Eld’s deer (Rucervus eldii eldii), are losing ground to mushrooming agricultural practices and human settlements, reports a study.

27/07/2018

Biodiversity

Can a scientific name save one of Earth’s most iconic freshwater fish from extinction?

The mahseers are an iconic group of fish found throughout the fast-flowing rivers of South and South-East Asia. Characterised by their large scales, attractive appearance and potentially vast size, the mahseers have long been afforded saintly status as “God’s fishes”. They are also known to anglers as some of the world’s hardest fighting freshwater game fish, earning them the reputation of “tigers of the water”.

26/07/2018

Agriculture

Prehistoric people started to spread domesticated bananas across the world 6,000 years ago

In a globalised world, we routinely move enormous quantities of food around the planet in trade and for aid. Many countries, including India, would struggle to feed their populations without food imports. Most people are used to being able to buy a wide range of produce which domestic farmers would struggle – or find impossible – to grow. A typical example is the banana, once a prized exotic novelty, but now a staple in many country’s supermarkets.

22/07/2018

Biodiversity

Dolphin population declines in India’s only dolphin sanctuary

Dredging, freight transport, pollution, and a lack of management plan leaves India’s only dolphin sanctuary under threat, and a drop in numbers has experts worried.

20/07/2018

Biodiversity

Peru: A decade-long quest to protect the world’s largest tropical glacier

The Quelccaya Ice Cap in Peru’s Canchis province is the world’s largest tropical glacier, but it has been melting steadily — a harbinger of climate change.

18/07/2018

Agriculture

Climate Change Crisis: Why Fatuhi Khera In Punjab Changed From Cotton To Rice

Crop losses following a deluge in 2009 prompted a switch from growing cotton to paddy in 75% of the acreage that was earlier under cotton. Since paddy withstands water logging better than cotton, farmers see its cultivation as a means to protect their income against loss.

17/07/2018

Climate Change

Tourist magnet Ladakh facing water scarcity

For 75-year-old Tsering Angdo, today’s Ladakh is entirely different from the world of his childhood in the cold Himalayan desert. Back then, he and everyone he knew would take water supply for granted. Ladakh was never short of water, considering the limited needs of a small population. That is now changing.

13/07/2018

Climate Change

A long fuse: ‘The Population Bomb’ is still ticking 50 years after its publication

“The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” Stanford biologist and ecologist Paul Erhlich declared on the first page of his 1968 best-seller, “The Population Bomb.” Because the “stork had passed the plow,” he predicted, “hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.” Here’s what the book got right and wrong.

11/07/2018

Wildlife

Elephants can adapt to human habitation but sirens stress them out

As more and more elephant habitats are falling under the ever-growing influence of humans, elephants are often coming into contact with people, whether they are passing through human-inhabited landscapes, or directly interacting with them, the latter of which sometimes culminate in intense conflicts.

09/07/2018

Water Resources

Indian villages look to Bhutan for water

A lot has been discussed about the acute water crisis in many parts of India. But who would have thought some villages in rural West Bengal have to depend on a neighbouring nation for water? Thanks to administrative failure, four villages surrounding the Bundapani tea estate in Alipurduar district of West Bengal, around 600 kilometres from Kolkata, get water from Bhutan for their daily needs.

06/07/2018

Agriculture

Why it’s time to curb widespread use of neonicotinoid pesticides

Neonicotinoids are very good at killing insects. In many cases they require only parts per billion, equivalent to a few drops of insecticide in a swimming pool of water.

02/07/2018

Forests

Urban ‘forests’ can store almost as much carbon as tropical rainforests

Trees absorb CO₂ during photosynthesis, which is then metabolised and turned into organic matter that makes up nearly half of their overall mass. Urban trees are particularly effective at absorbing CO₂, because they are located so close to sources such as fossil fuel-burning transport and industrial activity.

30/06/2018

Unsustainable Cities

Pink city turns heat island

A new phenomenon, urban heat islands in Jaipur indicate that the city has begun to witness the worst of climate change.

18/06/2018

Forests

Strengthen local forest rights for best climate solutions

India needs to proactively include indigenous communities and forest dwellers in its efforts to restore and expand forest cover to sequester carbon, and not exclude them from forestry management.

15/06/2018

Biodiversity

How villagers in Poi breathed life back into a forest

In an extraordinary tale of community managed ecological restoration, the residents of Poi village near Kalyan in Maharashtra adopted a degraded forest and turned it into a lush haven of biodiversity.

06/06/2018

Conservation

Scientists tackling conservation problems turn to artificial intelligence

New technologies are generating far more information than ever before to help scientists assess and predict the health and behaviour of species and ecosystems, as well as the threats they face.

01/06/2018

Collateral Damage?

Air pollution increases crime in cities – here’s how

The impact of air pollution on human health is well-documented. We know that exposure to high levels of air pollutants raises the risk of respiratory infections, heart disease, stroke, lung cancer as well as dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. But there is growing evidence to suggest that air pollution does not just affect our health – it affects our behaviour too.

27/05/2018

Agriculture

Climate variability affects mental health among rural poor

Climate variability affects the psychological well-being of adults, especially the rural poor, reports new research on India, rekindling the debate over the complex interplay of factors that could trigger mental distress in people affected by a changing climate.

22/05/2018

Biodiversity

India soon to have guidelines to save birds from wind energy farms

Alarmed by the threats from wind energy farms to birds, including migratory birds and raptors, a panel of forest experts of India’s environment ministry has now suggested a series of measures to be adopted by all the wind power companies in India for ensuring the protection of birds. For instance, it has suggested painting the vane tips of wind turbines orange, to prevent birds from flying into the turbines. The requirement for such measures has increased as the world is moving away from fossil fuel and towards renewable energy, mainly wind and solar power, to avoid the worst effects of climate change.

17/05/2018

Climate Change

Half of Earth’s satellites restrict use of climate data

When governments restrict who can access data, or limit how people can use or redistribute it, that slows the progress of science. Now, as U.S. climate funding is under threat, it’s more important than ever to ensure that researchers and others make the most of the collected data.

07/05/2018

Collateral Damage?

25 Indian states ban plastic bags. Yet, 600 truckloads of plastic discarded every day

Twenty-five Indian states/UTs now have some form of ban on polythene carry bags, but implementation is often lax, and plastic–which takes hundreds of years to decompose–continues to be used, which gathers in India’s water bodies and landfills.

20/04/2018

Biodiversity

This draft national forest policy too gives short shrift to grasslands

Neglected ever since the days India’s first national forest policy, starting with the British Raj, these treeless, timber-free landscapes have been erroneously considered as wastelands. The Draft National Forest Policy 2018 also misses an opportunity to give importance to grasslands.

16/04/2018

Agriculture

Agroforestry bolsters biodiversity and villages in Sri Lanka

Visitors to the Sinharaja Man and Biosphere Reserve, Sri Lanka’s largest remaining primary rainforest, could easily miss the fact that adjoining the forest’s entrance is the old and thriving community of Pitekele. Yet on foot, it takes just a quick turn and a climb over a boulder or two to exit the UNESCO World Heritage Site and enter into this bucolic village landscape of fallow rice paddies, sprawling tea gardens, and homes surrounded by some of the most diverse, and biodiverse, gardens in the whole region.

12/04/2018

Climate Change

Forests burn across India as temperatures rise

The beginning of summer in India has arrived with a spate of forest fires across the country. Fires are raging in the dry deciduous forests of southern and western India. Sporadic fires have begun in the sub-tropical forests of the Himalayas as well.

05/04/2018

Decoding Nature

Snow crab saga: a story that demonstrates the complexities of climate change

There’s much more to snow crab than their tasty legs and claws. Especially so in the last few years as these large, cold water Arctic crabs have started showing up in the Barents Sea, where they’ve never been before. The snow crab’s story is a harbinger of climate change complexities on the horizon, and much more.

20/03/2018

Livelihoods Under Threat

Farmers’ plight: Leaving land for a lesser life

Scanty rainfall, depleting groundwater levels, barren farmlands and mass migration of farmers to cities for better livelihood – this is the reality of most of rural India today. Many parts of India are witnessing this growing trend of farmers leaving their lands in search of jobs in cities. Andhra Pradesh is no different with several districts of the state seeing a rising rate in outmigration of farmers. Around 4.87 lakh people are reported to have left Anantapur district as per last April’s count by the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA), a pan-India confederation of farmers’ organisations. That’s more than 10 percent of the district’s population!

17/03/2018

Collateral Damage?

Rohingya find a precarious perch on deforested hills

The settling of nearly 600,000 Rohingya refugees in a forested area has led to complete deforestation and precipitous drop in the water table, leaving the refugees deeply vulnerable and destroying a small ecosystem.

06/03/2018

Collateral Damage?

Why your tourist toilet habits are bad for locals – and the environment

Research suggests that in some locations up to 40% of water is consumed by tourists. Tourists tend to splash out far more per day on average than local residents, who are often outcompeted by industry for water access. Using limited freshwater supplies to flush tourists’ toilets means less for residents’ drinking, cleaning and cooking needs.

21/02/2018

Climate Change

When rhododendrons bloom in winter

Something unusual happened this year in the hills of Uttarakhand in northern India — the rhododendron bloomed in January. The blooming, celebrated as flower day (phool sankranti) across the Himalayan state, usually heralds the onset of spring. But the blooming of the flower two-three months early, due to an unusually warm spell, could be a result of climate change, some researchers say.

18/02/2018

Climate Change

Tree-dwelling animals can ‘climb’ away from climate change, study finds

Animals that live in trees in the tropics are likely to be better at crossing mountains and dealing with climate change compared to ground-dwelling animals, a new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment suggests.

15/02/2018

Water Resources

River turns drain, drowns villages in sorrow

Till four decades ago, Ghaggar river in Haryana and Punjab was the lifeline of the villages along its course. Incessant dumping of sewage and industrial effluents, however, has choked the life out of it and has reduced it to a drain or nullah, as locals call it, now. Its water has become unusable and those who come in contact with it, mostly farmers, contract skin ailments. Water-borne diseases such as jaundice and diarrhoea are common in settlements along the Ghaggar. Early greying of hair in children is another disturbing trend. Even the underground water has turned black or yellow in many places.

12/02/2018

Decoding Nature

The deepest-dwelling fish in the sea is small, pink and delicate

Thanks to movies and nature videos, many people know that bizarre creatures live in the ocean’s deepest, darkest regions. They include viperfish with huge mouths and big teeth, and anglerfish, which have bioluminescent lures that make their own light in a dark world. However, the world’s deepest-dwelling fish – known as a hadal snailfish – is small, pink and completely scaleless. Its skin is so transparent that you can see right through to its liver. Nonetheless, hadal snailfish are some of the most successful animals found in the ocean’s deepest places.

09/02/2018

Navigation