Ecology and Environment

Jog falls in Western Ghats

 These dams have had a profound negative impact on communities and ecology upstream and downstream. While promised benefits of these dams (irrigation, hydro-power or flood control) have been overstated, numerous interrelated and complex negative impacts have simply not been studied or documented. Nonetheless, communities and ecosystems continue paying huge prices of these impacts.

The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) is a public interest research and advocacy organisation based in New Delhi. CSE researches into, lobbies for and communicates the urgency of development that is both sustainable and equitable.

This certificate course is designed as a hands-on 'boot-camp', and targets those interested in a career in mainstream or niche news media, development communication, civil society campaign and advocacy initiatives, and industry CSR, among others.

The pocket book provides an overview of the oceans,their formation, characteristics, and the dynamics that determine their evolution. It also contains information on how the interested reader can pursue these topics further through books and websites.

The pocket book is divided into the following chapters:

The Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM) is a sectoral management institute, which constantly endeavours to evolve knowledge useful for the managers in the area of Forest, Environment and Natural Resources Management and allied sectors.

Rainforest Rendezvous is a great opportunity to photograph the less photographed creatures. Under the guidance of renowned herpetologist, researcher and conservationist Gowri Shankar, learn a great deal about the elusive wildlife in the depths of the Western Ghats. He would share his extensive knowledge about the rainforests and their conservation and lead us on the trail to discover the myriad forms of life. If there’s a rescue call from a nearby village, we’ll even accompany him on the mission to relocate the snake to its natural habitat.

Article courtesy: Environment Support Group

On 2nd May 2011, Indian Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh finally approved the diversion of over 3,000 acres of forest land, of the 4,000 acres demanded, for a steel-power-port complex of the POSCO India project.

Earlier, on 31 January 2011, Ramesh had approved the environmental and coastal regulation zone clearances that the project had secured in 2007, even though all these clearances were obtained by fraud, and thus illegal, as proved by two independent investigative committees that he appointed last year.

The river, along with its estuarine reach, provides the much-needed green lungs to the city in the form of mangroves. Neglect of this river was the main cause of the catastrophic floods in Mumbai on 26 July, 2005, which claimed nearly 1,000 lives. In what could be a monumental urban transformation initiative to be undertaken anywhere in India yet, ORF has proposed a grand vision for the reclamation of Mithi River. The study report and a documentary film ’Making the sewer a river again - Why Mumbai must reclaim its Mithi’ on the dreadful conditions of the river, was released in May, 2011 in Mumbai.

Based on evidence from this inquiry, the study presents a critical analysis of the environmental and social impact information of POSCO's steel-power-port components to expose the fact that regulatory agencies have inadequate information on the short term and long term impacts of the project on the basis of the information that the company supplied to them.  It also provides historical evidence

European Beech
Photo: Forestryimages.org/University of West Hungary/Norbert Frank

 Although there are other local-and regional-scale forest canopy maps, the new map is the first that spans the entire globe based on one uniform method.

The work - based on data collected by NASA's ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites - should help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world’s forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere. Michael Lefsky of the Colorado State University described his results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.