Morvarid Fernandez
Morvarid Fernandez writes: Our crops failed, cattle graze the dry paddy straw, and fields remain fallow because there is not enough water. Bore wells are deeper, the lines longer, and the black blister bug – usually a bane – simply did not appear last year. The monsoon of 2015, you ask. But there just wasn’t one….
Read More about Winds of change – A view from NersaHaving endured three successive droughts, the region of Bundelkhand in Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh continues to be on edge. Governments in both the states have failed to do their bit. Here’s a press conference video and interview of Yogendra Yadav, who leads the Swaraj Abhiyan movement, which recently held an extended survey of the region….
Read More about Video & Report: Yogendra Yadav on the unfolding famine in Bundelkhand and the need for a farmers’ politics
The Times of India reports: Distress conditions forced about 6 lakh people from Rayalaseema, where the major crop is groundnut, to move to cities in 2015. It works out to migration of around 1,600 persons per day last year. Although the rate dipped in November and December due to the ongoing cultivation, the trend continues….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #79This short animated video on inequality from Krishi TV shows what it really means when the top 1% of India owns half of the country’s wealth. The benefits of India’s economic growth of the past years have been largely appropriated by this small group, at the expense of the welfare of the majority of Indians….
Read More about Video: What it really means when the top 1% own half of India’s wealthIndiaSpend reports: Indian farms depend too much on increasingly uncertain rainfall: while there was not enough rain during the pre-monsoon kharif season (July-October) last year, there has been vastly excess rainfall during this rabi season (October-March). For instance, Eastern Rajasthan, the farm belt of the desert state, had more than 14 times the normal rainfall during this pre-monsoon season….
Read More about A Farmer’s Life Crisis — And India’s Farming Predicament
Melting asphalt distorts road markings in New Delhi, May 27, 2015
Harish Tyagi/EPA
IISc scientists report that minimum temperatures show “more pronounced” changes, compared to maximum temperatures in India. While maximum temperatures showed “a significant upward trend” in post-monsoon months in most regions, there was a rise in minimum temperatures across India in most seasons. The number of “significant trends” was greater for minimum temperatures than for maximum….
Read More about IISc study shows minimum temperatures rising in India
The hottest year in recorded history is coming to a close with a wave of extreme weather and ecosystem shifts, from unprecedented flooding in the United Kingdom to dangerous deluges in South America. Looking back at 2015, it’s clear that such extremes are not the exception, but the rule for the last year and beyond….
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #78
Raiot.in
If there is one book which speaks of all mining blighted societies, then it’s this one. The book by Hartman de Souza breaks all the boundaries of genres and gets its politics and economics right on. At once travelogue, investigative journalism and family memoir, Eat Dust maps the culture, topography and cultural diversity of Goa….
Read More about New Book: Eat Dust – Mining and Greed in Goa, by Hartman de Souza
The Hindu
Vasanth Srinivasan of The Hindu quotes former AAP leader Yogendra Yadav as saying, “there is a crying need for environmental politics” in India, but with the following caveat. “If green politics does not restrict itself as urban environmental activism but emerges as a binding agent of various marginalised groups and concerns, it definitely has a future in India.”…
Read More about Yogendra Yadav and Vandana Shiva call for a green party in IndiaDr. M.S. Swaminathan writes: It’s unfortunate that industrialised nations are so inward looking in the area of agricultural trade, particularly since hardly 2 to 3% of their population depend on agriculture for their livelihood. Nairobi has paved the way for famines of the future. (Also read: Digest of articles on the recently concluded WTO talks)…
Read More about M.S. Swaminathan: The WTO has paved the way for famines of the future
As many as 50 million people across the world face potential hunger, disease, and water shortages by early 2016 if countries do not act immediately, declared Oxfam on Monday, addressing those nations predicted to be ravaged by this year’s Super El Niño as well as wealthy governments indebted to those most vulnerable to climate change…
Read More about NEWS UPDATE #77
Dead mango trees at the author's farm during the drought of 2011-2015
Uma Shankari
Chittoor-based farmer and activist Uma Shankari writes: After the year 2010, for the first time we’ve had good rains; in fact exceptionally good rains, a side effect of the Chennai disaster. My husband used to say, “If Chennai drowns, we’ll be saved”. This time it came true. We’ve not seen such heavy rains in twenty, thirty years….
Read More about Did Marx call the peasant an idiot? He was right, I am an idiot.
Rahul Alvares
Meet this year’s Earth Heroes, winners of the Sanctuary Wildlife Awards 2015, who form a part of the small tribe of people who keep our planet wonderful. Men and women who work with steadfast passion to protect what remains of wild nature. (Pictured above: Two of the award-winners – Goa-based environmentalists Claude and Norma Alvares)….
Read More about Earth Heroes: The Sanctuary Wildlife Awards 2015
Indianexpress.com
According to a recent survey, air pollution in Delhi is one-and-a-half times worse than in Beijing, which has always been among the world’s most polluted cities. This feature looks at Delhi’s unprecedented air pollution, which is endangering the health of its citizens, especially young children, and making the city a textbook example of urban dysfunction….
Read More about Special: Delhi’s alarming pollution problem
Columnist Tushar Dhara writes: Environmentalists, urban geographers, social activists and other such critically engaged citizens have consistently been talking about the perils of a development which ignores ecological sustainability and social justice — only to be told that they were against progress. A more damning criticism is “anti-national”, supposedly working on behalf of foreign interests….
Read More about A Message From The Chennai Floods: It’s Not Anti-National To Question ‘Development’
Chris Mooney reports: “India is moving to the center stage of global energy,” IEA executive director Fatih Birol says. “All the numbers are indicating that India will be the number one country in terms of coal consumption and oil demand growth worldwide. India will also have more than 20 percent of the solar PV worldwide.”…
Read More about Why India is about to move to the ‘center stage’ of world energy
Even if all emission pledges are fully implemented, temperature rise by 2100 will exceed 2oC, and may be in the range 3-4oC. The additional carbon space of 1,000 GtCO2 will fill by 2040, just 5 years later than had emissions continued in a business-as-usual manner. Clearly, the pledges are too little and have come too late….
Read More about From Hopelesshagen to Flop21: the shenanigans of climate change negotiations
There is no threat to any society, anywhere, that is remotely comparable to that of climate change. How can people summon so much indignation on so many matters and yet remain indifferent to a process that threatens their very existence? Nowhere is the disjunction more confounding than in India, which will be among the worst-affected….
Read More about Video: The Great Derangement – Amitav Ghosh on climate change
Commuters carry their motorbikes through a waterlogged street in Chennai
AP
“Studies show that with rising global temperatures, the intensity of rain spells is increasing, both in the southwest and northeast monsoons,” says M Rajeevan, director, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. While no single weather event can said to be directly affected by global warming, the probability of heavy rain increases in the climate change scenario….
Read More about Update: Chennai floods and climate change
An image from flooded Kotturpuram
PTI
Chennai experienced exceptionally heavy rainfall in 1969, 1976, 1985, 1996, 1998, 2005 and now in 2015. Even a decadal frequency is higher than the occurrence of extreme rain events in the first half of the 20th century. It’s likely that at least some of these six extreme rain events had the fingerprint of climate change….
Read More about Climate Change Brought the Rains, Our ‘Development’ Brought the Chaos
