PLOS-One: Climate change in the Himalayas, a biodiversity hotspot, home of many sacred landscapes, and the source of eight largest rivers of Asia, is likely to impact the well-being of ~20% of humanity. However, despite the extraordinary environmental, cultural, and socio-economic importance of the Himalayas, and despite their rapidly increasing ecological degradation, not much is [...]
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Assam Tribune: Ignoring the crucial linkages of a river’s upstream, midstream, and downstream flows can endanger not just the river, but human communities and ecology sustained by it. A disregard of ‘environmental flows,’ by construction of dams, has already harmed many rivers in the Western Ghats, giving rise to political as well as environmental issues. [...]
Jagaran Post: Members belonging to various parties on Monday demanded immediate intervention of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to save the river Ganga and make it pollution free at the earliest. “I demand that the Prime Minister should intervene to save the Ganga which is not just a river but our lifeline and part of our [...]
Environmental Research Web: University of California, Berkeley, scientists are drilling into ancient sediments at the bottom of Northern California’s Clear Lake for clues that could help them better predict how today’s plants and animals will adapt to climate change and increasing population. The lake sediments are among the world’s oldest, containing records of biological change [...]
UN-Habitat: has developed a checklist for mainstreaming gender under the second phase of Cities and Climate Change Initiatives (CCCI) initiated by UN-Habitat in 20 cities of 13 countries. The check list is being tested in different countries and Nepal (Kathmandu Valley) is one of those few countries chosen by UN-Habitat. The purpose of testing the [...]
Environment News Service: India is considering integrating Israeli water technologies into a national initiative to clean up the polluted Ganges River, which provides water for 40 percent of India’s population in 11 states through which it flows. Indian engineers, scientists and officials from water technology companies visited Israel late last month to explore the possibilities. [...]
The News Pakistan: A Bangladeshi disaster management expert, Khurshid Alam, on Friday emphasised the need for training the local community in playing an effective role in recovering from natural calamities and minimising the adverse effects of an emergency. Local knowledge should be incorporated in designing a disaster management plan. It is very important to learn [...]
Daily Mail: When it comes to conservation of river Ganga, the government seems to be moving at snail’s pace. Even 10 months after issuing a notification to declare 135 km stretch of the river from its origin at Gaumukh as eco-sensitive zone (ESZ), the ministry of environment and forests has failed to finalise it. The [...]
ABC Science (Anna Salleh ): The greenhouse effect is accelerating the global water cycle almost twice the rate predicted by climate change models, say researchers. Oceanographer Dr Susan Wijffels of the CSIRO and colleagues report their findings today in the journal Science. “The models predict a 4 to 5 per cent amplification of the global [...]
UNECE: The Third workshop on water and climate change in transboundary basins: Making adaptation work will bring together more than 140 participants from all over the world on 25 and 26 April 2012 in Geneva to discuss how to prevent conflict in transboundary basins over dwindling water resources by cooperating at the transboundary level in [...]
New Scientist: As Arctic sea ice breaks apart, massive amounts of methane could be released into the atmosphere from the cold waters beneath. High concentrations of the greenhouse gas have been recorded in the air above cracks in the ice. This could be evidence of yet another positive feedback on the warming climate – leading [...]
CO2Science: The authors write that “currently there is much discussion regarding the impact of climate change and the vagaries of the weather, in particular extreme weather events,” which climate alarmists generally contend will increase in both frequency and severity in response to global warming. And in light of this significant climate of interest, plus the [...]
Time: India’s Wular Lake, a popular picnic and tourist spot nestled in the Kashmir Valley, is an unlikely site for conflict. But India’s plan to build a structure on the Jhelum River at the mouth of the lake that will allow it to release water during the river’s lean winter months has outraged neighboring Pakistan, [...]
Nature: Despite a warming climate, some glaciers in southern Asia are holding their own. By: Sid Perkins While most of the world’s glaciers are shedding ice at a brisk clip, many in one mountain range along the rim of the Tibetan plateau have been posting measurable gains in recent years, a new study confirms1. The [...]
BBC News: By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News Some glaciers on Asia’s Karakoram mountains are defying the global trend and getting thicker, say researchers. A French team used satellite data to show that glaciers in part of the Karakoram range, to the west of the Himalayan region, are putting on mass. The reason is [...]
Alertnet: Water is key to food security. Meeting mounting food needs of a burgeoning population increasingly depends on efficient use of the water. That is possible if people are educated about its prudent use. According to the a UN Water, “Food security exists when all people, at all times, have physical, social and economic access [...]
Farmers Weekly: The government’s chief scientific adviser has told Farmers Weekly that farmers should be convinced that global warming is a reality. John Beddington condemned climate scientists who refuse to accept that climate change is happening as all the evidence points towards climate change in a number of forms. “I would completely disagree with those [...]
Kashmir Life (Srinagar, India): Tonnes of trash dumped in Indian Kashmir during an annual religious pilgrimage pose a serious threat to the region’s water supplies and flora, environmental groups warn. The trash is dumped during an annual trek to a shrine in the Amarnath cave, 3,800 meters (12,800 feet) up in the Himalayas, which is [...]
Press Information Bureau (GoI): The Prime Minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh addressed the inaugural ceremony of India Water Week today in New Delhi. Following is the text of Prime Minister’s address on the occasion: “I am very happy to have this opportunity to inaugurate the India Water Week that is focussing this year on the important [...]
DowntoEarth: AFTER spending 6 months in the Indian Himalayas, my pessimistic attitude towards the developing world has eased somewhat. My experience has also led me to believe that the current ideology needs to be changed in order to restore the environment to the people, alleviating some of the everyday drudgery in their lives while preserving [...]
National Geographic: A recent study may warn of more widespread threats to water quality. As global warming triggers heavier rainfall and faster snowmelt in the Arctic, Inuit communities in Canada are reporting more cases of illness attributed to pathogens that have washed into surface water and groundwater, according to a new study. The findings corroborate [...]
Seattletimes: Environmentalists and several major insurers argue policymakers must move quickly to cut carbon emissions and devise strategies to adapt to climate impacts. WASHINGTON — Scientists are increasingly confident that the uptick in heat waves and heavier rainfall is linked to human-caused greenhouse-gas emissions, posing a heightened risk to the world’s population, according to two [...]
Economic Times (WASHINGTON): It’s believed that global warming is quite a recent phenomenon, but a new study has suggested that the world’s oceans began warming more than 100 years ago, much earlier than previously believed. The findings, published in the journal Nature Climate Change, could help scientists better understand the Earth’s record of sea-level rise, [...]
IPS: By Stephen Leahy: CAIRNS, Australia, Apr 3, 2012 (Tierramérica) – Extreme weather is fast becoming the new normal. Canada and much of the United States experienced summer temperatures during winter this year, confirming the findings of a new report on extreme weather. For two weeks this March most of North America baked under extraordinarily [...]
NZHERALD.Co.Nz: New research on corals in the Pacific islands of Kiribati suggests some reefs are more likely than others to withstand ocean warming. With tropical sea temperatures forecast to rise by between one and three degrees Celsius by the end of this century, it had been feared that all corals might be at risk [...]
China’s coming water crisis threatens growth and stability The Yarlung Tsampo River has hurtled down from the Himalayas for millennia, cleaving the mountain range in two and creating one of the world’s steepest and longest canyons. The river forms a huge bend in the remote southeastern corner of the Tibet before flowing into India and [...]
SANDRP Delhi: On World Water Day 2012, the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers & People (SANDRP) is happy to publish its new report: Water Sector Options for India in a Changing Climate. The report highlights that for the poorest sections, also most vulnerable in the climate change context, the water, food, livelihood and energy [...]
BBC (Navin Singh Khadka Environment reporter): A supreme court order in India asking the government to link more than 30 rivers and divert waters to parched areas has sparked concerns in neighbouring countries. Bangladesh says it would be hardest hit because it is a downstream country to two major rivers that flow from India. New [...]
Times of India, Dipannita Das: Climate change presents a unique opportunity to revisit our plans to develop and manage water resources, besides helping frame policies and practices, says a report titled ‘water sector options for India in a changing climate,’ published recently by South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People (SANDRP). The SANDRP is [...]
CORDIS: When permafrost thaws, it releases greenhouse gases into parts of the Arctic, exacerbating the effects of climate change. And now, detailed satellite images have picked up on changes in land surfaces at northern latitudes, indicating that there are worrying levels of thawing permafrost. The findings were made by European Space Agency (ESA) scientists using [...]
APC- Alan Finlay, Shawna Finnegan, Johannesburg: In collaboration with the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), APC is releasing a series of reports discussing opportunities for information and communication technology (ICT) to help individuals and communities adapt to water scarcity as a result of climate change. Climate change is having a profound and worsening effect on [...]
By Sujoy Dhar, IPSNews, KOLKATA – Sahara Bibi, a 47-year-old poor Muslim woman living on one of the climate- impacted islands of Eastern India’s fragile Sundarbans archipelago in West Bengal state, was forced to pull her two young sons out of school and send one of them to the Southern state of Kerala to earn [...]
The Nation, ISLAMABAD – On the concluding session of a three-day workshop on the occasion of World Water Day, experts said that Pakistan has done nothing to store water in past 45 years. The workshop titled Framing Responses: Journalists’ Workshop on Climate Change Impacts and Challenges was organised by Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) [...]
The News, Islamabad: While the United Nations announced this March 6 that the international target to halve the number of people without access to safe drinking water has been met five years before the 2015 deadline, in Pakistan water worries are rapidly growing. While the UN estimates that more than one in six people worldwide [...]
The Himalayan, KATHMANDU: The International Water Management Institute (IWMI), Nepal office, has been named for the Stockholm Water Prize Laureate for 2012. Awarded by the Stockholm International Water Institute, this prestigious prize honors individuals, institutions or organisations whose work contributes broadly to the conservation and protection of water resources and to the improved health of [...]
NASA: In a speech on March 22, 2012, marking World Water Day, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton launched a new partnership to improve water security. The U.S. Water Partnership is a public-private partnership that seeks to mobilize U.S.-based knowledge, expertise and resources to improve water security around the world, particularly in those countries most [...]
By Rashme Sehgal, Deccan Chronicle: India has the world’s largest water infrastructure, but the poorest water delivery system in the world.On World Water Day 2012, water experts are demanding a dramatic revamp of the present water management strategy. Unlike the US and Australia, which have built over 500 cubic meters of water storage per capita, [...]
100 days to go to a conference and a summit that UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon has described as a “once in a life time opportunity”. Whether this event, coming 20 years after the historic Rio Earth Summit of 1992, delivers transformational change will depend on governments, but it also depends on you. If the UN [...]
Low-tech experiment produces accurate data on threat to plant biodiversity and may also help with carbon capture. The fresh snow covers the Aubonne valley overlooking Lake Geneva. Clumps of beech, maple and juniper trees cling to the slopes of the Jura highlands. Scientists from Lausanne Polytechnic (EPFL) and Switzerland‘s Forest, Snow and Landscape Research Institute [...]
Urban air pollution is set to become the top environmental cause of mortality worldwide by 2050, says a new report by France’s Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The worst countries affected will be China and India. The report released March 15 was issued with a strong warning, “Act now or face costly consequences.” [...]
Case studies on responses to too much and too little water in the Hindu Kush Himalayas. With increased climate variability increasing the risk of floods and droughts, problems of too much or too little water are affecting the lives and livelihoods of the people in the Hindu Kush Himalayan region. Climate change is expected to [...]
The claim that global warming and climate change aren’t real gets increasingly ridiculous each year. For one, the science just makes it so much more obvious as it develops (but, truthfully, it’s been obvious for years). Additionally, the real-world climate disasters just keep increasing. In the past two years, for example, 42 million Asians have [...]
OECD report says pollution will become biggest cause of premature death, killing an estimated 3.6 million people a year by 2050. Urban air pollution is set to become the biggest environmental cause of premature death in the coming decades, overtaking even such mass killers as poor sanitation and a lack of clean drinking water, according [...]
Australian climate scientists are concerned over the fact that the nation’s cool and wet summer could lead to confusion about whether climate change is real, according to a media report. The last few months have seen floods in New South Wales, Queensland and Victoria, with river systems overflowing and dams filled to the brim, and [...]
Water problems in many parts of the world are chronic and without a crackdown on waste will worsen as demand for food rises and climate change intensifies, the UN warned on Sunday. Issued on the eve of a six-day gathering on world water issues, the United Nations, in a massive report, said many daunting challenges [...]
Housed within 55,000 glaciers in the Himalaya Mountains sits 40 percent of the world’s fresh water. The massive ice sheets are melting at a faster-than-ever pace due to climate change, posing possible dire consequences for the continent of Asia and the entire world stand, and especially for the villages and cities that sit on the [...]
Before Apa became a legendary Sherpa mountaineer, he was a humble Himalayan potato farmer who worked his fields in the Everest foothills until without warning, raging floodwaters swallowed his farm. The flash flood — unleashed when a mountain lake fed by melting glacier waters burst its banks — destroyed homes, bridges and a hydroelectric plant. [...]
A freshwater ecologist at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, Smol studies lake sediments to understand climatic and environmental change. Nature Outlook asks him to share his experience. What can we learn from lake sediments? One of the biggest challenges in environmental science is the lack of long-term data, so we have to use indirect [...]
Mr. Cyril R Raphael: In this article Mr. Raphael writes the agony of mountains in general by taking an example of overall development in one of the Indian mountain states called Uttarakhand. His discourse covers the social and economic development, governance, leadership, availability of basic amenities, health, education, livelihood, effectiveness of information and communication, role [...]
In one of the articles published in 2009, by Koji Matsuo, Kosuke Heki from the Dept. of Natural History Sci., Hokkaido University, Japan mentioned that a substantial amount of glacial ice is melting in the Asian high mountains (AHM). It stated that the Gravimetry by GRACE satellite during 2003–2009 suggests the average ice loss rate [...]
Sacred natural sites are areas of land or water having special spiritual significance. And the Eastern Himalayas is home to many such sites like Mount Kailash (Tibet), Lumbini (Nepal), Taksang (Bhutan), Gosaikunda (Nepal), Gurudongmar Lake (Sikkim). These sites besides having spiritual and religious significance also have biodiversity conservation value due to restrictions on cutting of [...]
Glaciers around the world may hold clues about how Earth’s remote ecosystems have been influenced by the industrial revolution. They capture large amounts of carbon-containing dissolved organic matter (DOM) that is later released to downstream ecosystems where it provides food for microorganisms at the base of the aquatic food web. While many scientists believe the [...]
Climate stakeholders of SDPI-HBS Pak-India Track II Dialogue adopt unanimous resolution. Deliberating on water, energy, adaptation, gender equity and livelihoods, the climate stakeholders adopted a resolution on the concluding day of ‘Track-II Dialogue on (Climate) Change for peace’ which was jointly organized by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) and Heinrich Boll Stiftung (HBS). They stressed [...]
National Geographic: Villagers discover that it is easier to store water in ice than in a reservoir, and less is lost to evaporation. This story is part of a National Geographic News series on global water issues. A remote Indian village is responding to global warming-induced water shortages by creating large masses of ice, or [...]
Improved integrated water management practices could increase agricultural production, protect natural systems and improve regional food security A major new survey of the likely effects of climate change on India’s water resources identifies huge challenges to maintaining adequate supplies in the next few decades, but argues that these can be overcome with an integrated, multi-sectorial [...]
Improved integrated water management practices could increase agricultural production, protect natural systems and be a ‘game changer’ for national food security A major new survey of the likely effects of climate change on India’s water resources published today identifies huge challenges to maintaining adequate supplies in the next few decades, but argues that these can [...]
New Delhi: Farmers in the South-Indian state of Tamil Nadu are switching from paddy cultivation to panning for salt. On the other extreme of the sub-continent, hundreds of thousands of people live in harm’s way in the event of a glacial lake outburst-triggered flood, or GLOFs as they are called. Something sinister connects the [...]
Suman K A : Close to a billion population on this planet lack access to safe drinking water, modern energy services and food to lead healthy and productive lives; a great majority of them residing in the SSA and South Asian regions. The problem is likely to be exacerbated with ever growing population, climate change, [...]
The best reassurance that Pakistan can have is full Indian compliance with the provisions of the Indus Waters Treaty. This article is not about the complex political or strategic reasons that the water establishment in the government and/or the army in Pakistan may have for projecting water as a new core issue between that country [...]
