Climate Emergency

In September 2020, India passed the Farm Laws without any multi-stakeholder, multi-disciplinary consultations or parliamentary debates. There were sweeping protests across India against these laws, which favour private investment, unregulated markets, and contract farming, among other changes. Experts feel this will push commercially viable but intensive agriculture which will not favour the farmer or the environment. 

India is home to over 18,000 species of plants including, 160 crop species (with several thousands of varieties), 1,500 wild edible plant species, nearly 9,500 plant species of ethnobotanical and medicinal purposes. 

This podcast episode traces how India’s agrobiodiversity was destroyed and continues to be under threat. We look at alternatives and examine what ecologically sustainable farming looks like.
In this podcast episode, Mahima Jain reports from Pudukkottai, Tamil Nadu on alternative models of farming that farmer organizations are promoting. 

Additional reading:

Agricultural Subsidies: Study Prepared for XV Finance Commission
Biodiversity in Farming, European Court of Auditors, May 2019
Assessing the sustainability of post-Green Revolution cereals in India
The impact of the Green Revolution on indigenous crops of India

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While scientists discovered a new snake species in the southern Indian state of Tamilnadu, little did they know that this discovery would unearth a 185-year old problem of name mix-ups done in the past. In 2016, Deepak Veerappan, working with the Natural History Museum in London, received a new snake species from Tamilnadu. It was considered similar to banded racer (a widespread species). For this, they had to describe the snake, look at finer details, and also compare it to a banded racer. When they looked at the morphology and DNA of the new species, they found it to be different from banded racer. When they probed further into banded racer for comparisons, they found that banded racer was wrongly classified in the category of wolf snake. And all this mix-up happened due to Albert Gunther, a scientist, working with the Natural History Museum between 1875 and 1895.

The specimens, snakeskin collection and paintings in the Natural History Museum, London and Bodleian Library, Oxford University among other repositories were analysed to deconstruct this. Though discovering a new species is not uncommon among researchers, this research traces back to historical archives and modern science to break a taxonomic confusion.

The story is based on a research paper published in the journal of ‘Vertebrate Zoology. Sharada Balasubramanian, an environmental journalist, spoke to authors Deepak Veerappan and Surya Narayanan, and renowned herpetologist Varad Giri, for this story.

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In April 2020 India’s environment ministry gave wildlife clearance to two infrastructure projects waiting for approval in Goa. This was another step towards allowing trees to be cut in the forests of Mollem that is part of the UNESCO global biodiversity hotspot–the Western Ghats.

In Goa, this move was met with strong resistance. What initially started out as an online campaign due to Covid-19 restrictions soon bubbled into an offline one once they began to ease.

The Save Mollem movement is one of the many local citizen-led movements in India and highlights the increasing concerns of the young at a time when climate change threatens their future. In the process, the citizens of Goa also showed the rest of India how to make the environment political.

A year on, we look back at the movement, and speak to Karleen De Mello, an advocate based in South Goa, on how the movement began and where it stands now.

This podcast was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

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If you ever visit a vegetable market late in the day you will see mostly rotten vegetables and leftovers thrown around everywhere.  Some of it is stored in cold rooms but most of it, unfortunately, ends in dump yards. But one such exception is the Bowenpally market yard in Hyderabad. It got a mention in Prime Minister Modi's Man ki Baat.

In this episode, we talk to Shruti Ahuja director of Ahuja engineering services private limited from  Hyderabad who has been instrumental in developing the biogas plant which helps in generating energy with the vegetable waste.

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In a recent paper published in the Journal of Hydrology, scientists looked at climate change and their impact on river runoffs in the Dokriani Glacier in the Central Himalaya. To understand the impact of climate change on these glaciers, it was crucial to collect and analyse regional climate data from the field.

It was found, over forty years of data analysis, that the glacier was in steady state before 2000. The temperature changes impact the glaciers, and as a result, the snowmelt and ice melt disappears earlier. This, in turn, impacts the runoff of the river.

Experts also talk about debris cover in this paper. The lower part of the glacier has rocks that come down to the glacier when there is an avalanche. Scientists worldwide say that perhaps this debris cover could prevent the glacier from impacts of climate change. In the last 5-6 decades, glaciers have been losing their mass but the impact of climate change on melting runoff into rivers depends on the local climate. This study quantifies the snow and glacier melt at local conditions and looks at how the river runoff would be impacted in the downstream regions. This would help in planning the water resources and flood risk reduction in the rivers. As farmers heavily depend on these rivers for sowing, and this happens on a very timely basis, this data would help in water management in future. 

In this episode, independent environmental journalist Sharada Balasubramanian talks to Smriti Srivastava, a research scholar from the Indian Institute of Technology, Indore, and Mohammad Farooq Azam, a glaciologist and professor from IIT Indore.

Being an editorially independent platform, we rely on you to help us bring in untold stories that have the potential for social change. Do consider supporting us!

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In a recent paper published in the Journal of Glaciology, scientists have reported their findings from the longest ever field data from the entire Himalayan range for the first time. Chhota Sigri, a key benchmark glacier or an indicator glacier for the Lahaul-Spiti region in Himachal Pradesh, was studied to understand the effect of climate change. The data looked at various components of the glacier like mass balance, ice velocity, high altitude meteorology, glacier runoff, and their interactions with climate change.

The glacier is losing its ice mass like other glaciers in the world. However, it’s not as bad as previous studies have pointed out.

Also, based on The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that the Himalayan glaciers would be gone soon, it was found that the glaciers would not really disappear as predicted or talked about. The study revealed that glacier health depends on fluctuations in air temperature but summer-monsoon snowfall plays a key role in maintaining the mass of the glacier. If such summer snowfalls continue to arrive, the glaciers would sustain. Their patterns were analysed over different time periods to understand what could be the possible factors that could drive the glaciers to disappear.

Over the past two decades, there was a significant slowdown inflow of the lower half of the glacier, and this was directly related to glacier mass loss or thickness reduction. However, at the higher altitudes, ice flow didn’t change much, indicating less impact of warming at higher altitudes. The glacier river runoff is tightly controlled by the air temperature, which translates to the fact that a warmer world would likely be associated with higher runoff in the Himalayan rivers. 

In this episode, independent environmental journalist Sharada Balasubramanian talks to Arindan Mandal, a PhD student at JNU’s School of Environmental Sciences, and Mohammad Farooq Azam, a glaciologist, and professor at IIT, Indore.

Being an editorially independent platform, we rely on you to help us bring in untold stories that have the potential for social change. Do consider supporting us!

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During the COVID lockdown, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate change gave many virtual environmental clearances with little or no consultation with the public. Three such environmental clearances in Mollem, Goa have given rise to Save Mollem Campaign by youth and environmental activists in Goa. They have been advocating to get the clearances cancelled and save the pristine Mollem from “development". Recently, some of the young protestors have also been arrested for their non-violent protests to stop these projects.

To discuss these issues Rakesh Kamal, host of Climate Emergency talks to two young activists Gilbert Soyus and Leandra Do Carmo Souza to understand the Save Mollem campaign.

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Fans, one of the most used electrical appliances in India, has the potential to reduce energy demand and carbon emissions. Fans consume about 20% of the electricity in Indian households. And this number is growing rapidly, said a study from a Pune-based NGO Prayas. Versa Drives, a Coimbatore-based company made Superfans, became one of the earliest companies to produce super-efficient fans. This fan runs on just 35 watts as compared to normal fans which consume almost 75-90 watts. As the fan industry is growing, and the energy efficiency norms have changed, there is hope that energy-efficient fans could capture the mainstream fan market, and reduce the demand for energy in India.

In this episode independent journalist Shardha speaks with Sundar Muruganandham, Maheshwari Krishnasamy and R Mahendran of Versa Drives and Toine van Megen, Co-Founder of Auroville Consulting to know all about these Energy efficient fans.

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In August this year, the Madras High Court delivered a rare, but decisive victory to the people of Thoothukudi in their fight against an industrial giant in their quarter-century battle. Thoothukudi is an industrial seaside town of 700,000 facing the Bay of Bengal in South India. The court not only denied Vedanta, the multi-billion-dollar global mining and metals conglomerate permission to resume its shuttered copper smelter, it also held the company responsible for widespread environmental degradation and severe health consequences suffered by the people of Thoothukudi as a result of sulphur dioxide poisoning. 

This episode on the Climate Emergency podcast reported by journalist Kunal Shankar captures why this court order is significant to India’s environmental jurisprudence and how opposition to Vedanta has influenced the social and political dynamics of Tamil Nadu.

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In August this year, the Madras High Court delivered a rare, but decisive victory to the people of Thoothukudi in their fight against an industrial giant in their quarter century battle. Thoothukudi is an industrial seaside town of 700,000 facing the Bay of Bengal in South India. The court not only denied Vedanta, the multi-billion-dollar global mining and metals conglomerate permission to resume its shuttered copper smelter, it also held the company responsible for widespread environmental degradation and severe health consequences suffered by the people of Thoothukudi as a result of Sulphur dioxide poisoning.

This episode on the Climate Emergency podcast reported by journalist Kunal Shankar captures the genesis of Vedanta’s entry into Thoothukudi and the beginnings of what has come to be a highly effective grassroots environmental campaign.

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