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Explore a featured selection of my writing work below.
Down To Earth •

Many provinces experiencing highest emissions since 2003: Scientist monitoring Canadian wildfires

Throughout Canada, more than 400 wildfires have led to mass evacuation across the country. While every year, Canada experiences a wildfire season between May and October, this level of destruction is unprecedented and is touted to be the worst in history.“Persistent hot and dry conditions are fanning the flames of Canadian wildfires. So far this spring, wildfires in Canada have scorched an area more than 10 times larger than average,” the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the...
Down To Earth •

Critically polluted: Kolak fisherfolk in distress as chemicals from Vapi industries destroy river catch

The villagers suspected the coloured water is released into the river by the textile industries upstream. When the villagers inquired, representatives of industries they spoke to shifted the blame to the Gujarat Industrial Development Corporation (GIDC) region located in the Vapi Industrial Area some 16 kilometers away.“Due to the abundance of fish available in the past, we could make do with low prices. Now,  with inflation coupled with fish population decline, the price of Rs 400 per / kg make...
Down To Earth •

Critically polluted: Treated effluents from Vapi CETP don’t meet safety standards, find pollution control boards

In the inspection conducted from July-September 2022, it was observed that compared to the prescribed safety norms, the treatment of fixed dissolved solids (FDS), chloride and sulphate at Vapi CETP was not up to the mark and carried out with negligence at both the inlet and the outlet.Karthik M, senior principal scientist at National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (NEERI), was part of the committee in 2018 that looked at the Vapi CETP’s contribution to pollution in the Daman Ganga...
Down To Earth •

New policy to help Indian communities displaced by annual river & coastal erosion drafted

The Union Ministry of Home Affairs had directed NDMA to draft a policy based on the 15th Finance Commission’s report for 2021, in which it had for the first time emphasised on rehabilitation and resettlement for people displaced by the river and coastal erosion, in view of the increasing threat due to climate change. Until now, most policies in the country only address displacement after sudden rapid-onset disasters such as floods and cyclones. Over the last two years, NDMA held national-level c...
Down To Earth •

Grasslands, forests and glaciers decreased in the Kedarnath-Joshimath region over 3 decades

“In view of frequent extreme climatic-geomorphic events, temporally increasing population and tourist pressure, and temporally changing climatic conditions, it is vital to identify hotspots having dominant changes in land use/land cover to understand the possible source of potential disasters,” they added.In 1991, nearly 4,316 sq km was the total extent of the moderately dense forest area captured via satellite imagery. In 2020, it decreased to around 3,856 sq km and 10.6 per cent of this was ob...
Down To Earth •

Loss and damage from floods, storms cost India $7.6 bn in 2021: Report

India suffered huge economic losses from floods and storms in 2021 as climate change has made these events more frequent. The country was only second to China in the Asian continent in this regard, according to the recently released The State of the Climate in Asia 2021 report.Floods and storms accounted for 80 per cent of the natural disasters that struck Asia in 2021. Asian countries incurred financial losses worth $35.6 billion (nearly 2.9 lakh crores) in 2021 because of natural disasters. Fl...
Down To Earth •

Triple tremors in Delhi: ‘We should always be prepared for a big earthquake’

Harsh Kumar Gupta: If you remember, we had an earthquake on the India-Nepal border on April 25, 2015 of 7.8 magnitude. Seventeen days later, the region experienced another earthquake of 7.3 on May 12 and the aftershocks continued for quite some time after that. One major problem in seismology is we cannot say for sure if some activity is an aftershock or foreshock. Furthermore, it cannot be ruled out that these are independent quakes on their own too. One cannot make any conclusions.For the Delh...
Down To Earth •

Receding cryosphere: What latest WMO report warns us about

The global mean temperature is currently at 1.15 degrees Celcius above pre-industrial (1850-1900) levels and the last eight consecutive years were the eight hottest years of humanity, said a new report.It was the first time that “no snow outlasted the summer season even at the very highest measurement sites and thus no accumulation of fresh ice occurred,” the WMO said.The lack of adequate winter snow and Saharan dust blowing over the Alps accelerated the same this year. Heat waves between May an...
Down To Earth •

Run-up to COP27: Extreme weather events drive mass migration in Odisha’s Kendrapara, Jharkhand’s Palamu, says study

Rapid-onset events, like floods, increased the odds of migrating by 687 per cent. At the same time, slow-onset events, like drought, increased the likelihood by 172 per cent, noted the study by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), a non-profit.Some 60 per cent of the respondents in Kendrapara said rapid-onset events are a major climate stressor. At the same time, 87 per cent in Palamu stated that slow-onset events were the reasons for the same.Only 0.47 per cent of...
Down To Earth •

Fewer cyclones in Bay of Bengal but frequency increased in Arabian Sea: Report

“One thing in the atmosphere that inhibits the growth of cyclones is called the vertical shear, which refers to how strongly the winds can change from the surface to the top of the atmosphere, for up to 10 kilometres or so. It determines if the cyclone, which is trying to grow like a tunnel, gets chopped off or not. If it does, then its energy gets taken away and it doesn’t grow into a strong cyclone,” Murtugudde said.The researchers found that 49.8 per cent of tropical cyclones occurred from Oc...
Down To Earth •

How to assess disasters: 8 Indian states adopt global standards

An international framework for assessing losses and damages in the aftermath of a disaster is now being used to evaluate the financial and social cost of local disasters in eight states in India. The framework helps get recovery and reconstruction efforts right following a disaster. But this is not the first time PDNA has been conducted in India. It was first adopted during the Kerala floods of 2018 and again during the cyclone in Odisha in 2019, both unprecedented disasters.  However, until now...
Down To Earth •

Hazards in waiting: Half the world still without early warning systems, flags UN report

The analysis was made with data from the Sendai Framework Monitor (SFM), an online tool where member countries report their progress on the targets outlined in The Sendai Framework (2015-2030). The framework is a global blueprint for disaster risk reduction and prevention. Of the seven targets in the framework, Target G aims to “substantially increase the availability of and access to multi-hazard early warning systems and disaster risk information and assessments to the people by 2030”. The fra...
Down To Earth •

Climate crisis: Expect more extreme heatwaves in near future

The global mean temperature was close to 1°C  between 2017 and 2019. However, the global mean temperature was at 1.2°C in 2016 and 2020, according to data on the global surface temperature compiled by the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration between 2016 and 2021.“Hot extremes” have become recurrent and more severe over the earth’s land since the 1950s, according to the Sixth Assessment Report of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.No one is prote...
Down To Earth •

Bengaluru floods: City’s stormwater drains are not good enough & government has known it for long

Recent images of water-logged Bengaluru may have led to much surprise, but that may be misplaced: A report nine years ago had flagged that India’s so-called 'Silicon Valley’ could go under even due to moderate rain — the stormwater drains of the Karnataka capital are just not up to the mark.Unlike the rest of Bengaluru, at an elevation of 3,020 feet, these areas are relatively flatter and have been at the epicentre of rapid development.Some 0.017 billion residential properties in Bengaluru have...
Down To Earth •

Only 10 of 46 Least Developed Countries mention loss and damage explicitly in NDCs: Study

The LDC is a 46-member negotiating bloc of geographically and economically disadvantaged countries whose main ask is compensation for losses and damages incurred after storms, droughts, and floods at COPs. A key outcome of CoP26 was the establishment of the Glasgow Dialogues, a two-year exchange on ways to figure out how to fund L&D for low-income countries.Myanmar’s NDC has got whole sections detailing how L&D affects sectors such as agriculture or fisheries, cities and health. It also has an a...
Down To Earth •

Integrated risk assessment of dams required to prevent human-made disasters: Experts

The recent floods in the Mahanadi basin in Odisha have brought to the fore, the faulty management of dams, which were built to mitigate floods and not be the cause of them.Most of the Mahanadi river catchment, where the Hirakud dam is located, is in Chhattisgarh. Adequate intimation from Chhattisgarh dam authorities on the amount of water that would come gushing out was not given, authorities in Odisha had told DTE previously.“Existing dams, where no new engineering activity is planned, are not...
Down To Earth •

Monsoon report card: Rainfall deficit in 8 states, excess in 8 others

Generally, the southwest monsoon winds slowly withdraw from north India in the third week of September. But like last year, the summer monsoon may not recede by October and there might be confusion between the summer and winter monsoon season rains, Raghu Murtugudde, a climate scientist at the University of Maryland, told Down To Earth.Several districts have had an extreme change in rainfall patterns over the last two weeks. As many as 163 districts went from witnessing excess rainfall to defici...
Down To Earth •

Just 3 of every 1,000 queries in Lok Sabha during last 2 decades on climate change: Study

Climate change is a technical and research-oriented subject; politicians are unable to see how it affects decisions in their constituencies, commercially, economically and socially. This is why they have failed to pick up this issue, she added.“In these two years, questions were not related to the NAPCC and the change in the Ministry’s name as such. The overall interest in climate change piqued with these external events,” lead author Seema Mundoli, senior lecturer at Azim Premji University’s sc...
Down To Earth •

Heavy rainfall due to climate change increasing landslides, say experts

“Due to degradation of the landscape, the water stops percolating and with change in vegetation patterns, the soil is losing its holding capacity. This causes water to collect over the ground, loosening the soil, leading to landslides and mudslides,” he said.Today, most state governments are savvy with remote sensing data to conduct long-term or short-term analyses. But the prediction of landslides still remains a challenge, as it is with any disaster, Sharma says. In Manipur, authorities are tr...

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