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An underlying threat to India’s people, climate and economy, land degradation has affected almost 30 per cent of its total land. As more than half of this degraded land consists of either farmlands or forests, it is directly affecting lives of more than 700 million people who either depend on agriculture or forests for their sustenance. Restoring these farmlands and forests is not just critical for supporting livelihoods of these farmers and forest dwellers, but also for building India’s...

India is an agrarian economy with a need to ensure availability of fertilizers for productive farming operations and food production. It is also the world’s second largest consumer and third largest manufacturer of fertilizers. Fertilizer production in India has witnessed a surge over the years, from having an annual production of...

This year India witnessed an early intense heatwave where around a billion people were exposed to temperatures more than 40 degrees C in the month of April itself. But heatwaves are so much more dynamic and complex that traditional methods of reporting them, purely based on absolute air temperatures, might be insufficient. Heat has a dynamism spatially, temporally, and in its interaction with materials. Hence its measurement must also be dynamic. And not just the heatwave but its effects have several dimensions as well, with respect to human health, economic activity etc. It is, therefore...

This is an updated version of the article that was first published on Gaon Connection on June 3, 2022.

Earlier while traveling to my native village in the interior of Assam to meet my grandparents, I used to wait for the Barak Valley Express train at the New Haflong railway station. I always admired the lush greenery and scenic beauty in and around the station. A few weeks ago, in May 2022, I was shocked to see...

Well-designed, well-maintained and accessible public spaces, such as gardens and city squares, are critical to our well-being. There is ample research to indicate that investing in inclusive public spaces helps create livable and equitable cities. However, these spaces, which have the potential to bind communities and be the lungs of the city, are often woefully neglected in Indian Cities.

Undertaking the transformation of public spaces requires political...

Convergence Energy Services Limited (CESL), supported by WRI India, recently concluded India’s biggest electric bus (e-bus) tender to deploy 5,450 e-buses across five cities: Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Surat. This tender, based on a gross cost contracting (GCC) model and supported by FAME-II subsidy, led to the discovery of lowest ever rates for e-bus...

This article originally appeared on cities4children.org on April 5, 2022.

As education is the right of every child, so is safe access to schools. As schools in India reopen after nearly two years of online education, it is important to reexamine how children access schools. Data suggests that every year, more than...

In India, around 3.6 million people are expected to have been displaced annually (between 2008-19) due to climate-induced disasters such as floods. Climate migration is often influenced by two types of drivers namely extreme events like storms, floods, and droughts, and slow-onset events like sea-level rise, saline water intrusion into agricultural land, etc. Such migration includes temporary or periodic displacement of people from more climatically vulnerable regions. Sometimes, this migration...

To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius and lower carbon emissions, many pathways are being investigated, one of which is the use of hydrogen as an alternative energy vector. Although hydrogen is the most abundant element, it doesn’t exist independently. For hydrogen to emerge as a clean fuel contender, it is critical to evaluate how hydrogen is produced (to check emissions) and its use across sectors. Colour-coded (green, blue, grey, etc.) hydrogen is based on its production process.

Grey hydrogen is produced from natural gas whereas blue hydrogen, although produced from...

Dinesh, a 31-year-old farmer from the Malwa region in Madhya Pradesh grows a variety of crops on his farm. His educational background in agriculture helps him understand the benefits of crop diversification for maintaining the soil health of his farmland while minimizing risks from crop losses. However, growing tomatoes is often a gamble even for well-informed, progressive farmers like Dinesh due to high input costs, sensitivity to climatic variations such as frost, rainfall, temperature, the perishable nature of the crop, and uncertain market returns.

These factors increase the...