Environment

The Western Ghats may not get its World Heritage Site status in the near future. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which assesses proposals for sites of natural significance, has asked UNESCO to defer granting the WHS tag to the Western Ghats. This means that the World Heritage Convention may drop this proposal now and India can submit a fresh proposal for nomination only after three years. The IUCN recommendation has been made in the IUCN Evaluation Report which...

The Union Ministry of Environment and Forests (MoEF) has finally put up on its website the controversial report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP). This follows the judgment of the Delhi High Court on May 17 rejecting the ministry’s plea that the court set aside an earlier order of the Central Information Commissioner (CIC) asking it to put the report in the public domain. The MoEF, pushed into a corner on the issue a number of times, has invited comments from the general public...

The Delhi High Court judgment asking the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF) to comply with a order of the Central Information Commissioner (CIC) over the publication of a crucial ecological report has pushed the ministry to the wall. A recalcitrant MoEF, which had been smarting ever since the CIC asked it to published a high-profile report by the Western Ghats Ecological Expert Panel (WGEEP) it had held back, had moved the court against the CIC directive of April 9. The court had...

The Himalayas are warming more rapidly than the rest of the globe. Researchers have found that the average annual mean temperature during the 25-year period from 1982 to 2006 increased by 1.5°C, with an average increase of 0.06°C per year. This is about three times greater than the global average of temperature rise in the same time period. This has had an effect on rainfall too. The average annual precipitation during the same period has increased by 163mm or 6.52mm per year in the Himalayas...

The Union ministry for environment and forests (MoEF) has effectively cut off its nose to spite its own face. The ministry has obtained from the Delhi High Court a stay on the order of the Central Information Commissioner (CIC) which had asked MoEF to publish a crucial ecological report on the Western Ghats by May 10. The CIC on April 9 had asked MoEF to “disclose” the ecological report of the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) in a months’ time. The ministry, in a brazen counter-move...

Till the other day it was Karnataka which had a bad name when it came to illegal mining. But in terms of sheer statistics, Maharashtra seems way ahead – with the state registering a whopping 440 per cent increase in illegal mining cases in the last five years. According the ministry of mines, the number of illegal mining cases detected in the state shot up from 4,919 in 2006 to 26,563 in 2010. To add to it, 20,928 cases were clocked in the first three quarters of 2011. Illegal mining cases in...

The new rules on e-waste that have come into effect from May 1 can be seen as the first step towards reducing pollution of the information era. The E-Waste (Management and Handling) Rule, 2011 were notified on May 30, 2011 by the Union ministry of environment and forests (MoEF), which set May 1, 2012 as the date for implementation. What makes the notification far-reaching with its ‘extended producer responsibility’ principle is that it puts the onus on companies which would now be responsible...

A resource-hungry industry has reasons to be perturbed about the possibility of the government accepting the recommendations of an expert panel which was constituted to look at the ecological status of the Western Ghats. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), which has also called for a blanket ban in mining in most parts of the ecologically fragile region, has recommended that power plants being set up in the Western Ghats should be subject to strict environmental regulations and...

Conservation, till very recently, was so top-down and condescending in its approach that conservationists and social activists would forever be at each others’ throats. There was no clear winner and it was evident that it were both people local communities on one hand and wildlife and forests on the other that were losing out in this internecine battle. That top-down approach is being, to quite an extent, turned on its head by the Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP) which submitted to the...

Those clamouring for Special Economic Zones to be established in the Western Ghats are not going to like this. An expert panel which recently studied the ecological imbalance in the region has recommended that no SEZs should be set up in the region. The Western Ghats Ecology Expert Panel (WGEEP), which submitted a two-volume report on August 31, 2011, has listed out sectoral guidelines for conservation of the Western Ghats, reckoned to be a biodiversity hotspot. The Ministry of Environment and...