General Awareness

ENVIRONMENT - October 2014

Oct 2014

Jun 24, 2019

Pacific Trash Clean-up

A floating device designed to catch plastic waste was redeployed in a second attempt to clean up a huge island of trash swirling in the Pacific Ocean between California and Hawaii.
Boyan Slat, creator of The Ocean Cleanup project, announced that a 600-metre-long floating tube that broke apart late last year (2018) was sent back to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch after four months of repair.
Fitted with solar-powered lights, cameras, sensors and satellite antennas, the device communicate its position in real time, allowing a support vessel to fish out the collected plastic and transport it to dry land.
The plastic barrier with a tapered three-metre-deep screen is intended to act like a coastline, trapping some of the 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic that scientists estimate are swirling in the patch while allowing marine life to safely swim beneath it.

Jun 22, 2019

Forest Cover Up

According to Union Minister for Environment Prakash Javadekar, India's forest cover was up by 1% in the last one year, while former Minister and his own party's MP Maneka Gandhi told that the additional forest cover could be a result of satellite imagery being taken where the sugar cane crops could be mistaken for trees.
Mr. Javadekar said that for one tree chopped for development work, three to four were planted either in the same area or elsewhere.
Responding to Ms. Gandhi, he said satellite imagery was taken at regular intervals and it was unlikely that sugar cane crops were counted as such.
According to a latest report, over 24.39% of the country's geographical area now constitutes of green cover.

Jun 20, 2019

Himalayan Glaciers Melting Far Faster

According to a study, Himalayan glaciers have been melting twice as fast since the start of this century, underscoring the threat the climate crisis poses to water supplies for hundreds of millions of people across Asia.
The new analysis, spanning 40 years of satellite observations across India, China, Nepal and Bhutan, showed glaciers have been losing the equivalent of more than a vertical foot-and-a-half of ice each year since 2000. That represents double the rate between 1975 and 2000.
Although melting ice caps at Earth's north and south poles are already destabilising the climate system, the retreat of Himalayan ice has more direct consequences for some 800 million people who depend on meltwater to sustain their rivers.

Jun 19, 2019

DPCC Stops Free Registration

The Delhi Pollution Control Committee (DPCC) stopped the free online registration of non-polluting white category industries, after it came to light that a section of such units, operating from non-conforming areas, were misusing the facility to get themselves registered illegally without paying any charge.
Now owners of even white category industries would have to pay a registration fee of Rs. 10,000.
The DPCC would change its online software to ensure industries from non-conforming areas will not be able to register at all.
White category industries, introduced by the union government in 2016, are the least polluting among other categories, red, orange and green.

Jun 18, 2019

Cod and Haddock Fishes Face Extinction

Research has indicated cod and haddock fishes face extinction as rising temperatures cut oxygen in the oceans. Marine zoologist Prof John Spicer said it was a "major cause for concern.
Many large species will almost certainly be the first casualties of our warming, oxygen-poor ocean.
The research was conduced by Prof Spicer's University of Plymouth team and the British Antarctic Survey. Experts analysed four types of crustacean, which are abundant off coast of the western Antarctic Peninsula.
They found when the gas in their water was reduced, they got smaller – supporting the theory that bigger sea creatures are more vulnerable to climate change.
The study, published in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, suggests that failure to control greenhouse gases will have a greater impact on marine ecosystems than previously feared.
Over the past 50 years, the oxygen in our oceans has decreased by around 2-5%.

World's Population to Go up by 2 Billion in next 30 Years

The world's population will increase to 9.7 billion by 2050, going up by 2 bn from the earlier 7.7 bn, shows a new United Nations report.
The global population could reach its peak around the end of the current century, with an estimated population of 11 bn.
India is projected to overtake China as the world's most populous country in next 8 years, according to the report. The global fertility rate, which fell from 3.2 births per woman in 1990 to 2.5 in 2019, will decline further to 2.2 in 2050. India's current total fertility rate stands at 2.2 births per woman.
Nine countries will make up more than half of the projected growth of the global population between now and 2050: India, Nigeria, Pakistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, Indonesia, Egypt and the United States of America.
The population of sub-Saharan Africa is projected to double by 2050, up 99%. Regions that may experience lower rates of population growth between 2019 and 2050 include Oceania excluding Australia/New Zealand (56%), Northern Africa and Western Asia (46%), Australia/New Zealand (28%), Central and Southern Asia (25%), Latin America and the Caribbean (18%), Eastern and South Eastern Asia (3%), and Europe and Northern America (2%).
People are growing older due to increasing life expectancy and falling fertility levels, and that the number of countries experiencing a reduction in population size is growing.
In 2019, life expectancy at birth in the least developed countries lags 7.4 years behind the global average, due largely to persistently high levels of child and maternal mortality, as well as violence, conflict and the continuing impact of the HIV epidemic.
The World Population Prospects 2019: Highlights, which is published by the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, provides a comprehensive overview of global demographic patterns and prospects.

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