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This season in the region is commonly referred to as – Barh (flood). For centuries local people have treated it as ‘a way of life’, and found ways to deal with it. Post independence, this ‘way of life’ gradually transformed into an assured annual devastation. The once self-sufficient communities in the flood plains have been relegated to being highly dependent on sources external to the village for their survival during floods.

Article courtesy: Environment Support Group

On 2nd May 2011, Indian Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh finally approved the diversion of over 3,000 acres of forest land, of the 4,000 acres demanded, for a steel-power-port complex of the POSCO India project.

Earlier, on 31 January 2011, Ramesh had approved the environmental and coastal regulation zone clearances that the project had secured in 2007, even though all these clearances were obtained by fraud, and thus illegal, as proved by two independent investigative committees that he appointed last year.

India Meteorological Department has objective criteria for declaring the onset of monsoon over Kerala.

The river, along with its estuarine reach, provides the much-needed green lungs to the city in the form of mangroves. Neglect of this river was the main cause of the catastrophic floods in Mumbai on 26 July, 2005, which claimed nearly 1,000 lives. In what could be a monumental urban transformation initiative to be undertaken anywhere in India yet, ORF has proposed a grand vision for the reclamation of Mithi River. The study report and a documentary film ’Making the sewer a river again - Why Mumbai must reclaim its Mithi’ on the dreadful conditions of the river, was released in May, 2011 in Mumbai.

Based on evidence from this inquiry, the study presents a critical analysis of the environmental and social impact information of POSCO's steel-power-port components to expose the fact that regulatory agencies have inadequate information on the short term and long term impacts of the project on the basis of the information that the company supplied to them.  It also provides historical evidence

European Beech
Photo: Forestryimages.org/University of West Hungary/Norbert Frank

 Although there are other local-and regional-scale forest canopy maps, the new map is the first that spans the entire globe based on one uniform method.

The work - based on data collected by NASA's ICESat, Terra, and Aqua satellites - should help scientists build an inventory of how much carbon the world’s forests store and how fast that carbon cycles through ecosystems and back into the atmosphere. Michael Lefsky of the Colorado State University described his results in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

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