Feature Article

The solution to the decline of water resources is today often addressed to the revival of community traditions and people's participation in water management.

To restrain the growth of Kruger's elephant population, 14,562 animals were culled from 1967 to 1995, when South Africa banned the practice. "It was extraordinarily traumatic," says Ian Whyte, the park's longtime elephant specialist, who witnessed many of the culls. "You had to shut your mind to it, otherwise you'd go mad." Now elephant specialists are being forced to consider culling again. While poaching continues to threaten elephants in Kenya and elsewhere, in southern Africa conservation measures have been so successful that populations are booming.

The Ladakh Ecological Development Group or LEDeG for short is an NGO (non-governmental organization), which came into being in 1983, and has been actively involved in awareness generation programmes related to the environment and sustainable development. LEDeG is a firm believer in being a real practitioner of alternate energy technologies like solar PV (photovoltaic).

Thanks to the availability of satellite data archives covering more than a decade, Permanent Scatterer SAR Interferometry (PSInSAR) nowadays represents one of the most powerful techniques capable of retrieving surface displacements of either natural (rock outcrops) or man made objects (buildings, infrastructures) already present within the surveyed area, acting as permanent radar reflectors.

Currently some estimated 854 million people worldwide are chronically hungry due to extreme poverty; and about 2 billion people lack food security intermittently due to varying degrees of poverty (FAO 2006).

Wind energy continues to be the dominant source of renewable power in India. About 8000 MW of wind power capacity has been installed in the country so far. As against this, the share of solar power is abysmally low mainly due to its high initial capital cost and thus, a higher cost of per unit power generation.

Just how harmful are baby bottles, eyeglasses and other bisphenol-A plastics? Patricia Hunt, who helped to bring the issue to light a decade ago, is still trying to sort it all out.

The aim of this study goals was to evaluate the feasibility of linking the 2001 California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), air monitoring, and traffic data; estimate associations between traffic density (TD) or outdoor air pollutant concentrations and childhood asthma morbidity; and evaluate the usefulness of such databases, linkages, and analyses to Environmental Public Health
Tracking (EPHT).

Agriculture in and around Indian cities is under pressure due to rapid urbanisation and associated land use change, and couples with pressure on already scarce water resources. The major beneficiaries of UA in the larger cities are low-income communiies that make use of the available resources - vacant land, river banks and wastewater - to supplement their meagre incomes.

India hosts major aggregations of turtles, especially olive ridleys. The present debate over the construction of a port at Dhamra and other ports along the Orissa coast is part of long-standing controversy about turtles in this region.