Feature Article

In China, and elsewhere, long-term economic development and poverty alleviation need to be balanced against the likelihood of ecological failure. Here, we show how paleoenvironmental records can provide important multidecadal perspectives on ecosystem services (ES). More than 50 different paleoenvironmental proxy records can be mapped to a wide range of ES categories and subcategories. Lake sediments are particularly suitable for reconstructing records of regulating services, such as soil stability, sediment regulation, and water purification, which are often less well monitored.

Despite decades of restoration efforts by a rich ensemble of state-development actors, cultural heritage votaries and rights activists, the Bagmati is nothing less than a sewage canal by the time it meets its tributaries in Kathmandu. In her book Reigning the River: Urban Ecologies and Political Transformation in Kathmandu Anne Rademacher, assistant professor of social and cultural analysis at New York University, chronicles how the river’s degradation resonates with the perceived social, cultural, religious and political disorder in the tumultuous democracy.

Bt-maize is a transgenic variety of maize expressing the Cry toxin from Bacillus turingiensis. The potential accumulation of the relative effect of the transgenic modification and the cry toxin on the rhizobacterial communities of Bt-maize has been monitored over a period of four years.

Some states have banned mechanised mining, but the mafia is not ready to obey. Illegal mining is hollowing the riverbed putting at risk the stability and ecology of rivers. This special report in Down To Earth examines the murky business of sand mining.

Delhi municipality constructs yet another waste-to-energy plant at Ghazipur. Waste-to-energy projects figured in the election manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party during the recent civic polls in Delhi. BJP hoardings across the city declared that “the citizens will not be charged to generate power”. It seems the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) is obsessed with the idea of generating energy from garbage. Despite ample evidence that the technology is a failure and people’s oppositions to the projects, three waste-to-energy projects are under way in the capital city.

Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become wetter in response to warming. Efforts to detect this long-term response in sparse surface observations of rainfall and evaporation remain ambiguous. We show that ocean salinity patterns express an identifiable fingerprint of an intensifying water cycle. Our 50-year observed global surface salinity changes, combined with changes from global climate models, present robust evidence of an intensified global water cycle at a rate of 8 ± 5% per degree of surface warming.

Human land cover can degrade estuaries directly through habitat loss and fragmentation or indirectly through nutrient inputs that reduce water quality. Strong precipitation events are occurring more frequently, causing greater hydrological connectivity between watersheds and estuaries. Nutrient enrichment and dissolved oxygen depletion that occur following these events are known to limit populations of benthic macroinvertebrates and commercially harvested species, but the consequences for top consumers such as birds remain largely unknown.

Modern climate change has a strong potential to shift earth systems and biological communities into novel states that have no present-day analog, leaving ecologists with no observational basis to predict the likely biotic effects.