Glaciers and Polar Ice Caps

"All of a sudden, water entered the house at night. Goods and cattle were submerged. There is no place to eat or drink. We have been in trouble for three days, but no one has come to help us.” The elderly Gauri Singh complains, with mixed feelings of anger, pain and helplessness. 

Gauri Singh lives in Satjoda village of Satjoda panchayat of Panapur block in Chhapra district. He is about 80 years old, but he has not seen so much water in his village since he last remembers. 

Climate change triggered heat waves threaten water availability

Ninjallama rues as she remembers, " It was a terrible summer. The heat wave was killing. Three people died in my village. People with skeletal fluorosis suffered .. "

A new McKinsey Global Institute report, ‘Climate risk and response: Physical hazards and socioeconomic impacts’, suggests that many assumptions about the potential damage climate risk could cause need to be revisited.

Global warming has given rise to unprecedented extreme events such as cyclones, floods, heatwaves and droughts in India. Why are these threats increasing?

The National Mission for Cleaning Ganga was set up in 2014 and the Namami Gange programme was launched the year after, with a budget outlay of Rs. 20,000 crore. The implementation of the flagship programme was followed by the framing of a draft National River Ganga (Rejuvenation, Protection and Management) Bill, 2019 to be introduced in the winter session of Parliament.

A new research study by Climate Central, a US-based non-profit research group has projected that 300 million people could face annual coastal flooding triggered by climate change by 2050. Scott A Kulp and Benjamin H Strauss, the authors of the study suggest that the choices made today will likely determine whether our planet’s coastlines will even be recognizable, by the middle of the twenty first century.

Ladakh, the arid Himalayan desert, is a high elevation borderland located close to the Union Territory (UT) of Jammu and Kashmir, in India. Water here originates from glaciers in the high altitude mountains that tower over Ladakh’s villages. Simple earthwork irrigation channels tap meltwater from streams that originate from these glaciers. The glaciers are extremely sensitive to seasonal variations and serious concerns have been raised in recent years on the impact of climate change on glacier recession and the subsequent sustainability of water resources in the region.

Monsoon’s withdrawal likely to begin around October 10: IMD

The Water Future Conference in Bangalore last week, saw many from the scientific community, academia, research, civil society and the media come together to discuss the state of water resources across the world and in India, as well as future pathways and scenarios, and different technological and institutional solutions to accelerate the implementation of the water SDGs and the 2030 Agenda targets, leaving no one behind.