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IN his speech at last December’s COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow, Prime Minister Modi surprised everyone, perhaps even his own official delegation, by making five rather striking promises to reduce emissions even more than India had pledged in its Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) tabled under the Paris Agreement (PA).

THESE columns have covered many issues of environmental damage and systematic dilution or dismantling of environmental regulations in India under the present dispensation at the behest of corporate interests, all spuriously in the name of “development.” The question raised through these cases has been, not the hackneyed one of, do we want development or environmental conservation, but the fundamental one of, when the environment is damaged irrecoverably, when it can no longer sustain natural life or livelihoods of people dependent upon it, can this still b

THE attention of global forces representing cities is keener to know how the planet earth will be shaped for the future. The COP-21 climate change talks had set a target of keeping the rise in global temperature to less than 2 degrees centigrade. And for that, all the nations will have to play a major role in reducing their carbon footprint.

ON November 30, when the cyclone Ockhi struck, it was for the first time in 100 years that such an incident had occurred in Kerala’s seas. Thousands of fishing workers were then out in the sea. State government and various agencies were able to jointly carry out the rescue operations in an efficient and timely manner. This has helped to save the lives of hundreds of fishing workers.