‘Lake Walk’ -August 2021
Come join us for the walk and conversation on lakes woven around history, ecology, livelihoods, legality and imaginations of food and water security.
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Events
Webinar Report: Consolidating Visions for Bengaluru’s Climate Action Plan
Week 9 of “Bengaluru’s Climate Action Plan: Making it Participatory and Inclusive”An initiative of Environment Support Group, Bengaluru Background Earlier
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Stan – Indefinite Tribute – 5th July 2021
The Judiciary is the Defence of the Innocent. Or so we thought. Fr. Stan Swamy is dead. The bail which
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Week 9 & Final Session: Consolidating visions for Bengaluru’s Climate Action Plan
The outcome of this final session would include voices from all sector and sections of the city that will assist the city in developing its Climate Action Plan to benefit present and future generations, in an intergenerational perspective, and inspired by Vasudaiva Kutumbakam.
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A New Chapter in Decentralised Governance of Lakes of Karnataka: Principal Bench of Karnataka High Court directs the State to constitute District Lake Protection Committees in Environment Support Group v. State of Karnataka (WP No. 817 of 2008)
On 15 June 2021, the Principal Bench of the Karnataka High Court headed by Chief Justice Abhay Oka pronounced an order that will significantly change lake governance across Karnataka state, in rural and urban areas. This order will now pave the way for truly decentralised governance of lakes as commons, allowing the local public direct access to these Committees. The order was issued in response to an application made by Leo F. Saldanha, Coordinator of Environment Support Group, who sought modifications to the landmark 2012 judgment in ESG’s Lakes PIL Environment Support Group v. State of Karnataka (W.P. No. 817/2008), to strengthen lake governance from the ground up.
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Week 8: Reimagining Bengaluru’s Infrastructure as Resilient to Climate-Change
The ‘smart city’ projects have skewed relationships between intent and impact, with massive investments being made in gentrified neighborhoods to the neglect of most other areas of the metropolis. Meanwhile, investments in essential social, education and health infrastructure remain stagnant and are even declining. Would turning planning and development into deeply democratic and decentralised processes and promoting self-sufficient neighborhoods be the answer to reducing the carbon footprint of the metropolis and adapting Bengaluru to climate change impacts?
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Week 7 Webinar Report: Securing Clean Air and Inclusive Mobility for Bengaluru
“Environmental justice, transportation justice, street justice are all deeply political matters, and to see it merely from a technical perspective will not give us the answers…It is also important to try and create a network where it doesn’t become a government-driven system alone. As consumers we have power. As consumers, we are not effectively networked to propel the transformation that is essential”
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Tackling COVID-19 Sensibly – A conversation with Dr. Kashinath Dixit
Environment Support Group invites you to participate in a conversation with Dr. Kashinath Dixit, an Endocrinologist who has worked for decades in the United Kingdom and been closely involved in responding to the COVID waves that affected the region. He is now also helping a variety of vulnerable communities across India to take precautions, stay healthy and recover from the disease
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Webinar Series Update
The webinar is postponed until further notice due to the Covid situation and we have started providing assistance to the heavily impacted communities during the lockdown.
Read moreYour Participation Can Make Bengaluru’s Climate Action Plan More Inclusive
Thank you to those of you who have joined us in the ongoing webinar series “Bengaluru’s Climate Action: Making it Participatory and
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Week 7: Securing Clean Air and Inclusive Mobility for Bengaluru
Everyone pays a very high price for mobility in Bengaluru. Incredible traffic snarls cost precious time, money, infrastructure and public health, and substantially erode the ‘salubrious’ quality of the metropolis. With an astonishing 0.8 to 1 vehicle to population ratio, Bengaluru metropolitan area is amongst the most fossil fuel dependent urban spaces globally. Air quality is significantly deteriorating, resulting in severe health impacts, especially for the poor and marginalised.
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Week 6 Webinar Report: Making Bengaluru Energy Independent
“Is it possible to keep this city running with this pattern of consumption and demand for energy? How are BESCOM and KPTCL sustaining this supply? What are the challenges of the petrochemical sector in supporting fuel demands? Is there a way that we could shift to more sustainable sources, such as renewable energy, and can those transitions be just for all involved? Will such just transitions require Bangalore Metropolitan Planning Authorities to imagine futures that are based on sustainable energy systems, in contrast with the prevailing extractive and unsustainable systems? And can we ensure all homes (be they of rich, poor or middle classes), institutions, offices, government buildings will find ways to consume less power and shift to alternate forms of locally generated power?”
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A Landfill is no place to “dispose” of our dead. BBMP needs to reconsider its decision to set up an open crematorium at the Mavallipura landfill.
The entire world has been afflicted with COVID. But nowhere has a landfill been used to cremate loved ones. We must all work together to ensure there is dignity and grace in conducting final rites of the unfortunate departed, and in a place appropriate for such terribly sad occasions. It has to be a place worthy of a sacred ritual.
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The Anatomy of a Solar Land Grab: Press Conference Invite
Release of “The Anatomy of a Solar Land Grab”. Report of a Fact-Finding Committee relating to Human Rights Violations, and Environmental & Social Impacts of 15 MW Solar Power Plant being established by Azure Power at Mikir Bamuni Grant Village, Nagaon, Assam .
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Week 6: Making Bengaluru Energy Independent
Date: 26th April 2021, Monday, 6:00 PM India on Zoom Pls note: Registration is not required if you have already
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Week 5 Webinar Report: Securing Biodiversity Rich, Healthy, Socially Inclusive and Economically Viable Commons in Bengaluru
“Commons bring people of the city together. It gives an opportunity to mix people from various communities…In a public park you will find people from a diverse set of communities; people from across caste and class economic status and so on and that is important for us to broaden our minds also. Otherwise we are just limited and living in our own silos”
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Week 5: Securing Biodiversity Rich, Healthy, Socially Inclusiveand Economically Viable Commons in Bengaluru
Densely crowded, polluted, non-inclusive and stress-inducing concretised spaces are making neighbourhoods increasingly vulnerable to various impacts of climate change such as flooding and the ‘heat island’ effect. How, into the future, can the metropolis secure biodiversity rich, healthy and economically viable spaces for all?
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Week 4 Webinar Report: Food for Thought- Towards an environmentally sustainable and socially just food system
Download Report Date: 13 April 2021 Week 4 of “Bengaluru’s Climate Action Plan: Making it Participatory and Inclusive” Recording Background
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Week 4: Food for Thought: Towards an Environmentally Sustainable and Socially Just Food System
Bengaluru metropolitan area every day takes a lot of effort, energy, land, water and complex logistics. From a time when the city was growing and sourcing almost all its foods from the local region and backyard gardens, rising wealth and associated consumer capacity has resulted in foods with a high carbon and environmental footprint being fetched from far away, even from across the world. The metropolitan region now contributes far less food production than before, even as its expansion strains rural areas close by in sustaining farming.
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Week 3 Webinar Report: Making Bengaluru Water Secure
Download Report 8 April 2021 Week 3 of “Bengaluru’s Climate Action Plan: Making it Participatory and Inclusive” Recording Overview In
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Week 3: Making Bengaluru Water Secure
Bengaluru’s insatiable demand for water has not only exhausted its replenishable ground water reserves, and overdrawn its share of the Cauvery, but now plans are afoot to extract water from the far away Sharavathi river. Meanwhile, the acute financialization of land sans rigorous and democratic land use planning has resulted in lakes and other water commons that once sustained the city’s water needs being cannibalised.
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Week 2 Webinar Report: Public Health, Sanitation And Waste Management: Is A Decentralized Approach The Way Out?
Public health, sanitation and waste management sectors are intricately linked in not only ensuring all are healthy, but that the toxic impacts of our living are not a burden for future generations. It has been argued time and again that centralised response strategies are resource heavy and cause societal dysfunctionality, and the way forward is to ensure ward-level governance becomes real in every way, especially in securing public health and sanitation for all.
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Week 2: Public Health, Sanitation and Waste Management: Is a Decentralised Approach the Way Out?
One of the first challenges that climate planning throws up is: how to deal with climate change and its impacts? Is decentralisation of governance the most optimal way out? Public health, sanitation and waste management sectors are intricately linked in not only ensuring all are healthy, but that the toxic impacts of our living are not a burden for future generations.
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Bengaluru’s Climate Action Plan: Inaugural Session Report
The series is a process of engaging with multiple thematic issues, concerns and imaginaries of leading officials of various agencies whose functioning impacts the city, with subject matter experts, youth, representatives of various sectors and residents from diverse sections of the city. And it is also a process of collectivising diverse views and solutions with necessary nuance.
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On World Wildlife Day, Prime Minister and UN Secretary General’s Intervention Sought to Safeguard Indigenous Peoples of Loktak Wetland Region
Communities demand Wetland International’s problematic ‘wise use’ plan for Loktak be withdrawn
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