Environment Justice Matters Vol. 4 Issue 01
EJM Vol. 4 Issue 01 focuses on the decline of urban greenery in Bengaluru, environmental impacts, plastic ban and renewable energy.
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Resources
Environment Justice Matters Vol. 3 Issue 15
The 2022 year end issue of Environment Justice Matters
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EJ Matters Vol 3. Issue 14
Featured Book Talk: “Seed Activism” by Karine E Peschard On 13th December, 2012, ESG held a book talk to launch
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How to read and create maps to narrate public interest environmental and social stories?
This 2-day webinar was conducted by ESG on 28th November and 19th December 2022. The webinar focussed on generating informative maps using remote sensing and other freely available data to enhance the narratives that would be relevant to the participants’ work. Hands-on technical training was provided for using open-source resources such as QGIS mapping software and Google Earth Engine platform, which can be used to visualise and analyse data.
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How to Protect Lakes and Raja Kaluves?
A webinar on Lake Conservation was conducted by ESG on 20th December 2022. This session was mainly organised to benefit activists, researchers, public officials and also concerned citizens to explain how to use judicial orders, government orders and various other laws relating to lakes for the protection, conservation and rehabilitation of tank/lakes, ponds, raja kaluves, and such other water commons.
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Seed Activism: Patent Politics And Litigation In The Global South
In “Seed Activism”, Karine Peschard explores how patenting seeds and turning them into financialised, corporatised and commodified industrial products threatens farm and food securities of the world now and into the future.
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EJ Matters Vol 3. Issue 13 : Climate Change and the 27th Conference of UNFCCC Parties (COP27) and more
27th COP of United Nations Framework Conference on Climate Change at the seaside resort city of Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt during 6th – 20th November 2022. The main gain, it appears, is the decision to establish and operationalize a ‘loss and damage fund’ which most vulnerable countries have been demanding for decades now
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Supreme Court restores PIL highlighting regulatory failures causing biopiracy and biodiversity losses
PIL raises grave concerns on prevailing weaknesses in Biodiversity Act that is contributing to biodiversity loss and associated traditional rights
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EJ Matters Vol 3. Issue 12 : Regressive Amendments Proposed To Environmental Laws Of India Resisted
The unanimous conclusion of legal scholars, environmental and social justice activists, researchers, etc. is that all of the proposed Bills must be withdrawn immediately.
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Concrete galore: The transformation of Bengaluru
The concretising didn’t stop with roads; like a cancer it spread across to pavements, as paved regions into parks, and even into urban forests like Turahalli where, thankfully, public resistance stopped it. But the phenomenon is so widespread now, that it shows up in satellite imageries, and when it rains, the city floods in no time as there is simply no open ground for water to percolate. And in summer ‘heat islands’ result, desiccating what little greenery is left.
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Transformations to Sustainability: Governance of Sociotechnical Transformations
A video by Belmont Forum and International Science Council on ‘Governance of Sociotechnical Transformations” (GoST) project in which ESG is a partner to discover pathways of Transformations to Sustainability.
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Unsettling Proliferation of Solar PV Waste Piles and What it Means for us
With Prime Minister Narendra Modi pitching 500 GW as a target for energy production from renewable sources, mainly solar and wind, there has been a substantial increase in mega solar park installations across the country in various landscapes.
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Why did Bengaluru get badly flooded? | Express Dialogues
Bengaluru witnessed torrential rains and floods that created a disastrous impact. As a result, a large part of #Bengaluru was underwater.
The New Indian Express spoke to experts to understand the cause and effect of this concerning issue.Experts go on to state that rapid construction, encroachment, and corruption are behind the crisis.
ESG Imaginaries to Make Cities Work
‘ESG Imaginaries to Make Cities Work’ is a webinar series co-organised by ESG in collaboration with Habitat Forum – INHAF
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EJ Matters Vol 3. Issue 10
The @CompCoRe_STS project organised the first (semi-)in person meeting at @HarvardSTS . Leo Saldanha and Bhargavi Rao of ESG are part of this network and writing the India paper as part of a 50 country study on how COVID was managed, an international research effort led by Prof. Sheila Jananoff of Harvard Kennedy School and Prof. Stephen Hiltgartner of Cornell University.
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Need for meaningful extensive review and debate on fundamental changes proposed to India’s Environment Protection Act, 1986 and related laws
India’s environmental jurisprudence has been torn between the competing demands of prioritising environmental protection and securing economic progress. While there are several judgements that speak to the need for balancing development with environmental priorities, it is not necessarily an exercise that can be easily rationalised. There is overwhelming evidence in the pollution flowing in every river and lake across the country, in the extensive degradation across the Western Ghats and the Himalayas – resulting in catastrophic impacts on human settlements, in the breakdown of our cities every time it rains or when there is an unrelenting heat wave, and in commons that are extensively encroached, diverted and polluted, that the state of India’s environment is precariously hinged. The damaging consequences of such extensive degradation are irreversible and will seriously impede the country’s socio-economic progress.
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EJ Matters Vol 3. Issue 9: Environment Ministry proposes comprehensive dilution of India’s Environmental Laws & More..
There has been systematic dilution of India’s forest and biodiversity protection laws for several years now. But the Indian Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change now proposes to fundamentally change the essential characteristic of India’s environmental jurisprudence with fundamental changes that it proposes to India’s umbrella environmental law, the Environment Protection Act, 1986, and also the Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 and Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991.
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Report of 5 Taluk-level Workshops for Bengaluru Rural District – Decentralised Governance of Lakes and other Water Commons
For over two decades, ESG has focussed on emerging urban environmental and socio-economic challenges and worked with multiple communities, government agencies, academia, media, etc. in attending to these issues and conflicts.
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Environment Justice Matters_ Vol3. Issue 8
The Yale Centre for Environmental Law and Policy and Columbia University’s Earth Institute issued the 2022 Environmental Performance Index (EPI) report recently. It is projected as a “data-driven summary of the state of sustainability around the world” and uses “40 performance indicators across 11 issue categories” to rank “180 countries on climate change performance, environmental health, and ecosystem vitality”. India has been ranked at the bottom of this list, scoring merely 18.9 points of a possible 100.
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Environment Justice Matters| Environment Day | Vol3. Issue 7
At Environment Support Group(ESG), every day is Environment Day. And it has been the case for us ever since the organisation was founded, 25 years ago. Yes, it is the 25th year of this initiative and we hope we are doing our bit to be grateful for the incredible opportunity of being a part of this living planet.
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Decentralised, Socially Inclusive & Ecologically Wise Protection & Rehabilitation of Lakes, Kaluves & Water Commons of Karnataka
ESG, along with Karnataka State Legal Services Authority, organized a seminar on Decentralised, Socially Inclusive & Ecologically Wise protection &Rehabilitation of lakes, kaluves and Water Commons of Karnataka.
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All Saints Church – Sacred Living heritage of Bengaluru – Saved for posterity
At a time when the meeting of minds is so very rare, this effort by the All Saints Church congregation, BMRCL, Government of Karnataka, and various supporters of the cause, including ESG, stands out as representative of the enormous possibilities of democratic engagement. The conciliation mechanism organised by EIB helped in this process. This also helped ensure that the contestations did not end up in Court, burdening further the judiciary, and without a clear outcome in sight.
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Environment Justice Matters Vol 3. Issue. 6 | Large Gaps In Bengaluru’s Urban Planning Process & More
The IPCC sixth assessment report released early April notes that climate misinformation can jeopardise climate action and weaken public demand for mitigation and adaptation measures. The report acknowledges the role of misinformation in fuelling polarisation, saying, “Together with the proliferation of suspicions of “fake news” and “post-truth”, some traditional and social media contents have fuelled polarisation and partisan divides on climate change in many countries.”
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THE ANATOMY OF A SOLAR LAND GRAB – Report of a Fact-Finding Committee
Karbi and Adivasi farmers belonging to Mikir Bamuni Grant village in Nagaon district of Assam reported that about 93 acres of the land they were cultivating was taken over forcibly during 2020 by Azure Power Forty Private Limited, a subsidiary of international power corporation Azure Power Global Ltd. The farmers reported that their land was taken for establishing a 15 MW solar power plant by the company. In the process, ripened paddy crop raised on over 200 bighas of land was razed to the ground on 8th October, 2020 by the company. Villagers report that the local police and district authorities backed this forced dislocation of the farmers and forcible takeover of their lands.
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