environment – आवारा मुसाफिर

Smartphone use goes up in city parks, but down in forests

May 15, 2023884 Views

Nature can curb smartphone use, but you need to go beyond your local park—where screentime increases—and find some wild nature, new research says While a visit to the great outdoors is a common prescription for reducing screen use, a pioneering new study finds that time outdoors doesn’t always reduce smartphone screen time. The new research, which tracked the smartphone activity of 700 study participants for two years, reveals that participants’ smartphone activity actually increased during visits to city parks and other urban green spaces. With smartphone use rising worldwide, the study clearly identifies a powerful way to reduce screen time: participants who visited nature reserves or forests saw significant declines in screen time over the first three hours, compared to vi...

खबरनामाघटनाएंभारत

For tree lovers, plantations are a poor substitute for lost forests

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

March 29, 2022888 Views

* Indian forests squeezed by infrastructure development* With eye on emissions, government backs tree planting* Critics say intensive plantings are a poor substitute For scientist, activist and tree lover Ravi Chopra, it is a painful sight. Where thick forest recently stood, a swathe of bare yellow earth is now dotted with road-building materials and construction workers near his home in India’s Himalayan foothills. “It’s driving us crazy,” said Chopra, who runs an environmental nonprofit in the city of Dehradun, saying thousands of trees had been cut down due to two recent road-widening projects in the area. “We’re going to pay a very heavy price for cutting down our forests,” he warned. Across India, roads, hydroelectric projects and other infrastructure construction too...

जलवायु परिवर्तन

Coral reefs off east Africa could die out in 50 years

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

December 8, 2021765 Views

A new study found warming temperatures to be the main driver Coral reefs in the western Indian Ocean are at risk of extinction by 2070 due to warming temperatures and overfishing, according to a new study. A roughly 12,000 sq km expanse of coral reefs stretching down the eastern coastline of Africa and around Madagascar is facing ecosystem collapse, threatening a range of species and the livelihoods of over a million people who work in the fishing and tourism industries. These reefs make up around 5% of the planet's total coral reef area. "When an ecosystem collapses, we might still see individual fish or corals but the whole system is no longer effective in supporting either marine biodiversity or communities who are dependent on it," said David Obura, a Kenyan marine ecolog...

खबरनामाघटनाएंब्राजील

Indigenous leaders push new target to protect Amazon from deforestation

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

September 5, 2021751 Views

Indigenous groups urged world leaders on Sunday to back a new target to protect 80% of the Amazon basin by 2025, saying bold action was needed to stop deforestation pushing the Earth's largest rainforest beyond a point of no return. Amazonian delegates launched their campaign at a nine-day conference in Marseille, where several thousand officials, scientists and campaigners are laying the groundwork for United Nations talks on biodiversity in the Chinese city of Kunming next year. FILE PHOTO: Carlos Roberto Sanquetta, a forestry engineering professor at the Federal University of Parana, botanist Edilson Consuelo de Oliveira and Rioterra plant nursery worker Juciney Pinheiro dos Santos inspect a parcel of Amazon rainforest in Itapua do Oeste, Rondonia state, Brazil, November 4, 2020....

कनाडाखबरनामाघटनाएं

Save Fairy Creek: The battle over Western Canada’s ancient forests

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

June 6, 20211087 Views

Nolan Paquette started working part-time at his local sawmill more than 20 years ago while still at school, pushing a broom on the clean-up team. Now 38, Paquette drives trucks and operates machinery at the same Western Forest Products-owned mill in Duke Point, Nanaimo, the third generation of his family to work in forestry on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island. He is one of 38,000 workers in Canada’s westernmost province whose job, according to the industry, depends on the logging of towering old-growth trees, such as cedars, Douglas firs and western hemlocks aged at least 250 years, and in some cases more than a thousand. The dispute over felling British Columbia’s ancient forests has been thrust into the limelight by a months-long blockade of private logging company Teal Jones i...

खबरनामाघटनाएंसेशेल्स

Seychelles leaving an ecological print this Environment Day

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

June 5, 20211156 Views

The Seychelles Tourism Board (STB) launched its partnership with the Global Impact Network on Friday, June 4, 2021, coinciding with the destination’s activities for the World Environment Day, celebrated on June 5. The partnership, allows Seychelles to become, officially, the first destination to create its online community page on the Global Impact Network platform. Global Impact Network is an app that allows individuals and organisations to take action anywhere and for any ecologically-oriented cause. Seychelles, the Indian Ocean sustainable champion, joins the platform to entice its visitors to have a profound experience while on holiday in the destination and to be personally transformed by the end of their trip. The digital platform will allow users to track, measure and ...

खबरनामाघटनाएंजलवायु परिवर्तन

Coral reef restoration technology aims to reverse climate change damage

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

May 28, 2021939 Views

Marine scientist Deborah Brosnan remembers “feeling like a visitor at an amazing party” on her diving trips to a bay near the Caribbean island of Saint Barthelemy where she swam above coral reefs with nurse sharks, sea turtles and countless colorful fish. But on a return trip after Hurricane Irma ravaged the island in 2017, she dove the reef again - and was shocked by what she saw. “Everything was dead,” she recalled in an interview with Reuters. “There were no sharks, no sea turtles, no sea grass, no living coral. I felt like I lost my friends.” Marine scientist Deborah Brosnan does a research dive on a coral reef, in this undated handout in Antigua and Barbuda. Courtesy of Deborah Brosnan & Associates/Handout via REUTERS Recent research has shown that warmer atmospheric ...

खबरनामाघटनाएंफ्रांस

Lost in the Mediterranean, a starving grey whale must find his way home soon

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

May 7, 20211198 Views

A young grey whale lost in the Mediterranean, thousands of miles away from its natural habitat in the Pacific ocean, is desperately seeking its way home, but biologists are worried it may not survive. Grey whales normally migrate along the U.S. west coast, but biologists think that with global warming opening northern routes, the whale became lost and swam into the Atlantic ocean via the Arctic. Thierry Auga-Bascou, scientist and member of the French Biodiversity Agency, takes a skin sample of Wally, the 15 month old gray whale, swimming in the Mediterranean Sea past the coast of Argeles-Sur-Mer, France, May 6, 2021. REUTERS/Alexandre Minguez Named Wally by biologists, the whale is around two years old and eight metres (26.25 ft) long, but his rapid weight loss is causing concern...

खबरनामाघटनाएंजलवायु परिवर्तन

Real-time monitoring of Himalayan glaciers can be helpful

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

April 22, 20211086 Views1

Satellite-based real-time monitoring of Himalayan glacial catchments would improve understanding of flood risk in the region and help inform an early flood warning system that could help curb disaster and save human lives, says a recent study. This should be the future strategy to reduce loss of human lives during glacial lake outburst floods (GLOF), said a study carried out by scientists from IIT Kanpur. The study carried out by Dr. Tanuj Shukla and Prof. Indra Sekhar Sen, Associate Professor from IIT Kanpur, with support from the Department of Science & Technology, Government of India, has been published in the international journal ‘Science’. FILE PHOTO: People walk past a destroyed dam after a Himalayan glacier broke and crashed into the dam at Raini Chak Lata village in Cha...

कोलंबियाखबरनामाघटनाएंजलवायु परिवर्तन

Road to ruin: informal byways sow seeds of destruction in Colombia’s Amazon

AWARA MUSAFIR BUREAU

April 14, 20211172 Views

The dirt tracks winding through southern Colombia’s tangled jungle often mark the beginning of the end for besieged patches of rainforest in this part of the Amazon. Across San Vicente del Caguan, one of the country’s most deforested regions, illegal and informal roads fan out in an ever-expanding network, bringing visitors, commercial interests and farmers and ranchers who clear and burn the land. The result is the steady decay of Colombia’s Amazon. A Reuters map of the region shows a lattice of lines that crisscross one another and creep southward into the forest and fan out on all sides. The destruction, which is striking on the ground, is significant enough to be visible from the sky. Patches of deforestation appear at the furthest extent of the roads, according to ...