Premjibhai's method of planting trees

http://www.gian.org/viewslide.php?type=image&innovation_im_id=144

Shri Premjibhai has developed an innovative practice for planting / growing trees in the arid region. The named the technique as Sand Pipe method. Description : The steps of the methods are as below. (To see the planting method stepwise in detail, please Click Here) Step: 1) A pit is dug ( about 1 feet deep) and a sapling is placed vertically in the pit. Step: 2) A PVC pipe of approximate 6 inch in diameter and 2 feet in length is inserted (about 1 feet deep) placed vertically aside of the plant in the pit. Step: 3) The pit is filled with the normal soil up to the ground level. Step: 4) Now the PVC pipe is filled with the coarse sand up a ground level Step: 5) Pull out the PVC pipe slowly. The process makes a passage in the ground nearer to the root portion of plant and facilitates easy and maximum movement of water towards roots. Steps: 6) Watering one – two bucket of water (15 – 25 liters) on the top of the sand passage. This water does not spread in surrounding area but remain in the dry coarse sand and give moisturize effect to the root zone of the plant. This accelerate the root germination and helps the plants growth much faster. Steps: 7) In case of insufficient monsoon, additional water and if available , watering the plant one or two times in six months  ( during summer and winter ) . This water is sufficient for the tree to survive till next monsoon (for one year) The concept behind this is that the sand filled pit acts as a chamber and moisture is retained for a longer time. Water percolating through sand facilitating water absorption by root zone of the plant and it helps the roots development much faster and ultimately plant survive for longer period.

A safe water transportation backpack

The packH2O water backpack provides a solution for transporting and storing safe water; reducing the impact of waterborne pathogens that lead to illness. The product is lightweight, collapsable, ergonomic, and features a liner that can be sanitized in sunlight. It serves both residential and commercial needs, and is less-expensive to place in the field than the rigid containers currently used. Just one backpack can provide safe water for a classroom of children for an entire day or serve the water needs for a household of five.

This Karnataka Bus Driver Turned Eco-Warrior & Developed a Unique Way to Revive Dead Borewells

Joseph GM Rebello was leading his life at a steady pace as a bus driver when everything came to a screeching halt after a tragic accident rendered him bedridden for 12 months.

But rather than be defeated, he re-invented himself as a staunch environmentalist who has even developed a technique to revive defunct and dry borewells.

Joseph, who is based in Udupi, had dropped out from school after having completed class 10 to become a bus driver. He continued with the profession for 10 years when in 2010, he fell off a tree and was bedridden for a year having damaged his spinal cord.

When he recovered, his employer, a private player in the industry, gave him a job as the bus driver for Shri Madhwa Vadiraja Institute of Technology and Management in Udupi. It was here that he found his passion for environmental causes and conservation while attending gram panchayat meetings in his free time.

Encouraged by the panchayat development officer, he began attending a number of training programmes and was even appointed the convener of the Church Social Development Commission.

While a convener, he came across an empty borewell and quietly started working on a method to revive it. Speaking to the Bangalore Mirror, he explains his method saying, “We dig a pit that is 10 feet deep and 10 feet wide around the abandoned borewell. To make it safe, it is then covered but only in a way that water can percolate through a 5 mm hole in the casing and a mesh is placed that acts as a filter. The rainwater that trickles down brings up the water table.”

The method, that was officially inaugurated last year, was developed after Joseph consulted with experts in the field and also did his own research regarding rainwater harvesting.

---

Of course recharging dead borewells isn’t all that Joseph does; he also goes to various educational institutes to raise awareness not only about this technique but also various environmental causes close to his heart.

Climate Change Leaves Hares Wearing The Wrong Colors

The effects of climate change often happen on a large scale, like drought or a rise in sea level. In the hills outside Missoula, Mont., wildlife biologists are looking at a change to something very small: the snowshoe hare.

Life as snowshoe hare is pretty stressful. For one, almost everything in the forest wants to eat you.

Alex Kumar, a graduate student at the University of Montana, lists the animals that are hungry for hares.

"Lynx, foxes, coyotes, raptors, birds of prey. Interestingly enough, young hares, their main predator is actually red squirrels."

Hares switch color in the spring and fall in response to light, when the days get longer or shorter. But that means they're at the mercy of the weather. If the snow comes late, you get a white hare on brown ground.

Enlarge image

A snowshoe hare in the Montana woods.

L.S. Mills Research Photo

"And they really think that they're camouflaged," Kumar says. "They act like we can't see them. And it's pretty embarrassing for the hare."

Kumar calls this "mismatch," and it's becoming more of a concern with climate change.

"If the hares are consistently molting at the same time, year after year, and the snowfall comes later and melts earlier, there's going to be more and more times when hares are mismatched," he says.

Scott Mills of North Carolina State University leads the research. He says they're finding that mismatched hares die at higher rates. That's a concern for the threatened Canada lynx, which mainly eats these hares.

"It's a picture that paints a thousand words," Mills says. "It's a very clear connection to a single climate change stressor."

Mills says hares might be able to adapt over time. Some snowshoe hares in Washington State don't turn white at all. Mills is trying to figure out whether hares and other wildlife can adapt as fast as the climate is changing.

"But really what we don't know very well is how fast is too fast?" he says.

New Federal Report: Climate Change is Really, Really Scary

Say what you want about the Obama administration's relative ignoring of climate issues: Many of his top scientists are paying rapt attention, and they think we're about to get our butts kicked—although dumping the news at 4pm on a Friday gives some indication of where it sits in federal priorities.

The National Climate Assessment is produced by the US Global Change Research Program, which is tasked with collating climate research from a wide variety of federal agencies and, every few years, distilling it into one major report. The latest, a first draft, is the third such report (the last was in 2009), product of a 1990 law that requires the White House to produce semi-regular updates on climate science to Congress. Today's report echoes the themes of earlier editions, and paints a picture that is all the more grim for being an unsurprising confirmation of the dangers we've come to know all too well. Here's the top six things for you to worry about this weekend, according to the report:

1. Climate change is definitely caused by human activities. Always nice to hear government officials acknowledge this essential fact. And the report concedes that our only hope of curbing warming is to kick our addiction to greenhouse-gas spewing fossil fuels.
2. Extreme weather is increasing, and that's our fault, too.  In particular, searing temperatures, heavy rain, and prolonged drought.
3. Weather isn't the only threat we have to worry about. The list sounds like the side-effect warnings at the end of a prescription drug commercial: decreased air quality, insect-borne diseases, and "threats to mental health" are all on the docket for the coming decades.
4. Our infrastructure is getting hammered, and we're not spending enough to save it. Floods are destroying farmland; extreme heat is damaging roads, rail lines, and airports; and military installations are at risk.
5. Food and water security will be up in the air. Especially in water-scarce regions like the Southwest, decreasing snowpack and shrinking groundwater supplies will spark competition for water between "agricultural, municipal, and environmental" uses. At the same time, heavy floods could put water quality at risk with sediment and chemical contaminates. And by mid-century, efforts to artificially protect agriculture (like expanded irrigation) could be over-ridden by temperature and precipitation extremes.
6. Climate change is hitting plants and animals just as hard as us. Beaches, forests, wetlands, and other ecosystems could shrink or disappear, especially a problem when they play a role in mitigating the impact from extreme weather. And warming, acidifying seas could slam sea life.

Rinks in Canada’s Arctic Turn to Cooling Systems

By JEFF Z. KLEIN

Winter has come to the vast, northernmost reaches of Canada, the sparsely populated area surrounding the Arctic Circle historically characterized by severely cold weather. But these days refrigeration systems are needed to keep the ice cold at hockey arenas.

It has been too warm for December hockey in the Arctic, the latest sign that climate change is altering the environment and the way people live — especially in the far north, where the effects of rising temperatures are most pronounced.

Nine of the 14 villages in Nunavik, a region in northernmost Quebec, have installed cooling systems at community arenas within the last five years.

In Canada’s Nunavut Territory, towns including Arviat, Igloolik, Sanikiluaq and Repulse Bay have resorted to cooling systems. A system is also being installed at the community arena in Cape Dorset, a hamlet of 1,400 just 150 miles south of the Arctic Circle.

“We used to have natural ice in the arena in October, but that hasn’t happened for a long time,” said Mike Hayward, a Cape Dorset town official. Now the ice isn’t fit for hockey until mid-January, he said. That is why a cooling system is being installed in the building.

The Canadian environmental ministry reports that the country is warming more than twice as fast as the world as a whole, with annual average temperatures in Canada up about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit since 1948. The warming in winter is even faster, almost 6 degrees Fahrenheit over the same period, and scientists have documented a substantially shorter outdoor skating season as a result.

A study published last year by climate scientists at McGill and Concordia universities in Montreal warned that natural ice for skating could disappear from southern Alberta and British Columbia by midcentury and be significantly diminished throughout the rest of the country.

“The ability to skate and play hockey outdoors is a critical component of Canadian identity and culture,” the study said. “Wayne Gretzky learned to skate on a backyard skating rink; our results imply that such opportunities may not be available to future generations of Canadian children.”

The last several winters have been remarkably warm in Canada, and the winter of 2011-12 was the warmest in the historical record, with temperatures as much as 13 degrees Fahrenheit above normal in parts of the country. Last January, the winter warmth disrupted the N.H.L. All-Star Game festivities in Ottawa, as mild temperatures denied visitors the wintertime tradition of skating on the Rideau Canal.

The warming trend has been especially noticeable in the Canadian Arctic.

In Cape Dorset, Hayward noted, it rained on Christmas Day in 2010. Last month, on the first day of winter, it was only about 27 degrees.

“There’s been a big change over the past few years, to the point where without these systems now, it would not be possible for the villages to make their ice inside the arenas,” said Joe Juneau, a former N.H.L. player who has run a youth hockey program in Nunavik since 2006.

“When I started the program, I remember some of the villages starting building their ice in early November,” said Juneau, who holds an aeronautical engineering degree from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. “Now it’s very problematic. Without these systems, it would not be possible anymore for communities to have natural ice in their arenas.”

Hockey in the far north is a relatively recent phenomenon, helped largely by government-backed recreational programs and arena construction over the last two decades. Juneau initiated the Nunavik Youth Hockey Development Program to encourage children to stay in school and away from alcohol and drug consumption. More than 1,000 children are involved, and a handful have gone to Montreal to pursue a higher level of play while attending high school.

Rankin Inlet, Nunavut, has had an arena since the mid-1980s and produced the N.H.L.’s first Inuit player, Jordin Tootoo. When he grew up there was only one team per age group. The hockey program in Iqaluit, the territorial capital, produced a minor league goalie, Paul Dainton, formerly of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who played this season with the Springfield Falcons of the A.H.L.

Those and other Nunavut towns have busy senior men’s leagues, and tournaments among the territory’s communities are a winter highlight.

But the warming climate has forced arena managers in the far north to forgo natural ice and turn to artificially made ice for longer ice seasons.

Some rinks installed concrete floors to promote cooling, but others employed newer technologies. The new cooling plants in many Nunavut rinks use a thermosiphon system, in which metal pipes below the arena floor send warm air outside the building.

The rinks across Nunavik and in Cape Dorset use a less expensive refrigeration system called Eco-Ice, which employs compressors standing outside the building to draw cool air in, force warm air out, and keep the building interior at a constant temperature of minus-3 Celsius, or 26.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

“Eco-Ice systems were installed in Nunavik because the communities wanted to extend the hockey season for the kids,” said Frédéric Gagné, director of the municipal public works department for the region.

“With global warming, it’s getting pretty difficult for northern communities to make ice,” said François Bilodeau of LeProhon Group, the Quebec manufacturer of the Eco-Ice system, which has been installed in 42 rinks across Canada in the last 15 years.

“If it wasn’t getting so warm, we would probably not be in business,” he said.

Climate Change Skeptics, Here’s a Lesson from Harappan Extinction

Many hypotheses have been floated after many, many years of work on what actually led to the collapse of Harappa, the largest Bronze Age Civilization and the earliest urban civilization that India has seen, some 5200 to 4500 years ago. Some said the invading Aryans destroyed it; others proposed that there were massive earthquakes which ruined the cities. Then there were some who suggested that rivers shifted course and left the cities on their banks to decay.
Now, a group of researchers, from mathematicians to geologists to archaeologists, report today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, there’s conclusive evidence that it was climate change which led to the extinction of the Harappan civilization.
“Our work shows that none of these is likely to be true. Rather, it was the shifting pattern of the monsoon, which receded towards the north and the east of the Indian continent which led to a drying up of the land in which the Harappans had made their civilisation, and this led to its collapse,” says Ronojoy Adhikari, a mathematician at The Institute of Mathematical Sciences in Chennai.

Data analysis from multiples sources show that it was the gradual decrease in flood intensity that had encouraged urbanization around 4500 BC. However, further decline in monsoon precipitation made both inundation and rain-based farming difficult. For a long while it was believed that a large glacier-fed Himalayan river, which some have identified as the “mythical Saraswati” river, watered the Harappan heartland. The new research shows that only monsoonal-fed rivers were active in those days. And as the monsoon weakened, these rivers dried or became seasonal, impacting “habitability” along their courses.
Unlike the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, regions which were surrounded by deserts and hence restricted people’s movement forcing them to adapt and take action, harsh climate conditions led Harappan people to find an escape route. They moved eastwards, to the moister monsoon regions of upper Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, says Liviu Giosan, a geologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
So, does this finding offer any lesson to the climate change skeptics?
Of course it does, say both Adhikari and Giosan.
Global warming is leading to a change in the glaciers in the Himalayas. It is also conjectured that the global warming will increase the intensity of the monsoons. This will lead to much greater floods in the monsoon-fed rivers of the Indo-Gangetic plain. Our
society may have to find out innovative technological measures to deal with such a situation, and it is in this context, that we consider the findings in our paper a “lesson from the past”, they say.
This result is “instructive”. As was the case in the Egyptian and Mesopotamian civilizations, people today hardly have any possibility to “move”. National borders and densely populated regions don’t provide the option of finding an escape route. Giosan, who researched inKarachi (unfortunately under protection) from 2003 to 2009, says the floods of 2010 inPakistan are a warning sign. “Monsoon is the life blood of India and other countries in the region but we don’t understand how it’s going to increase or decrease due to changing climate. The entire system of irrigation in this region is under calibrated,” he cautions.
However, there’s one more reason why this study is important. This work brings in several independent sources of data – sediments, fluvial patterns and archaelogical records – to provide compelling support for the climate change hypothesis. “The great pioneer of such ‘combined methods’ was D. D. Kosambi [he wrote a popular book called ‘Combined Methods in Indology’] and I see our work as firmly embedded in that paradigm. This is the real strength of this work,” says Adhikari.