CLIMATE CARE - NORTHEAST INDIA

MONOJ GOGOI The fire that broke out at a massive landfill in Bhalswa in North Delhi on Tuesday (26th April) raises several pertinent questions. Eruption of small fires in such garbage dumping areas were common as local people reported but this type of massive blazing was rare. The size of the dumping ground was about 36 acres and mountainous and the fire tenders were struggling for three days to douse it.  But why it’s started to happen? In the last 30 days four landfill fires occurred – on March 28 at Ghazipur, April 10 at Ghazipur and again on April 20 at Ghazipur; but this time it occurred in Bhalswa of North Delhi on Tuesday. As mentioned in the previous write-up, the incidents of fire have been increasing. Climate change impacts worldwide can be attributed as one of the primary causes. The atmospheric temperature was around 42C on Tuesday. The methane gas is very vulnerable for ignition, in such dumping yards the rotten garbage emits methane in high rate. Mismanagement ...

MONOJ GOGOI   Wildfire is a very major natural disaster in many parts of the world, including some parts in Australia, the United States of America, Brazil or Peru etc. In many countries, fire was not considered seriously or more devastating than other hazards like flood and erosion, cyclone, storm, earthquake, drought, landslide etc. But now, wildfires or other fires are becoming more focal issues in some countries where such incidents were not taken care of with much attention.   In a speech to the Chief Ministers, today, on April 27th, the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi tells towards the end of his speech that temperature is soaring in many parts of India drastically and much earlier than the normal period. He states that incidents of wildfires or fires in buildings, residential areas and hospitals are increasing rapidly increasing. Modi warns the Chief Ministers fire hazards may increase fatalities and create catastrophes. Hospital authourities should be more ca...

Thawing permafrost is roiling the Arctic landscape, driven by a hidden world of changes beneath the surface as the climate warms Permafrost and ice wedges have built up over millennia in the Arctic. When they thaw, they destabilize the surrounding landscape. Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post via Getty Images Mark J. Lara , University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Across the Arctic, strange things are happening to the landscape. Massive lakes, several square miles in size, have disappeared in the span of a few days. Hillsides slump. Ice-rich ground collapses, leaving the landscape wavy where it once was flat, and in some locations creating vast fields of large, sunken polygons. It’s evidence that permafrost, the long-frozen soil below the surface, is thawing. That’s bad news for the communities built above it – and for the global climate. As an ecologist , I study these dynamic landscape interactions and have been document...