Author: divyamehra1992
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Compensatory Afforestation – Where is the Land?
Divya Mehra It is well established that India is an ‘under-construction’ country. As a developing economy, the country invests a significant amount of its budget in new development projects that are being proposed, planned, and implemented at the regional or local level. Very often the land for development projects is taken from the forest area…
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Green or Greenwashing?
Divya Mehra In my previous blog, titled ‘Responsible Consumerism Comes at a Cost’, I have highlighted the importance of being a responsible consumer, and how more and more people are choosing environmentally sustainable or simply green products to adopt a sustainable lifestyle. In doing so, increasingly, people are trying to choose products that are labelled…
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WATER QUALITY OF THE YAMUNA RIVER DURING THE FIRST LOCKDOWN
Divya Mehra and Shiwani The Coronavirus pandemic which has affected almost every part of the world is considered to be the biggest economic and health crisis of the present time. To contain the spread of the Covid-19 disease, in the initial phases of the pandemic, many countries went into lockdown, resulting in the temporary suspension…
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Responsible Consumerism Comes at a Cost
Divya Mehra With growing environmental concerns around the globe, the adoption of a sustainable lifestyle has become one of the important measures to deal with environmental crises at the individual level. In simple terms, a sustainable lifestyle is an individual’s or society’s attempt to reduce its consumption of natural resources and minimize its environmental footprint.…
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Plastic Woes and the Pandemic
Divya Mehra The world only recently started taking baby steps to deal with the troublesome nature of plastic and was coming to an understanding of the scale of damage it has done and can do to our environment, that the year 2020 brought with itself a pandemic. Besides causing unprecedented global health and economic crisis,…
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Did the Pandemic Help in Reducing Global Carbon Emissions?
Divya Mehra Since the beginning of the year 2020, the world is fighting a life-threatening enemy in the form of a virus that has turned the lives of people around. The Coronavirus, which was identified as SARS-CoV-2, is a new type of virus, which causes a highly infectious disease known as COVID-19 that has brought…
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Cities – Emerging Hotspots for Infectious Diseases
Divya Mehra Cities and pandemics have shared a long history and over the decades it has been witnessed that cities have emerged to be the epicentre for infectious diseases. This is often attributed to its very nature – the population densities and inter/intra connections have turned out to be the important factors. Cities act as…
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Pandemic and the Urban Water Crisis
Divya Mehra As the world fights the coronavirus outbreak, washing hands at regular intervals has become the most important protective measure to prevent the spread of the virus. As soon as experts confirmed that washing hands with soap thoroughly for 20 seconds will rip out the fat coating of the virus, thus making it inactive,…
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Reclaiming Lost Ground
Divya Mehra On 11 March 2020, the World Health Organisation (WHO) declared the COVID-19 or Coronavirus Disease 2019 outbreak as a ‘Pandemic’. As the number of COVID-19 cases increased manifold outside China, where it first originated, soon the enormity and seriousness of the COVID-19 threat dawned on most human beings on the planet. According to…
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Birding for an Amateur
Divya Mehra Every February, the Cornell Lab of Ornithology organises ‘The Great Backyard Bird Count’ (GBBC), a worldwide citizen science event encouraging birders, students, and the general public to count and identify birds found in their surrounding areas. The event is a fun, and easy way of engaging bird watchers from all age groups in…
Centre for Urban Ecology and Sustainability 