News stories by Manipadma Jena, page 2

MARSEILLE, France, Sep 15 (IPS) - One of the most hotly debated issues at the recently concluded IUCN Congress in Marseilles was about designating 30 percent of the planet's land and water surface as protected areas by 2030.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Sep 02 (IPS) - As Arti Prasad rode the Kuala Lumpur Pavilion mall escalator up to the third floor, a pair of luscious lips pouted down at her. Next to the towering and oversized lips, the vibrant red shades of lipstick on the giant screen immediately caught the 36-year-old Indian tourist’s fancy.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Aug 25 (IPS) - When 11-year-old Mitali Padhi hugged her childhood friends to say goodbye, she felt a deep-seated foreboding.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 29 (IPS) - Madhuri Roy left the famous Kamakhya temple in Guwahati, Assam. She had sought the goddess’s blessings for the safe delivery of her youngest daughter's baby, which was due in a few weeks. Shanty shops lined the temple outside and Roy’s eyes fell on a stack of black rice packets. All through her daughter’s pregnancy she had craved her childhood favourite black rice pudding. But during the country’s COVID-19 lockdown Roy could not procure it even though Meghalaya, her Himalayan home state, grew it.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Jun 17 (IPS) - June 17 is World Day to Combat Desertification and Drought. A new report shows that climate change, overuse and conversion for agriculture, cities and infrastructure, which also drive drought and desertification, have already degraded one fifth of the planet’s land area.

“Drought is on the verge of becoming the next pandemic and there is no vaccine to cure it.”

BHUBANESWAR, India, Feb 19 2021 (IPS) - “Our war on nature has left the planet broken. This is senseless and suicidal. The consequences of our recklessness are already apparent in human suffering, towering economic losses and the accelerating erosion of life on Earth,” António Guterres Secretary-General of the United Nations said.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Feb 19 (IPS) - “Our war on nature has left the planet broken. This is senseless and suicidal. The consequences of our recklessness are already apparent in human suffering, towering economic losses and the accelerating erosion of life on Earth,” António Guterres Secretary-General of the United Nations said.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Feb 16 (IPS) - On Sunday morning, Feb. 7, as most of the working-class in India’s Himalayan State of Uttarakhand went about their chores, the glacier-fed Rishi Ganga river started rising. Two hours later, swollen with rock debris and snowmelt, its waters rose 53 feet — the height equivalent of a five-storey building.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Jan 26 (IPS) - Climate warming is believed to have taken place at some of the fastest rates in the world in Mongolia, raising the country's average temperatures by 2.24°C between 1940 and 2015, with the last decade being the warmest of the past 76 years.

BHUBANESWAR, India, Jul 07 (IPS) - High up at an altitude of between 1,500 to 4,000 feet in India's eastern Odisha state, live the Bonda people — one of this country's most ancient tribes, who have barely altered their lifestyle in over a thousand years.