Environment and Natural Resources Test - 3

The sacred groves can be seen as a system that informally forces traditional communities to harvest natural resources in an ecologically sustained fashion. Some researchers believe that sacred groves hold the potential for preserving not only biodiversity and ecological functions, but also cultural diversity. Sacred groves embody a rich set of forest preservation practices and they share characteristics with common property resource systems. Their size ranges from clumps of a few trees to several hundred acres.

The early 1980s saw the first anti-dam movement launched in the North, namely, the campaign to save the Franklin River and its surrounding forests in Australia. This was a wilderness and forest campaign as well as an anti-dam campaign. At present, there has been a spurt in mega-dam building in the South, from Turkey to Thailand to South Africa, from Indonesia to China. India has had some of the leading anti-dam, pro-river movements. 

The growing focus on environmental issues within the arena of global politics was firmly consolidated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in June 1992. This was also called the Earth Summit. The summit was countries of the First World, generally referred to as the ‘global North’ were pursuing a different environmental agenda than the poor and developing countries of the Third World, called the ‘global South’. 

The Energy Conservation Act, passed in 2001, outlines initiatives to improve energy efficiency. Similarly, the Electricity Act of 2003 encourages the use of renewable energy. 

The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement setting targets for industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Certain gases like Carbon dioxide, Methane, Hydro-fluoro carbons, etc. are considered at least partly responsible for global warming - the rise in global temperature which may have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. 

‘Commons’ are those resources which are not owned by anyone but rather shared by a community. This could be a ‘common room’, a ‘community centre’, a park or a river. 

India ratified the Paris Climate Agreement on 2 October 2016. And India has one of the largest renewable energy programmes in the world.

The Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement setting targets for industrialised countries to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. Certain gases like Carbon dioxide, Methane, Hydro-fluoro carbons, etc. are considered at least partly responsible for global warming - the rise in global temperature which may have catastrophic consequences for life on Earth. The protocol was agreed to in 1997 in Kyoto in Japan, based on principles set out in UNFCCC.

A steady decline in the total amount of ozone in the Earth’s stratosphere (commonly referred to as the ozone hole) poses a real danger to ecosystems and human health.

The UN defines indigenous population as comprising the descendants of people who inhabited the present territory of a country at the time when persons of a different culture or ethnic origin arrived there from other parts of the world and overcame them. The following problems are faced by such people:

1. They lost their lands which belonged to them only for a long time.

2. The loss of land refers to a loss of an economic resource base.

3. Issues related to the rights of indigenous communities have also been neglected in domestic and international politics for a long.