COP24: What the outcomes were and whether they are sufficient

Last week, a much anticipated climate change conference concluded in Katowice, Poland. The conference is critical because 3 years after signing the Paris Agreement, there is finally a working program to operationalize the Agreement. Many people have been talking about the rigor (or the lack of it) of this rule-book, and what went down in […]

Urbanization trends in India

Since the dawn of the Industrial Era, urbanization is considered to be an inevitable and universal process. This is because urbanization and urban areas have conditions that are prerequisites for the industrial and technological revolutions and the associated economic development that followed. The conditions for industrialization includes access to capital, entrepreneurs ready to use the […]

Solar Village Search Engine: Search for a brighter tomorrow

Technological interventions today require a huge amount of funds and investments. This is especially true in the case of interventions in the sustainable development sector. Due to high perceived risk in the market, renewable energy and other innovations in the environmental field do not receive as much interest or amounts in terms of investments from […]

Groundwater recharge through irrigation losses in New Zealand

A guest blog by Nigel Cowburn. Nigel is a landscape architect based in New Zealand. I recently attended the New Zealand Irrigation Conference. One topic that came up often was aquifer recharge. NZ is undergoing a rapid shift from government funded irrigation to private sector schemes. The government-led approach resulted in over-allocation of many […]

Is groundwater a reliable source of water for communities?

Traditionally, communities all over the world have relied on fresh surface water to meet their water needs. Thus, with the advent of urban centers and rapid development, one of the first thrust areas was to control and store surface water resources so that the population of an area can reliably survive on it. Investment in […]