Daily Current Affairs including static notes - 10 JUNE

Xi to visit India in 2019 (GS 2 IR)

• The Chinese premier accepted Mr. Modi’s invitation for another “informal summit”, like the one held in Wuhan between the two leaders, in India next year.

Details: Prime Minister of India and President of People’s Republic of China, Mr. Xi Jinping held their first Informal Summit in Wuhan on April 27-28, 2018, to exchange views on overarching issues of bilateral and global importance, and to elaborate their respective visions and priorities for national development in the context of the current and future international situation.

PM Narendra Modi and Chinese President Xi Jinping met on the sidelines of the 2-day Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit being held in the coastal city of Qingdao.

It will be the first SCO summit since its expansion, when India and Pakistan were included as full members at the Astana summit in Kazakhstan last year. India is likely to pitch for concerted regional and global action against terror networks and favor effective connectivity links to boost trade. During his visit to Qingdao, a coastal city in east China’s Shandong Province, PM Modi will meet Mr. Xi multiple times on the sidelines of the summit.

Mr. Xi accepted Mr. Modi’s invitation for another “informal summit” in India next year and described Wuhan as a “new starting point” in India-China relations.

The leaders had detailed discussions on bilateral and global issues, which would add further vigor to the India-China friendship after their “milestone” informal summit in Wuhan.

A MoU on sharing hydrological information on the Brahmaputra River by China and another pact on amendment of the protocol on phyto-sanitary requirements for exporting non-Basmati rice from India to China were signed after the talks.

China is willing to work with India to take the Wuhan meeting as a “new starting point” to continuously enhance political mutual trust and engage in mutually beneficial cooperation across the board, to push forward China-India relations in a better, faster and steadier manner.

Last year, China stopped sharing data soon after the 73-day standoff between the Indian and Chinese troops at Dokalam over Chinese military’s plans to build a road close to India’s Chicken Neck corridor connecting the northeastern States.

The first MoU was inked between China’s Ministry of Water Resources and India’s Ministry of Water Resources, River Development and Ganga Rejuvenation upon provision of hydrological information of the Brahmaputra River in flood season.

The agreement enables China to provide hydrological data in flood season from May 15 to October 15 every year. It also enables the Chinese side to provide hydrological data if water level exceeds the mutually agreed level during non-flood season.

China, an upstream country, shares the scientific study of the movement, distribution and quality of water data for the river.

The second MoU was signed between China’s General Administration of Customs and India’s Department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare on Phyto-sanitary requirements for exporting rice from India to China, one of the world’s biggest rice markets.

The 2006 Protocol on Phytosanitary Requirements for Exporting Rice from India to China has been amended to include the export of non-Basmati varieties of rice from India. At present, India can only export Basmati rice to China.

Sources said the pact on non-Basmati rice may help in addressing India’s concerns over widening trade deficit which has been in China’s favor. China has been promising to address the issue of trade deficit with India which has been seeking a greater market access for its goods and services in China.

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Threat to Bannerghatta zone (GS 3 Env)

• At least 73 eco-sensitive villages, of which 22 are ‘red list’ villages, have been left out of the buffer zone of the Bannerghatta National Park, which remains Bengaluru’s last big urban forest.

Details: ‘Red list’ comprises villages that are adjacent to the forest and are highly eco-sensitive.

Using a 2016 Indian Institute of Science report that puts villages in the region in five categories of eco-sensitivity, Mr. Nowlakha, who has studied the ecologically sensitive zone, found that just 58 of 147 villages in the top two levels of eco-sensitivity had been included in the draft ESZ.

A further 16 are partially included (that is, only 100 meters into the village), while 73 are excluded.

Of these, the researcher placed 22 in the ‘red list’.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests does allow for buffer zone to be reduced to 100 meters in densely populated areas, and this makes sense in the context of the northern edge where Bengaluru lies. But, there is no logical reason, apart from vested interests, to exclude villages with low built-up area in the central and southern boundaries of the park.

Considering the reduction of the ESZ, Mr. Nowlakha is of the opinion that the buffer zone will do little in protecting the area, or the elephants that either uses it as a refuge or as a transit passage.

However, his study is based on the initial draft that put the ESZ at 269 square km, which has been cut down by a third to just 181.57 square km.

Bannerghatta National Park is the first of 21 urban forests to be looked at by the researcher. The findings will be presented to the Supreme Court, which is hearing the matter on eco-sensitive zones.

Protecting this meager buffer zone may be more than a challenge, finds the study. While the BDA’s master plan mentions the ESZ and recommends a status quo, major transit projects that are being planned or being implemented are threats.

The four-laning of Kanakapura Road, the metro on Bannerghatta Road till Gottigere and suburban lines connecting Bidadi and Ramanagaram will see land prices shoot up and more real estate projects.

About Ecologically Sensitive Zones: Eco-Sensitive Zones (ESZs) or Ecologically Fragile Areas (EFAs) are areas notified by the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEF&CC), Government of India around Protected Areas, National Parks and Wildlife Sanctuaries. The purpose of declaring ESZs is to create some kind of “shock absorbers” to the protected areas by regulating and managing the activities around such areas. They also act as a transition zone from areas of high protection to areas involving lesser protection.

An ESZ could go up to 10 kilometers around a protected area as provided in the Wildlife Conservation Strategy, 2002.

Moreover, in case where sensitive corridors, connectivity and ecologically important patches, crucial for landscape linkage, are beyond 10 kilometers width, these should be included in the Eco-Sensitive Zones.

Further, even in the context of a particular Protected Area, the distribution of an area of ESZ and the extent of regulation may not be uniform all around and it could be of variable width and extent.

About Buffer Zones: Areas peripheral to a national park or equivalent reserve, where restrictions are placed upon resource use or special development measures are undertaken to enhance the conservation values of the area.

Many authors agree that the term buffer zone became widely used with the Man and the Biosphere (MAB) program and the Biosphere Reserves (BRs) in the 1970s.

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Small dams are equally damaging as large dams (GS 3 Env)

• The first study on small hydropower projects in India proves that small dams cause as severe ecological impacts as big dams, including altering fish communities and changing river flows.

Details: Such hydro projects, which usually generate less than 25 megawatts of power and consist of a wall that obstructs a river’s flow, a large pipe that diverts the collected water to a turbine-driven powerhouse to generate electricity and a canal that releases the water back into the river, are touted to be better than large dams because they submerge fewer regions and barely impact river flow. Such projects receive financial subsidies — even carbon credits — for being ‘greener’.

To see how green such small dams really are, scientists from various organizations compared almost 50 kilometers of three river tributaries — over one undammed and two dammed stretches — of the Netravathi river in the Western Ghats of Karnataka.

They studied three zones in detail: above the dam (upstream), in the area between the dam’s wall and the powerhouse, sometimes completely devoid of water (‘dewatered’) and below the powerhouse (downstream).

Here, they studied differences in water depth and width, which signify how much habitat is available to the river’s denizens, and habitat quality through factors including dissolved oxygen content and water temperatures.

Their results show that changes in water flow in the dammed sections reduced the stream’s depth and width; water in these stretches was also warmer and had lower dissolved oxygen levels. These changes were most evident in the ‘dewatered’ zones and worsened in the dry seasons.

This decrease in habitat quantity and quality showed in fish diversity too. The team found that undammed stretches recorded a higher diversity of fish species, including endemics (species seen only in the Western Ghats).

Such small hydro-projects cropping up on rivers in the Ghats is a serious worry, especially because they do not require environmental impact assessments.

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Coral IVF for Great Barrier reef (GS 3 Env)

A coral fertility treatment designed to help heal damaged parts of Australia’s Great Barrier

• Reef is showing signs of success and now needs to be scaled up to create a bigger impact.

Details: the results show that the experimental process known as “coral IVF” is working on a small scale.

The team of researchers managed to “significantly increase” the numbers of baby coral on reefs at Heron Island and One Tree Island, where they laid millions of coral larvae 18 months ago.

There’s a very clear outcome, the higher the numbers of larvae that you put into the reef system, the more coral recruits you get.

The pilot studies at small scales are giving hope that scientists will be able to scale this up to much larger reef scales.

The Great Barrier Reef — a UNESCO World Heritage Site — lost around half of its coral in the past few years after two mass bleaching events in 2016 and 2017, a pattern repeated on coral reefs around the world.

The bleaching occurs when warmer ocean temperatures caused by climate change put major stress on coral organisms, turning them white. If they do not have time to recover, they eventually die.

The coral IVF project is designed to help reefs repopulate faster to help speed up the recovery time after a bleaching event.

The programme is one of a number of experimental projects under way to save the reef.

About Coral Bleaching: Warmer water temperatures can result in coral bleaching. When water is too warm, corals will expel the algae living in their tissues causing the coral to turn completely white. This is called coral bleaching. When a coral bleach, it is not dead. Corals can survive a bleaching event, but they are under more stress and are subject to mortality.

Bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef: The Great Barrier Reef along the coast of Australia experienced bleaching events in 1980, 1982, 1992, 1994, 1998, 2002, 2006, 2016 and 2017. Some locations suffered severe damage, with up to 90% mortality. The most widespread and intense events occurred in the summers of 1998 and 2002, with 42% and 54% respectively of reefs bleached to some extent, and 18% strongly bleached. However coral losses on the reef between 1995 and 2009 were largely offset by growth of new corals. An overall analysis of coral loss found that coral populations on the Great Barrier Reef had declined by 50.7% from 1985 to 2012, but with only about 10% of that decline attributable to bleaching, and the remaining 90% caused about equally by tropical cyclones and by predation by crown-of-thorns starfishes. A global mass coral bleaching has been occurring since 2014 because of the highest recorded temperatures plaguing oceans. These temperatures have caused the most severe and widespread coral bleaching ever recorded in the Great Barrier Reef.