Daily Quiz: UPSC Prelims Marathon (Environment) – June 27, 2020

In a first of its kind symbolic effort by India at the UN, Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated a 50KW ‘Gandhi Solar Park’, a gesture that highlights India’s willingness to go beyond the talk on climate change.

• At a contribution of about one million dollars, India has gifted solar panels that have been installed on the roof of the UN Headquarters here, one panel each for every 193 UN Member State.
• Modi will remotely inaugurate the solar park at the UN Headquarters and the ‘Gandhi Peace Garden’ during a special commemorative event marking Gandhi’s 150th birth anniversary.

In Iceland, people commemorated the loss of the glacier Okjokull.

• The glacier was officially declared dead in 2014 at the age of 700, when it was no longer thick enough to move. It has been reduced to a small patch of ice atop a volcano.
• The people walked up the volcano northeast of the capital Reykjavik to lay a plaque which carries a letter to the future.
• The plaque reads “Okjokull is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as glacier.

#FridaysForFuture is a movement that began in August 2018, after 15-year-old Greta Thunberg and other young activists sat in front of the Swedish parliament every school day for three weeks, to protest against the lack of action on the climate crisis.

• ‘Thunberg’ called for a strike every Friday until the Swedish parliament revised its policies towards climate change.
• Gradually, students and adults from across the world started mobilising and demonstrating in front of parliaments and local city halls in their respective countries.

New Zealand’s Parliament passed The Zero-Carbon Act, which will commit New Zealand to zero carbon emissions by 2050 or sooner, as part of the country’s attempts to meet its Paris climate accord commitments.

• The Act is not a separate legislation but is an amendment to the existing Climate Change Responses Act, 2002.
• According to the New Zealand government, this is the first legislation in the world to make a legally binding commitment to living within 1.5 degrees Celsius of global warming.

India’s rivers have a heavy metal contamination problem. According to The Hindu, samples taken from two-thirds of water quality stations on major rivers revealed the presence of a heavy metal (or in some cases more than one) beyond limits specified by the Bureau of Indian Standards.

• The Central Water Commission (CWC) collected a total of 442 surface water samples, of which 287 were polluted by heavy metals.
• “Samples from 101 stations had contamination by two metals, [and] six stations saw contamination by three metals”.
• The most common heavy metal found was iron, and above safe limits in 156 samples. Lead, nickel, chromium, cadmium and copper were the other metals.

The Union Minister for Environment, Forest and Climate Change, Shri Prakash Javadekar today released the biennial “India State of Forest Report (ISFR)”, in New Delhi.

• The report is published by the Forest Survey of India (FSI) which has been mandated to assess the forest and tree resources of the country including wall-to-wall forest cover mapping in a biennial cycle.
• Starting 1987, ISFR 2019 is the 16th report in the series.
• Area-wise Madhya Pradesh has the largest forest cover in the country followed by Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha and Maharashtra.
• In terms of forest cover as percentage of total geographical area, the top five States are Mizoram (85.41%), Arunachal Pradesh (79.63%), Meghalaya (76.33%), Manipur (75.46%) and Nagaland (75.31%).

The Ministry of New and Renewable Energy has proposed a draft policy for the supply of round-the-clock power to distributors through a mix of renewable energy and electricity generated in coal-based thermal power plants.

• Addressing issues of intermittency, limited hours of supply and low capacity utilisation of transmission infrastructure, the draft power policy provides for ‘reverse bundling’—high-cost thermal power clubbed with cheaper renewable energy.
• A power generating firm will have to supply electricity that consists of at least 51 percent of renewable energy and the rest drawn from thermal sources.
• The generator will supply renewable energy complemented with thermal power in round-the-clock manner, keeping at least 80 percent availability on an annual basis, the draft said.

Culling is a practice of segregating organisms from a group according to desired or undesired characteristics and then reducing that population by selective slaughter.

• In Australia, camels will be shot by professional firearms experts from helicopters. It is being done to prevent the animals from drinking too much water in the drought-affected regions.
• According to reports, 10,000 camels will be shot today after an order from the Aboriginal leaders in the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (APY) lands.
• The camels are being culled because according to locals they have been wrecking havoc searching for water sources.
• Another reason for the culling is being stated as the greenhouse gas emissions.
• Camels reportedly emit methane equivalent to one ton of carbon dioxide per year.

The Supreme Court allowed the Centre to introduce the African cheetah to a suitable habitat in India.

• With India’s own cheetahs vanishing, a plea for this had been filed by the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA), seeking permission to introduce the African cheetah from Namibia.
• Before Namibia, India had approached Iran for Asiatic cheetahs, but had been refused.
• The Asiatic cheetah is classified as a “critically endangered” species by the IUCN Red List, and is believed to survive only in Iran.
• In 1947, Maharaja Ramanuj Pratap Singh Deo of Koriya (now in Chhattisgarh) reportedly killed the last known Asiatic cheetah in India.
• In 1952, the cheetah was officially declared extinct from India.

Kuno-Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary is a hidden gem hiding amidst Vindhyan Hills in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

• This wildlife sanctuary is a well kept secret and is a safe haven for a large number of flora and fauna.
• Kuno Palpur Wildlife Sanctuary in Barkheda, Madhya Pradesh is underway to become India’s second home for the Asiatic lion.
• The species, whose only refuge in the country has been Gujarat’s Gir forest, numbered in 523 in 2015.
• To prevent decline—and possible extinction—in a single habitat due to natural disasters, epidemics, decline in prey or retaliatory killings, an action plan is being implemented to relocate a number of lions to Kuno, a former royal hunting ground.