Oil spill, due to collisions or grounding of ships, is one of the most devastating forms of pollution in the marine environment. The impact of an accidental oil spill could be tremendous on marine ecosystem, coastal economy and other activities. Heavy vessel traffic in and out of the major commercial ports, such as Jawaharlal Nehru Port and Mumbai port has made the coastline of Mumbai vulnerable for oil spill incidents.

The Thane creek which houses two major commercial ports; Mumbai & Jawaharlal Nehru Ports faces periodic siltation problems. The maintenance dredging, carried out to keep navigational channel navigable, incurs high annual cost. A detailed understanding of the dominant processes causing morphological changes is required in tackling the problem of siltation.An attempt has been made to simulate the annual morphological change soccurring within Mumbai port limits, using a process-based hydrodynamic and morphological numerical model.

A team of scientists from five different institutions: National Institute of Ocean Technology (NIOT), Chennai Integrated Coastal and Marine Area Management Project Directorate (ICMAM PD), Chennai; National Institute of Oceanography (NIO), Goa; and National Central University (NCU), Taiwan led by IIT Bombay has successfully demonstrated the joint capabilities through a one-day field measurement campaign to estimate the nearshore dynamics along Pondicherry coast, located about 150 kms south of Chennai.

Tidal energy is one of the most promising resources of marine renewable energy. In India, Gulf of Khambhat, Gulf of Kutchh in Gujarat state and delta of Ganga in Sunderbans, West Bengal state are potential sites for generating tidal power. The aim of the research study is to estimate the tidal power potential along the Gulfs of Khambhat and Kutch. Two independent hydrodynamic models have been developed to estimate the spatial and temporal distributions of tidal energies in these Gulfs.

Hydrological studies in regions with sparse rain gauge networks are limited by the availability of rainfall data. Hence, a regionalisation approach becomes critical in modeling extreme events such as floods. A comprehensive framework is put forward for generating regionalised design rainfall time series, which can serve as a vital tool for data-scarce catchments prone to flood disasters. To demonstrate the framework, Jagatsinghpur district, a highly flood prone region in Odisha (India) is selected.

Indian summer monsoon rainfall (ISMR) is the major component of the Asian summer monsoon, which provides an 80% of the total annual rainfall in India, from June to September, which is critically important for agricultural productivity and GDP. However, global and local environmental changes are likely to introduce non-stationarity in the characteristics of ISMR extremes.

Urban populations (and the associated resource consumption) are one of the largest contributors to the global energy consumption and environmental impact. In India, there is continuous increase in urbanisation and almost 1/3 rd of the population is already staying in urbanised areas. With the challenges of global warming and other diverse environmental pressures on earth, it has become essential to decouple the growth from resource consumption such that there will be less pressure on the environment due to human activities.

It is evident in the history of life through time that diversification of biotic communities was driven by evolutionary innovations and environmental changes. The Earth’s climate passed through several episodes of greenhouse to icehouse conditions. Organisms responded differently to the climate change at regional and global scales. The Micropalaeontology Lab at IIT Bombay is pursuing research to understand how a unicellular, marine organism, called foraminifera, responded to climate change in the Cenozoic Era, the last 65 million years of the Earth’s history.

Alkalophile microbes are known to consume urea and form calcium carbonate. Only recently this ‘natural cement’ has been used to bond loose granular soil particles to improve their strength and solve other geotechnical issues such as increase liquefaction and earthquake resistance, reduce soil erosion and restore brown field sites. The success of this method depends upon the precise environment conditions for the organisms to secrete one or more of their metabolic products. The temperature and pH must be ‘just right’.

Restoration of a site previously prepared using dredged and waste clays from underground construction or tailing sludge, is a serious geotechnical problem. Much of these clays exist as lumps which ranges in size from a few tens of millimetres to a meter suspended in slurry, with poor engineering properties. This double porous material consolidates because of the expulsion of water from the voids between the lumps, as well as the voids within each lump. Due to this complex nature, the conventional theory of consolidation is not applicable to lumpy clay fills.

Calcium carbide residue (CCR) is a waste by-product of acetylene gas manufacturing industry. Because of its zero recovery value, the present Indian practice is to dump it in open land or landfills. This not only adversely impacts the volume of the landfill, but also reduces the biodegradation process of many other wastes because of its high alkali content. Hence to support the environment, it is necessity to develop means to reuse this industrial waste. This is the background of the study.

Soils under road or rail embankment are subjected to millions of low amplitude cyclic loads. Similar large number of load cycles are seen in wind and wave loaded storage structures and below machine foundations. These load levels are not high enough to cause soil liquefaction or particle breakage, but the significantly large number of cycles can alter the soil fabric and cause significant volumetric strain accumulation over time. Under the best case scenario, this can cause the embankment’s strength to increase, thus permitting even greater axle load over them.

Ecosystem management has become critical in present times with rapidly shrinking forests, pollution in water bodies and increasing green house gas levels. The role of corporate assumes importance in this context as they are responsible for the environmental degradation on one hand and have access to resources (financial and technological) that can provide solutions, being economic engines of growth and employment. Firms’ practices towards ecosystem management are usually based on their sector, stakeholder interests, products or services and business models.

Indian policymakers are confronted with commitments to decarbonise the electricity sector to achieve climate change mitigation targets. In this context, it is important to find cost effective policies to create suitable conditions for penetration of green technologies. Many model-based studies have been previously performed to study carbon emission trajectories for future scenarios. Previously performed studies analyse the effectiveness of carbon prices in achieving mitigation targets and none of them focuses on existing policies under implementation. 

India is one of the fastest growing major economies of the world. It imports three quarters of its oil demand, making transport sector major contributor of green house gas (GHG) emissions. Around 40% of oil consumption in India comes from transport sector and over 90% of energy demand is from road transport sector. This has led to serious increase in CO 2 emission and concentration of air pollutants in India. According to Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), transport can play a crucial role for mitigation of global greenhouse gas emissions.

This study was commissioned by the Group of Eight + Five (G8+5), hosted by United Nations Environment Programme and launched in 2007 by Germany and the EU Commission. It builds on the analysis of the millennium ecosystem assessment and takes the analysis further by demonstrating the economic significance of biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation in terms of negative effects on human well-being’. So far, nature’s benefits have played a minor role in policy. Why is this the case?

Recognising the importance of valuing the ecosystem services, the TEEB-India initiative (TII) has been launched by the Ministry of Environment and Forests and Climate change for the forests, wetlands, coastal and marine ecosystems. This study, funded by The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH and Ministry of Environment and Forests, GoI, is part of the TII initiative on forest ecosystems for which Western Ghats has been considered as study region as it is the most

A scoping study to build forests accounts in Himachal Pradesh was carried out in 2013 as part of the Development Policy Loan. The World Bank has initiated the Wealth Accounting and the Valuation of Ecosystem Services (WAVES) in various countries. WAVES is a global partnership that aims to provide technical support to countries within the World Bank Group, through related programs and funding instruments to bring natural capital into economic decision-making and promote sustainable development. The HP exercise is useful and there are several interesting initiatives to share.

In parallel to the national efforts to address climate change, all Indian States have embarked on a process to individually develop action plans aligned with the National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) to plan for low carbon and climate resilient development in their respective States. This has assumed the shape of formulation of the State Action Plans on Climate Change (SAPCC). It is clear that meeting the plans requires enormous funds and can be a major stumbling block in realising sub-national climate change goals.

This project examines the feasibility of implementing a congestion tax for the city of Chennai in the State of Tamil Nadu. Based on secondary data, it calculates the time cost, fuel cost and cost of emissions due to congestion and makes recommendations regarding the effective design and application of such a tax. Chennai ranks one of the highest among all South Asian cities in terms of GHG emissions as well emissions of other criteria pollutants, especially NOx and PM10. The city also suffers from heavy volumes of traffic and congestion, particularly on the arterial roads.