Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 21

Panchamrit, the five nectar elements announced by India at COP26, consists of five hundred gigawatts of non-fossil energy capacity by 2030, meeting half of the country's energy requirement from renewable sources by 2030, reducing projected emissions by one billion tonnes by 2030, reducing the emissions intensity of the economy by…

The article directs parties to protect the climate system on the basis of equity and in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, and adds that the developed country parties should take the lead.

Loss and damage is the third pillar of climate policy, after mitigation and adaptation, and covers harm that can no longer be prevented: land lost to the sea, a crop destroyed by an extreme event, an island made uninhabitable.

Copenhagen in 2009 had produced the political pledge of a hundred billion dollars a year by 2020, and the Cancun decisions of the following year created the institution to channel that money, along with the Cancun Adaptation Framework.

Its central feature is the nationally determined contribution, written by each country itself and revised every five years, together with the goal of holding warming well below two degrees Celsius.

Under it a country with a Kyoto target financed a project such as a wind farm, a biomass plant or a more efficient kiln in a developing country, and the emissions avoided were issued to it as certified emission reductions that counted towards its own target, while the host country…

The protocol was adopted on 11 December 1997 in the Japanese city that gave it its name, and it entered into force on 16 February 2005 once countries accounting for the required share of Annex I emissions had ratified it.

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, held in June 1992 and popularly called the Earth Summit, opened three agreements for signature: the climate convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity and Agenda 21.

The CITES Secretariat is based at Geneva in Switzerland and is administered under the United Nations Environment Programme; it services the Conference of the Parties, maintains the appendices and advises member states on permits and enforcement.

This large land snail is native to East Africa and reached India long ago, probably through the trade in ornamental plants and shells.

The Wild Life (Protection) Amendment Act of 2022 brought the parent Act into line with India obligations under CITES, reorganised its schedules and for the first time inserted an express power allowing the Central Government to regulate or prohibit the import, trade, possession and proliferation of invasive alien species.

Neem is native to the Indian subcontinent, so by definition it cannot be an alien species here, however widely it has been planted; a species is alien only outside its natural range.

The mongoose is a protected animal under the Wild Life (Protection) Act, yet its hair was being used to make artists brushes, and Operation Clean Art was the Bureau first country-wide operation directed at a single wildlife article, ending with large seizures of brushes and raw hair.

Zygogramma bicolorata is a leaf-feeding beetle from Mexico, the native region of Parthenium hysterophorus, and it was introduced in India as a biological control agent because its grubs and adults strip the weed of leaves and check its seed production.

Parthenium hysterophorus reached India from tropical America, reportedly with imported wheat, and spread rapidly over waste ground, roadsides and fallow fields.

The Wildlife Crime Control Bureau is a multi-disciplinary statutory body created in 2007 under section 38Z of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, 1972.

CITES sorts species into appendices according to how badly trade threatens them.

The text of CITES was agreed by the representatives of eighty countries meeting at Washington in the United States in 1973, which is why the treaty is also called the Washington Convention; it then entered into force on 1 July 1975, and India became a party in 1976.

It is a free-floating plant of South American origin that was brought to India for its attractive flowers.

The correct answer is A, the Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park at Darjeeling, the highest altitude zoo in India, which runs recognised conservation breeding programmes for the red panda, the snow leopard and the Himalayan wolf, and has released captive-bred red pandas into the Singalila landscape.