Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 26

Tarun Bharat Sangh works on water conservation, and its base is at Bhikampura in Alwar district of Rajasthan.

The earthworm is called the farmer's friend because its work keeps soil fit for crops. As it burrows it loosens the soil and lets air and water reach the roots, and the castings it leaves behind are rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potash, so the topsoil is steadily renewed.

Sem is the local word for waterlogging with salt, and it hurts Sriganganagar and Hanumangarh the most because these districts lie in the command area of the Gang Canal and the Indira Gandhi Canal.

The gaur, also called the Indian bison, is the wild bovine closest to domestic cattle and is protected in the Nagarhole and Bandipur national parks of Karnataka.

An aquifer is a body of rock or loose sediment that is both saturated with groundwater and permeable enough to let that water move freely, so a well sunk into it keeps yielding water.

Most renewable sources depend on the weather, so the power they give is intermittent rather than steady. Solar panels make nothing at night and little under thick cloud, wind turbines stop when the wind drops, and hydropower falls away in a weak monsoon.

Sustainable Development Goal 15 is Life on Land, and target 15.3 commits countries to combat desertification, restore degraded land and soil including land affected by desertification, drought and floods, and strive to achieve a land degradation neutral world.

The Ramsar Convention was signed at Ramsar in Iran in 1971 and came into force in 1975, two decades before the Earth Summit, and its secretariat sits at Gland in Switzerland; it therefore has no connection with Rio.

The permanent secretariat of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification has been based at Bonn in Germany since 1999, in the same United Nations campus that hosts the secretariat of the UNFCCC, which is a useful memory link because both are Rio Conventions with their secretariats in the same…

Running water in the Chambal basin of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh has cut deep, steep-sided channels into soft alluvium, and when these channels multiply and widen the land becomes unfit for cultivation.

The ICAR-Central Soil Salinity Research Institute is at Karnal in Haryana and is the national institute for the reclamation of salt-affected soils, the use of poor quality water in irrigation, subsurface drainage in waterlogged land, and salt-tolerant crop varieties.

The Central Arid Zone Research Institute was set up at Jodhpur in Rajasthan in 1959 and works under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.

India hosted the fourteenth Conference of the Parties to the UNCCD at Greater Noida near New Delhi in 2019, and the meeting closed with the New Delhi Declaration, in which the parties committed themselves to restoring degraded land and to working towards Land Degradation Neutrality.

Itai-itai, which means ouch-ouch in Japanese, was first recorded in the Jinzu river basin of Japan, where mine waste put cadmium into irrigation water and then into rice grown in the contaminated soil.

The day marks the anniversary of the adoption of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification at Paris on 17 June 1994, and the United Nations General Assembly declared it in the same year so that governments would review progress on land restoration annually.

The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification was adopted at Paris on 17 June 1994 and it entered into force in December 1996.

The question asks for the odd one out, and the heavy use of chemical fertilisers damages soil rather than conserving it: it acidifies the soil, kills soil microorganisms, leaves salt residues, and the surplus nitrate and phosphate wash into water bodies and cause eutrophication.

A shelter belt is a row or a block of trees and shrubs planted across the direction of the prevailing wind.

Roots take up nitrogen chiefly as the nitrate ion and to a smaller extent as ammonium; inside the plant the nitrate is reduced and built into amino acids, proteins and nucleic acids.

Carbon dioxide is a trace gas, roughly four hundredths of one per cent of dry air by volume, yet it is the source of all the carbon that photosynthesis fixes into food and the chief gas by which human activity is warming the planet.