Environment & Ecology GK Questions with Answers – Page 29

Project Elephant was launched in 1992 to protect elephants, their habitat and the corridors along which herds move between forests, and it also deals with human elephant conflict and the welfare of captive elephants.

This nearly blind freshwater dolphin of the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna systems finds its prey by echolocation and was declared the National Aquatic Animal of India in 2009, a step meant to draw attention to the pollution and damming of its rivers.

The hangul, also called the Kashmir stag, is the only surviving Asiatic subspecies of the red deer in India and its last viable population lives in Dachigam, a park in the hills above Srinagar whose name means ten villages.

The Himalayan region is home to wild goats such as the ibex and the tahr and to the snow leopard, which hunts them above the tree line, so pair (a) is right.

CITES was drafted and signed at Washington in 1973, but a treaty begins to bind its members only after enough countries ratify it, and that stage was reached in 1975.

Silent Valley National Park lies in the Palakkad district of Kerala, in the Nilgiri hills of the Western Ghats, and protects one of the last stretches of undisturbed tropical evergreen forest in the country.

The Asiatic cheetah once hunted across the open grassland and scrub of central and peninsular India, was trained by rulers for coursing blackbuck, and was wiped out by shooting and by the ploughing of its grassland.

The Wild Ass Sanctuary lies in the Little Rann of Kachchh in Gujarat and is the last home of the Indian wild ass, locally called the khur, a Schedule I animal that grazes on the raised patches of grass known as bets in the salt desert.

The Red List arranges risk in a ladder, and the three threatened grades in falling order of severity are Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable.

The greater one-horned rhinoceros, the animal of Kaziranga and Manas in Assam, is placed in Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972, the schedule that carries the highest protection and the strictest punishment for hunting or trade.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature was founded in 1948 and works from Gland, a town in Switzerland near Geneva, where several environmental bodies have their offices.

Project Tiger was launched in 1973, the year after the Wildlife (Protection) Act came into force, and it was the first species recovery project of its kind in India.

From that date the manufacture, import, stocking, distribution, sale and use of a listed set of single-use plastic articles became an offence across the country; the list covers earbuds with plastic sticks, plastic sticks for balloons and flags, candy and ice-cream sticks, thermocol used for decoration, plates, cups, glasses, cutlery…

The mission was launched on the 145th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, whose insistence on sanitation the campaign invokes, and it runs in two wings, one for urban areas and one for rural areas.

In pyrolysis the waste is heated to a high temperature in a closed chamber from which air is kept out, so the material does not burn but breaks into a liquid oil, a solid char and a combustible gas, all of which can be used as fuel or feedstock.

Vermicomposting uses earthworms, which swallow organic waste, grind it in their gizzard and pass it out as casts that are rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, so the product is a finer and more nutritious manure than ordinary compost and is ready sooner.

The Basel Convention was adopted in 1989 to stop rich countries from shipping toxic and hazardous waste to poorer countries for cheap disposal, and it requires the prior informed consent of the receiving country before any such consignment moves.

Under this idea a producer, importer or brand owner stays answerable for its product after the consumer has finished with it, and must arrange to collect back and recycle an agreed quantity of packaging or equipment; the plastic waste, e-waste and battery waste rules all run on it.

In biomethanation, anaerobic bacteria break down organic matter inside a closed digester where no oxygen is present, and the gas they release is mainly methane, which is what makes biogas burn with a clean blue flame and gives it its fuel value.

Microplastics are plastic particles under five millimetres across, whether they were manufactured that small, as in cosmetic microbeads and synthetic textile fibres, or were formed when larger plastic articles weathered and broke up in sunlight and waves.