Everything about: Elephants

Asiatic Elephant

• Asiatic Elephant is Endangered in IUCN; Schedule I of Wildlife Protection Act and Appendix I of CITES.
• Elephants are National Heritage animals.
• World Elephant Day = 12 Aug, 2017.
• Elephant Reserves (ER are declared by Center)
  1. Singhbhum ER in JH is the 1st ER of India.
  2. Karnataka has the highest Elephants followed by Assam & Kerala.
  3. Singphan ER = Nagaland. (Other Protected Areas in NG = Itangki NP, Fakim WS, Pulibadze WS, Rangapahar WS).
  4. Manas NP is also an Elephant reserve.
• Elephant Corridors
  1. Elephant Corridors are narrow strips of land that connect 2 large habitats of Elephants.
  2. Elephant corridors are crucial to reducing animal fatalities due to accidents and other reasons.
  3. Odisha, Jharkhand and Chattisgarh are mineral-rich states, but also have the highest number of Elephant corridors.
  4. Asian Elephant Alliance,
     1. It is an umbrella initiative by 5 NGOs, that has come together to secure 96 out of the 101 existing corridors in the next 10 years used by elephants across 12 States in India.
     2. NGOs Elephant Family, International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), IUCN Netherlands and World Land Trust have teamed up with Wildlife Trust of India (WTI) in the alliance.
• Project Elephant, 1992
  1. It was launched by India in the year 1992 as a Centrally Sponsored Scheme with the following objectives:1
     1. To protect elephants, their habitat & corridors
     2. To address issues of man-animal conflict
     3. Welfare of captive elephants
  2. It is implemented in 16 States and MoEF provides financial and technical support.
• MoEF + WTI launched Gaj Yatra from Tura in Garo Hills, Meghalaya
  1. Gaj Yatra is a mega campaign launched on World Elephants Day (12 Aug) by NGOs WTI + IFAW (both NGOs) (International Fund for Animal Welfare). The campaign is planned to cover 12 Elephant range states. 100 Elephant corridors. Awareness.
  2. Recognize people's Initiative of Community forests for Human - Elephant Harmony & conservation of animals like Hoolock Gibbon.
• MoEF + WTI launched Haathi mere Saathi campaign
  1. Launched at E-8 meetin un 2011. For awareness.
  2. E-8 members include India, Srilanka, Thailand, Indonesia; Botswana, DRC, Kenya, Tanzania.
• MIKE: Monitoring of Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) programme
  1. MIKE is established by the UN CITES. At the core of the MIKE Programme is the site- based monitoring of elephant mortality.
  2. MIKE aims to help Elephant range States improve their ability to monitor elephant populations, detect illegal killings, and use this information to provide more effective law enforcement and strengthen any regulatory measures required to support such enforcement.
• Elephant Trade Information System (ETIS):
  1. ETIS is a comprehensive information system to track illegal trade in ivory and other elephant products.
  2. It shares the same objectives as those set out for MIKE, with the difference that its aim is to record and analyse levels and trends in illegal trade, rather than the illegal killing of elephants.
• Elephant Endotheliotropic Herpes virus (EEHV)
  1. EEHV is as a type of herpes virus that can cause a highly fatal hemorrhagic disease in young Asian elephants.
  2. It is a rare disease that has affected 5 elephants in Odisha.
• Elephant Conflict
  1. Bengal, Odisha and Assam account for half the fatalities in the man-elephant conflict.
  2. Reasons: Electrocution > Train Accidents > Poaching > Poisoning.
• Wayanad WS: is a part of Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve. It has the World's largest recorded population of Asiatic Elephant. It is drained by the Kabini river which is a tributary of the Cauvery river.
• MP gets its 1st Elephant colony in Bandhavgarh forests (Elephants came from Chattisgarh).
• India’s first elephant rehabilitation centre is to be set up in Kottoor, Kerala. It is being planned on the lines of the Pinnawala Elephant Orphanage in Sri Lanka. India has also opened its first water clinic for elephants suffering from arthritis, joint pain and foot ailments at a wildlife SOS Elephant Hospital, Mathura, UP.

Difference between Asiatic Elephants and African Elephants

Read more about Elephant: Click here

What is the news?

• As human-elephant conflicts increase with time and expand human range, understanding social behaviour becomes crucial to the conservation and management of the highly social and endangered Asian elephant.
• The Asian elephant is a charismatic species with a long history of co-existence with humans. Yet works on male societies of wild elephants based on long-term observations are rare.
• To fill this gap, researchers from Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), an autonomous Institute of the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, studied associations of male Asian elephants by collecting and analysing data on the behaviour of identified nonmusth wild Asian elephants of Nagarahole and Bandipur National Parks.
• They found that the time spent by male Asian elephants in all-male and mixed-sex groups depended on the age of the male.
• Adult Asian male elephants preferred to spend their time alone than in mixed-sex or in all-male groups. Besides, old males were found mostly in the company of their age peers and less frequently with young males (15 to 30 years of age). Also, young males did not disproportionately initiate associations with old males.
• Adult male Asian elephants are less social than females. They enter musth -- a mate-searching strategy for old (above 30 years of age) males, annually. The researchers hypothesised that when the adult males enter musth, dominance relationships may affect the number of mating opportunities they procure. Hence, it might be more crucial for old males than for young males to test strength with each other and settle dominant relationships during their non-musty time.
• On the other hand, since young males associated less with females during musth than non-musth time, they might also be using their non-musth time to search for mating opportunities.
• The team observed male elephants and identified them using features of their ears, tails, and tusks and recorded whether males associated with each other in the presence or absence of females.
• They used six years of field data on 83 identified males for this study, which was published in the open-access journal ‘Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution’. They considered two possible reasons for male associations --non-musth males may use their time to fight with males of the same age class, who would be of similar sizes, to decide their dominance relationships, and young males might also use their associations to learn from older males about food resources and/or reproductive behaviour.
• Their results showed that all-male groups (in the absence of females) were rare and small. According to the team, social learning from older males did not seem to play a big role in male associations. In contrast, African savannah elephants have been found to spend more time in all-male groups and to form larger groups, and young males preferred to associate with older males.
• The researchers said that this could be due to the difference in the dispersion of food resources in the habitats occupied by the two species.
• This study is one of the few that examines male associations in species in which males rove between social groups. It provides an example of how ecological differences could possibly drive differences in male societies in related species with similar male reproductive strategies.

Indian scientists discover materials that self-repair mechanical damages

• New materials may soon make it possible for damaged electronic components, such as in space crafts, to mend themselves. The materials recently developed by scientists can repair their own mechanical damages with the electrical charges generated by the mechanical impact on them.
• Devices that we use daily often break down due to mechanical damage, forcing us either to repair or replace them. This decreases the life of the equipment and increases maintenance costs. In many cases, like in space crafts, human intervention for restoration is not possible.
• Keeping such necessities in mind, researchers from the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Kolkata, teaming up with IIT Kharagpur, have developed piezoelectric molecular crystals that repair themselves from mechanical damages without the need for any external intervention. Piezoelectric crystals are a class of materials that generate electricity when it undergoes a mechanical impact.
• The piezoelectric molecules developed by the scientists called bipyrazole organic crystals recombine following mechanical fracture without any external intervention, autonomously self-healing in milliseconds with crystallographic precision.
• In these molecular solids, due to the unique property of generating electrical charges on mechanical impact, the broken pieces acquire electrical charges at the crack junction, leading to attraction by damaged parts and precise autonomous repair. This research supported by the Department of Science and Technology, GoI via Swarnajayanti Fellowship to CM Reddy and Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB) research grants has been published in the journal ‘Science’ recently.
• This methodology was initially developed by the IISER Kolkata team led by Prof. C Malla Reddy, a recipient of the Swarnajayanti fellowship (2015) given by the Department of Science & Technology, GoI. Prof. Nirmalya Ghosh of IISER Kolkata, a laureate of the Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) G.G. Stokes Award in Optical polarization 2021, used a custom-designed state-of-the-art polarization microscopic system to probe and quantify the perfection of the piezoelectric organic crystals. These materials with the perfect internal arrangement of molecules or ions are called ‘crystals’, which are abundant in nature.
• The IIT Kharagpur’s team, Prof. Bhanu Bhusan Khatua and Dr Sumanta Karan studied the performance of the new materials for fabricating mechanical energy harvesting devices. The material may find application in high-end micro-chips, high-precision mechanical sensors, actuators, micro-robotics, and so on. Further research into such materials may eventually lead to the development of smart gadgets that self-repair cracks or scratches.

G20 climate summit

About Group of 20, 1999

1. It is an international forum for the governments and central bank governors from 19 countries and the EU.
2. Objectives: It deals with International Financial stability and all economic issues, especially Trade wars.
3. It has 86% of Gross World Product (GWP) and 80% of World Trade. 2/3rd of World's population.
4. Members = 19 countries + EU:
   1. USA, Canada, Mexico; Argentina + Brazil;
   2. EU + Germany + France + UK + Italy;
   3. South Africa, Saudi Arabia and Turkey;
   4. India; Indonesia; Australia;
   5. Russia, China, South Korea and Japan.
5. Objectives
   1. G20 was formed with the aim of promoting of International Financial stability.
   2. It aims to solve BoP problems and financial markets by improving the coordination of monetary, fiscal and financial policies.
6. Areas of topics: Economic and Financial issues, global economy, women in the labour market, sustainable development, global health, fight against terrorism etc.
7. 2 Working channels of G20
   1. Finance Channel: headed by MoF and Central Bank.
   2. Sherpas Channel: Chief of Cabinet of Ministers. G20 Sherpa = Shaktikanta Das (personal representative of leader).

G20 Summits

1. 1st G20 Summit = Berlin. G20 has no permanent staff.
2. The chairmanship rotates annually between nations divided into regional groupings.
3. G20 Troika = When a new county assumes the presidency, it works for hand in hand predecessor and successor Presidency. So Argentina (2018 Presidency) will work with Germany (2017 Presidency) and Japan (2019 Presidency). 2019 Summit is in Osaka, Japan.
4. G20 2014 Brisbane Summit (Australia) talks about Base Erosion and Profit Shifting.
5. 2016 Summit in Hangzhou. 2017 Summit in Hamburg.
6. G20 2018 Buenos Aires Summit (Argentina) = 9 Point Agenda
   1. It managed to issue a Joint Communique with APEC Summit which happened in Papua New Guinea. USA and China did not agree. Communiques are not binding in the legal sense but binding in a political sense.
   2. Strong and active cooperation against Fugitive Economic Offenders.
   3. Cooperation in legal procedures.
   4. FATF should be assigned with Automatic Exchange of Information and standard definition of FEO.
   5. UN Convention Against Corruption and UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime should be fully implemented.
   6. Protectionism issues.
7. 11th G20 Summit in Osaka, Japan in 2019 aka Digital Economy Summit.
   1. India talked about Data localization guidelines as the new issue. Hence the name. We did not attend Digital Economy Sumit as it is against RBI's Data Localisation guidelines.
   2. Issues raised by India
      1. Greater Participation of MSME in developing countries.
      2. Digital taxation & non compliant tax.
      3. Fugitive Economic Offenders. For > 100 crores PMLA should establish Special Court.
      4. To reduce BEPS, India wants to tax global digital companies. Digital Taxation is important. Eg FB in Ireland. India had introduced this concept in the Income Tax Act for taxation of non-residents in India or global digital companies.
      5. Automatic Exchange of Information for Non resident financial account to reduce tax evasion.
   3. It discussed 8 themes crucial to Global sustainable development: Global Economy, Trade and Investment, Innovation; Environment and Energy; Employment; Women’s Empowerment; Development; and Health.
   4. On the sidelines of it, meets of Regional Groupings like: RIC (Russia-India-China); JIU (Japan-India-USA) and BRICS (Brazil-Russia-India-China-South Africa) happened. This shows India’s rising power in the World.
   5. India pledged to make Social Sector as its top priority and to resolve focus on infra esp digital infra.
   6. India and Japan also are partnering on Ahmedabad- Kobe Sister City partnership.
   7. India also stressed on the need for WTO reforms, Gender Equality, Anti Corruption and Ocean Pollution.
8. G20 2020 Summit is in Riyadh (Saudi Arabia) (1st time in West Asia); Theme of “Realizing Opportunities of the 21st Century for All”. 2021 Summit is in Italy and 2022 Summit will be in India.

Criticism of G20

• No permanent secretariat. No staff. Informal structure of G20. Topics change every year.
• Bias. Where small countries have to follow their big brothers to survive.
• Meetings are more showoff and less efficient. Failed to live upto expectations. No implementation at ground.
• Still recession and now CoVID. How to increase demand.
• USA - China issue is not resolved.
• Still Climate Change is not integrated.
• India, South Africa, and Indonesia have boycotted the “Osaka Track" on the “digital economy”, because
  1. It undermines “multilateral" principles of consensus-based decisions in global trade negotiations
  2. Denies "policy space" for digital-industrialisation in developing countries.

What is the news?

• At the conclusion of the G20 climate meet, India said that pledges by some countries to achieve net zero GHG emissions or ‘carbon neutrality’ by mid-century were inadequate, when considering the rights of developing countries to economic growth.
• Therefore and keeping in view, the legitimate need of developing countries to growth, India urged G20 countries to commit to bringing down per capita emissions to Global average by 2030.
• The G20 climate summit, which concluded, comes roughly about 100 days before the Conference of Parties (COP 26) is set to begin in Glasgow, Scotland (Prelims Pointers).

What is Net zero emission and how to achieve it?

• The net zero emissions refer to a situation where a country is able to remove at least as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as it is emitting.
• This can be done by increasing forest cover or through technologies such as carbon capture.
• India’s position as the third largest greenhouse gas emitter but also with among the lowest per capita emissions means that it has always resisted a hard deadline — some countries have set their target years as 2050 or 2060 — to commit to a net-zero future. It is expected that the forthcoming COP 26 talks in Glasgow will see a commitment by the United States.
• Countries periodically submit the National Determined Contributions (NDC) that outline their plans towards capping emission.
• As per the NDCs submitted to the UNFCCC under Paris the Agreement, the pledge of the United States falls short of its fair share by 12 tonnes of CO2 per capita, of the U.K. by 14.1 tonnes, of China by 0.2 tonnes, and of India by 0.4 tonnes, according to Council on Energy Environment and Water, a New Delhi based think-tank.
• The fair share represents the reductions countries must achieve to ensure that the greenhouse gas levels are below that to prevent a 1.5 average temperature rise over the globe by the turn of the century.

China braces for Typhoon In-fa

About Tropical Cyclones

Definition of a Cyclone

• Cyclone refers to any spinning storm that rotates around a low-pressure center. The low-pressure centre is also referred to as the 'eye' of the storm, which is well known for being eerily calm compared with the areas under the spinning 'arms' of the storm.
• You could say that the eye is watching what's going on down below, so it needs a clear path, but the arms are where all the action happens because this is where the storm is throwing out all of its rain and wind.

How are cyclones formed?

• To form a cyclone, warm, moist air over the ocean rises upward from near the surface. As this air moves up and away from the ocean surface, it leaves is less air near the surface. So basically as the warm air rises, it causes an area of lower air pressure below.
• Air from surrounding areas with higher air pressure pushes in to the low pressure area. Then this new “cool” air becomes warm and moist and rises, too. And the cycle continues.
• As the warmed, moist air rises and cools the water in the air forms clouds. The whole system of clouds and wind spins and grows, fed by the ocean’s heat and water evaporating from the ocean surface.
• As the storm system rotates faster and faster, an eye forms in the centre. It is very calm and clear in the eye, with very low air pressure. Higher pressure air from above flows down into the eye.
• Tropical cyclones usually weaken when they hit land, because they are no longer being “fed” by the energy from the warm ocean waters. However, they often move far inland, dumping many centimetres of rain and causing lots of wind damage before they die out completely.

Tropical cyclone

• Tropical cyclone is an intense circular storm that originates over warm tropical oceans and is characterized by low atmospheric pressure, high winds, and heavy rain.
• Drawing energy from the sea surface and maintaining its strength as long as it remains over warm water, a tropical cyclone generates winds that exceed 119 km (74 miles) per hour. In extreme cases winds may exceed 240 km (150 miles) per hour, and gusts may surpass 320 km (200 miles) per hour.
• Accompanying these strong winds are torrential rains and a devastating phenomenon known as the storm surge, an elevation of the sea surface that can reach 6 metres (20 feet) above normal levels.
• Such a combination of high winds and water makes cyclones a serious hazard for coastal areas in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. Every year during the late summer months (July–September in the Northern Hemisphere and January–March in the Southern Hemisphere), cyclones strike regions as far apart as the Gulf Coast of North America, northwestern Australia, and eastern India and Bangladesh.

Different names of tropical cyclones

• Tropical cyclones are known by various names in different parts of the world. In the North Atlantic Ocean and the eastern North Pacific they are called hurricanes, and in the western North Pacific around the Philippines, Japan, and China the storms are referred to as typhoons.
• In the western South Pacific and Indian Ocean they are variously referred to as severe tropical cyclones, tropical cyclones, or simply cyclones.
• All these different names refer to the same type of storm.

Conditions for formation of tropical cyclones

• The temperature of the surface layer of ocean water must be 26.5 °C (80 °F) or warmer, and this warm layer must be at least 50 metres (150 feet) deep.
• A preexisting atmospheric circulation must be located near the surface warm layer.
• The atmosphere must cool quickly enough with height to support the formation of deep convective clouds.
• The middle atmosphere must be relatively humid at a height of about 5,000 metres (16,000 feet) above the surface.
• The developing system must be at least 500 km (300 miles) away from the Equator.
• The wind speed must change slowly with height through the troposphere—no more than 10 metres (33 feet) per second between the surface and an altitude of about 10,000 metres (33,000 feet).

Types of Cyclones:

Tropical cyclones are what most people are familiar with because these are cyclones that occur over tropical ocean regions.

• Hurricanes and typhoons are actually types of tropical cyclones, but they have different names so that it's clear where that storm is occurring. Hurricanes are found in the Atlantic and Northeast Pacific, typhoons are found in the Northwest Pacific. If you hear 'tropical cyclone,' you should assume that it's occurring in the South Pacific or Indian Ocean, but for this lesson, we'll use it refer to all types of tropical ocean cyclones.
• We can also further describe tropical cyclones based on their wind speeds. They are called category 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5, increasing with intensity and wind speed as the number increases. A category 1 cyclone is the weakest, with wind speeds of 74-95 mph. A category 5 cyclone, on the other hand, is extremely dangerous and has the potential for major damage. Category 5 cyclones have wind speeds of 155 mph and above!
• Polar cyclones are cyclones that occur in polar regions like Greenland, Siberia and Antarctica. Unlike tropical cyclones, polar cyclones are usually stronger in winter months. As you can see, these storms really do prefer the colder weather! They also occur in areas that aren't very populated, so any damage they do is usually pretty minimal.
• A mesocyclone is when part of a thunderstorm cloud starts to spin, which may eventually lead to a tornado. 'Meso' means 'middle', so you can think of this as the mid-point between one type of storm and the other. Tornadoes all come from thunderstorm clouds, but not all thunderstorm clouds make tornadoes. In order for a tornado to occur, part of that cloud has to spin, and though you can't really see this happening, this is the intermediate, or 'meso' step from regular cloud to dangerous spinning cloud running along the ground.

Depending upon its location and strength, a tropical cyclone is referred by different names:

• Typhoons in Western North Pacific
• Willy-willies in Australia
• Baguio in Philippine Islands
• Hurricanes around North America
• Taifu in Japan
• Cyclone in the Indian Ocean

How are the cyclones named?

• If the speed of a cyclone is more than 34 nautical miles per hour then it becomes necessary to give it a special name. If the speed of the storm reaches or crosses 74 mph, it is then classified into a hurricane/cyclone/typhoon.
• The cyclones that are formed in any ocean basin around the world are named by the Regional Specialised Meteorological Centres (RSMCs) and Tropical Cyclone Warning Centres (TCWCs). There are a total of six RSMCs in the world, including the India Meteorological Department (IMD).
• The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for the Asia Pacific (ESCAP) have been naming cyclonic storms since 2000.
• The India Meteorological Department (IMD) names the cyclones developing over the north Indian Ocean, including the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea. It also issues advisories to 12 other nations in the region on the development of cyclones and storms.
• In 2000, a group of nations called WMO/ESCAP-- Bangladesh, India, the Maldives, Myanmar, Oman, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Thailand-- decided to name cyclones in the region.
• In 2018, five more countries were added-- Iran, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates and Yemen.
• After the aforementioned countries sent in suggestions, the WMO/ESCAP Panel on Tropical Cyclones (PTC) finalise the list.
• In April 2020, IMD released a list of 169 cyclone names. 13 suggestions were sent in by the aforementioned WMO/ESCAP member nations.

Why are cyclones named?

• The cyclones are named to help people identify them easily as it would be difficult to remember numbers and technical terms.
• Additionally, appending names makes it easier for the media, scientific community and the disaster management community to identify and report individual cyclones, disseminate warnings, increase community preparedness, and ward off confusion in areas that witness multiple cyclones.

Guidelines to name cyclones

The guidelines to name the cyclones are as follows:

1. The proposed name must be neutral to politics and political figures, religious beliefs, cultures and genders.
2. It must not hurt the sentiments of any group of people across the world.
3. It must not be rude and cruel in nature.
4. The name must be short, easy to pronounce and inoffensive to any member.
5. It must be of a maximum of eight letters and be given with its pronunciation and voice over.
6. The names of cyclones developing over the north Indian Ocean will not be repeated. Once used, it will cease to be used again.