In September 2023, the Environment Ministry waived the need for the ERD projects to obtain forest clearance, with a few exceptions within the national parks and sanctuaries and the surrounding eco-sensitive areas.
New fishing fields in Arabian Sea.
The FSI (Fishery Survey of India) sent out a deep-sea expedition with a trawler and surveyed waters as deep as 540m, between Kollam in Kerala and Goa.
It has exposed some very productive, possibly unexploited fish-grounds in the Arabian Sea.
The new grounds are found about 100 -120 nautical miles on the western coast of India.
It has a very high average catch per unit effort (CPUE) of 150-300 kg/hr.
Climate Risk Index 2025
The Climate Risk Index (CRI) rank of India, which was ranked seventh worst affected country in the world in 2019 because of extreme weather events, is now ranked number 49 in 2022.
But historically it has been rated as one of the 10 most affected with a sixth-worse long-term (1993-2022) ranking.
The results are included in the CRI 2025, published by the environmental think tank Germanwatch.
In 30 years (1993- 2022), India has lost 80,000 lives and almost 180 billion of its wealth in 400 extreme weather events.
Over 7,65,000 individuals nationwide have died because of over 9,400 severe weather occasions during the 30 years up to 2022.
It had economic losses of up to $4.2 trillion (in real terms).
The greatest number of deaths occurred during 1993-2022 because of storms (35%), heat waves (30%), and floods (27%).
The three EU countries that are in the 10 most affected countries in the world in the last 3 decades are Italy, Spain, and Greece.
In the list of 1993-2022, Dominica, China, Honduras, Myanmar and Italy are the five most hit.
In India, there were disastrous floods in 1993, 1998 and 2013 and extremely hot heat waves in 2002, 2003, and 2015.
Intertidal BioBlitz
The first Intertidal Bioblitz of India reveals buried secrets of a beautiful belt of over 500 species along the coasts of Visakhapatnam, Mumbai, Goa and Andamans.
During the biobltiz, 80 species were recorded in Mumbai suburban and 120 species were recorded in metropolitan.
More than 70 species were discovered in three intertidal walks in various sites in the Andaman Islands.