ABSTRACT
Agriculture and society are intertwined. Agriculture is necessary for human survival and social sustainability in India. Eco-friendly agriculture practices nurture ecosystems to solve current societal issues. Indian ecosystems are marred by pollution, imbalance, climate changes, food crisis, various diseases, and mal-nourishment continue as a major concern. The traditional environmental remedial strategies appear relatively ineffective in the ever expanding use of pollutants that pervade the water, air and soil environment. Nanotechnology provides an efficient, environmentally friendly and cost-effective solutions to the global sustainability challenges that society is facing. Nanotechnology utilizes nanomaterials that have remarkable physical and chemical features to make smart functional materials for developing sustainable technologies. Nanotechnology seems to be very promising in sustainable environment development, sustainable agriculture, renewable and economically energy alternative through use of nanomaterials for detection, prevention, and removing pollutants. The development of nanotechnology in India has huge potential to address the challenges like providing drinking water, healthcare, nano-based industry and sustainable agriculture. This review highlights the recent nanotechnology applications to meet the global challenges in providing clean energy technology, water purification, and greenhouse gases management. In addition, effort has been made to analyse the opportunities and limitations in engineered nanomaterials safety, solid waste management, reducing pollution of air water and soil.
ABSTRACT
This paper attempts to explore the determination of health and environmental outcomes of smart cities mission (MoHuA, India) and other urban development programs in India. It assesses the programs, evaluates their successes and failures, outlines their complications and gaps in addressing the urban health and environment concerns specific to India and its potential health and environmental impact. The paper further looks at how models adopted by the WHO, World Bank and urban health experts seek to address these gaps, which projects in India could potentially benefit from. The paper concluded by calling for what urban health experts call, 'descriptive urban health frameworks' which addresses some of the challenges posed by India's Smart Cities programs. This paper finally concludes by suggesting that a more qualitative and equity informed urban health framework is necessary to address the gaps that smart cities program in India fail to address. By highlighting issues of sanitation, water, housing, poverty, marginalization and inequalities, the paper calls for a more nuanced approach in addressing the needs of cities, within the context of urban health and environment.
ABSTRACT
Los sistemas fluviales han estado sometidos a la fuerte presión humana, debido a la intervención no planificada que ha desencadenado un mal manejo de aguas potencialmente potables para consumo humano y riego. Estos cambios han promovido cambios microclimáticos importantes, afectando el nicho de la fauna acuática, por ser un taxa cuya dinámica es muy susceptible a perturbaciones. En el contexto del desarrollo sustentable con perspectivas hacia el aprovechamiento y conservación de ambientes acuáticos, los bioindicadores juegan un papel importante en el manejo adecuado de los recursos. Un bioindicador puede ser definido como un conjunto de especies que poseen requerimientos particulares con relación a un grupo de variables físicas o químicas, tal que los cambios de estas variables indiquen para las especies involucradas que el sistema se encuentra en los límites de las curvas del óptimo ecológico. Las comunidades de macroinvertebrados son los mejores bioindicadores de contaminación acuática, debido a que son muy abundantes, se encuentran en prácticamente todos los ecosistemas de agua dulce y su recolección es simple y de bajo costo. Los órdenes de insectos utilizados en este estudio para estimar la calidad ambiental son: ephemeroptera, trichoptera, plecoptera, diptera, odonata y coleoptera. En este trabajo se presentan a los macroinvertebrados acuáticos como indicadores biológicos, y su utilidad a partir del empleo de los índices bióticos para estimar la tolerancia del bentos a los contaminantes (BMWP, IBMW, BMWQ, IBF, EPT, el porcentaje de raspadores y la abundancia de chironomidae) así como las respuestas funcionales de estos organismos a los contaminantes. El aumento de estudios de bioindicadores conllevara a la mejor comprensión de cómo y de qué manera es afectado un ecosistema de agua dulce por un contaminante.
The fluvial system has been under strong human pressure, due to a lack of urban planning, which has triggered a potentially dangerous potable water problem for human consumption and irrigation. These changes in the quality of the fluvial systems have promoted important microclimatic changes, within the niche of special aquatic fauna, macroinvertebrates, that have a susceptible population dynamics to habitat disturbances. For sustainable development it is necessary to consider aquatic atmosphere conservation and to propose an adequate management plan, which includes bioindicators as a potential tool, to evaluate the perturbation grade and monitor the fluvial system within the water conservation plan. A bioindicador is defined as a set of species, with specific requirements in relation to physical or chemical variables, so that the significant changes of these variables indicates for the species that the system is perturbed and the species are close to tolerance limits. The assemblages of macroinvertebrates are the best bioindicators of contaminated water, because they are very abundant, are present in all the fresh water ecosystems, easy to collect and monitoring is low cost. The taxa to consider for environmental quality are: Ephemeroptera, Trichoptera, Plecóptera, Diptera, Odonata and Coleóptera. In this work we suggest the use of these aquatic macroinvertebrates as biological bioindicators, and their utility as biotic indices to estimate the tolerance of benthos to the polluting agents (BMWP, IBMW, BMWQ, IBF, EPT, the percentage of scrapers and the abundance of Chironomidae) as well as the functional response of these organisms to the polluting agents. Increasing studies of biomarkers leads to a better understanding of how fresh water is affected by a pollutant.