Sv Krishna Chaitanya

India's micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs), which contribute nearly 35% of the country's manufacturing output and employ an estimated 320 million people, are increasingly facing climate-related disruptions, with extreme heat and flooding emerging as major threats to production, workers and business continuity, according to a new study by WRI India. The report, Resilience of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises to Climate Risks, based on a survey of 310 MSMEs across industrial clusters in Chennai, Coimbatore and Surat, found that while climate impacts are becoming more severe, most businesses continue to rely on short-term coping measures rather than investing in long-term resilience.

As negotiations for a global plastics treaty enter a crucial phase, the Chair of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INC), Julio Cordan, has sought to allay concerns that contentious issues such as plastic production and chemicals are being sidelined. Ahead of an informal meeting of Heads of Delegation in Nairobi from June 30 to July 3, Cordan said the gathering would not take decisions but would help restart negotiations, identify possible landing zones and pave the way for a new informal negotiating text before the next formal session (INC-5.4) in March 2027. Excerpts from the interaction:

This May, cities across northern, central and eastern India repeatedly recorded some of the highest temperatures anywhere on Earth. An analysis of weather data shows that all of the world's 50 hottest cities in May were in India.

CHENNAI: Even as the Tamil Nadu government's proposed Mamallan freshwater reservoir at Nemmeli continues to face legal scrutiny before the southern bench of National Green Tribunal (NGT), a new field survey has documented 47 bird species breeding in the Kovalam-Nemmeli Coastal Wetland Complex, adding fresh ecological evidence to the debate over the project's impact on the coastal habitat.

As football's biggest tournament heads into its decisive knockout stage, another contest is unfolding off the pitch - one against extreme heat.

The proposed reservoir, spread over 17.71 sq km with a storage depth of three metres, is designed to store 1.655 TMC in a single filling and an annual storage of 2.25 TMC.

CHENNAI: S Ramesh (name changed) bought a 2,400 sqft plot a year ago in TNHB's Sholinganallur Phase III layout, survey number 235, after paying nearly Rs 1 crore for it. The layout has everything in place – roads, metrowater, stormwater drains. SBI approved his housing loan, and since then, the 52-year-old central government employee has been paying an EMI of Rs 1.8 lakh a month.

As the debate over the Zone of Influence (ZoI) around the Pallikaranai marshland intensifies, Care Earth co-founder and wetland ecologist Jayashree Vencatesan, in an interview with TNIE's SV Krishna Chaitanya, clarified that the Integrated Management Plan never recommended a blanket one-kilometre buffer around the Ramsar site.

Nearly three in four villages still remain inside tiger reserve core areas despite decades of relocation effortsIndia’s ambitious programme to create inviolate

CHENNAI: The Tamil Nadu State Wetland Authority (TNSWA) has told the Madras High Court that the much-debated 1-km “zone of influence” around the Pallikaranai ma