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5th July 2022

  • Published
    05 July 2022

Lisbon Declaration

Context

All 198 members of the United Nations unanimously adopted July 1, 2022 the Lisbon Declaration on ocean conservation.

About
  • The ocean covers 70 percent of the Earth’s surface, is the planet's largest biosphere, and is home to up to 80 percent of all life in the world.
  • It generates 50 percent of the oxygen we need, absorbs 25 percent of all carbon dioxide emissions and captures 90 percent of the additional heat generated from those emissions.
  • It is not just ‘the lungs of the planet’ but also its largest carbon sink - a vital buffer against the impacts of climate change.
  • It nurtures unimaginable biodiversity and produces food, jobs, mineral and energy resources needed for life on the planet to survive and thrive. 
  • Recently, more than 6,000 participants, including 24 Heads of State and Government, and over 2,000 representatives of civil society, met in Lisbon for the United Nations Ocean Conference, co-hosted by the Governments of Portugal and Kenya.

Lisbon Declaration

  • Protecting at least 30% of national maritime zones by 2030
  • Achieving carbon neutrality by 2040
  • Allocating funds to research on ocean acidification, climate resilience and surveillance
  • Scale-up Science-based and innovative actions to address ocean emergency
  • Support implementation of SDG14 (life below water) by empowering women and girls- recognising their participation is crucial to building a sustainable ocean-based economy
  • Protect biodiversity in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction, which lie outside the 200-mile (322-kilometre) exclusive economic zones of countries.
  • India:
    • Will take up the Coastal clean sea campaign (‘Swachh Sagar, Surakshit Sagar’.)
    • Ban on single-use plastics
  • Participants at the conference also agreed to work on preventing, reducing and controlling marine pollution. It includes:
    • Nutrient pollution
    • Untreated wastewater
    • Solid waste discharges
    • Hazardous substances
    • Emissions from the maritime sector, including shipping, shipwrecks
    • Anthropogenic underwater noise
  • Other pledges include developing and promoting innovative financing solutions to help create sustainable ocean-based economies as well as expanding nature-based solutions to help conserve and preserve coastal communities.

UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development 2021 – 2030:

  • A vast majority of the ocean remains unmapped, unobserved and unexplored.
  • Our understanding of the ocean and its contribution to sustainability largely depends on our capacity to conduct effective ocean science - through research and sustained observations, supported by adequate infrastructures and investments.
  • The Decade provides a common framework to ensure that ocean science can fully support countries’ actions to sustainably manage the ocean and more particularly to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development – through the creation of a new foundation, across the science-policy interface, to strengthen the management of the ocean and coasts for the benefit of humanity.

The new guidelines against ‘service charge’

Context

The Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) recently issued guidelines to prevent unfair trade practices, and to protect the interest of consumers with regard to the levy of service charge in hotels and restaurants.

About

The guidelines:

  • The CCPA has issued five major guidelines regarding the levy of service charge by restaurants and hotels, which has for long been a contentious issue and has periodically triggered complaints from consumers. These are:
    • No hotel or restaurant shall add service charge automatically or by default in the bill;
    • Service charge shall not be collected from consumers by any other name;
    • No hotel or restaurant shall force a consumer to pay service charge and shall clearly inform the consumer that service charge is voluntary, optional, and at the consumer’s discretion;
    • No restriction on entry or provision of services based on collection of service charge shall be imposed on consumers; and
    • Service charge shall not be collected by adding it along with the food bill and levying GST on the total amount.
  • Under the guidelines, consumers can lodge complaints against hotels and restaurants by calling the number 1915 or on the National Consumer Helpline (NCH) mobile app.
  • The consumer can complain to the Consumer Commission, or through the edaakhil portal.
  • A consumer can submit a complaint to the District Collector of the concerned district for investigation and subsequent proceedings by the CCPA.
  • A consumer can complain directly to the CCPA by sending an e-mail to com-ccpa@nic.in.

Under which law have these guidelines been issued?

  • The CCPA has issued guidelines under Section 18 (2) (I) of The Consumer Protection Act, 2019.
  • The guidelines are in addition to the Centre’s 2017 guidelines which prohibit the levy of service charge on consumers by hotels and restaurants.

About Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA):

  • The CCPA was established in July 2020 under The Consumer Protection Act, 2019, to promote, protect, and enforce the rights of consumers as a class, and to investigate, prosecute, and punish violators.
  • The authority is being constituted under Section 10(1) of The Consumer Protection Act, 2019.
  • Aim: To protect the rights of the consumer by cracking down on unfair trade practices, and false and misleading advertisements that are detrimental to the interests of the public and consumers.
  • It will be headquartered in the National Capital Region of Delhi but the central government may set up regional offices in other parts of the country.
  • The objective of the Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) is to promote, protect and enforce the rights of consumers as a class.
  • It will be empowered to conduct investigations into violation of consumer rights and institute complaints / prosecution,
    • order recall of unsafe goods and services, order discontinuation of unfair trade practices and misleading advertisements,
    • impose penalties on manufacturers/endorsers/publishers of misleading advertisements.
  • Composition: It will have a Chief Commissioner as head, and only two other commissioners as members, one of whom will deal with matters relating to goods while the other will look into cases relating to services.
  • The CCPA will have an Investigation Wing that will be headed by a Director General.
  • District Collectors too, will have the power to investigate complaints of violations of consumer rights, unfair trade practices, and false or misleading advertisements.

Large Hadron Collider

Context

The world’s most powerful particle collider, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will begin smashing protons into each other at unprecedented levels of energy.

About

About Large Hadron Collider:

  • The Large Hadron Collider is a giant, complex machine built to study particles that are the smallest known building blocks of all things.
  • Structurally, the LHC is a 27-km-long track-loop buried 100m underground on the Swiss-French border.
  • In its operational state, it fires two beams of protons almost at the speed of light in opposite directions inside a ring of superconducting electromagnets.
  • The magnetic field created by the superconducting electromagnets keeps the protons in a tight beam and guides them along the way as they travel through beam pipes and finally collide.
  • Just prior to collision, another type of magnet is used to ‘squeeze’ the particles closer together to increase the chances of collisions.
  • Since the LHC’s powerful electromagnets carry almost as much current as a bolt of lightning, they must be kept chilled.
  • The LHC uses a distribution system of liquid helium to keep its critical components ultracold at minus 271.3 degrees Celsius, which is colder than interstellar space.

Large Hadron Collider Previous Runs:

  1. LHC’s first run:
    • Ten years ago, on July 4, 2012, scientists at CERN had announced to the world the discovery of the Higgs boson or the ‘God Particle’.
    • The discovery concluded the decades-long quest for the ‘force-carrying’ subatomic particle, and proved the existence of the Higgs mechanism, a theory put forth in the mid-sixties.
    • This led to Peter Higgs and his collaborator François Englert being awarded the Nobel Prize for physics in 2013.
  1. LHC’s second run: It began in 2015 and lasted till 2018. The second season of data taking produced five times more data than Run 1.
  2. LHC’s third run: It is expected to see 20 times more collisions as compared to Run 1.
    • It will operate round-the-clock for four years at unprecedented energy levels of 13 tera electron volts.
      • A TeV is 100 billion, or 10-to-the-power-of-12, electon volts.
      • An electron volt is the energy given to an electron by accelerating it through 1 volt of electric potential difference.
    • For the ATLAS and CMS experiments, scientists aim to be delivering 1.6 billion proton-proton collisions per second. The proton beams will be narrowed to less than 10 microns — a human hair is around 70 microns thick — to increase the collision rate.

ATLAS:

  • ATLAS is one of two general-purpose detectors at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
  • It investigates a wide range of physics, from the search for the Higgs boson to extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.
  • Although it has the same scientific goals as the CMS experiment, it uses different technical solutions and a different magnet-system design.
  • Beams of particles from the LHC collide at the centre of the ATLAS detector making collision debris in the form of new particles, which fly out from the collision point in all directions.
  • Six different detecting subsystems arranged in layers around the collision point record the paths, momentum, and energy of the particles, allowing them to be individually identified.
  • A huge magnet system bends the paths of charged particles so that their momenta can be measured.

Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS):

  • The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) is a general-purpose detector at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
  • It has a broad physics programme ranging from studying the Standard Model (including the Higgs boson) to searching for extra dimensions and particles that could make up dark matter.
  • Although it has the same scientific goals as the ATLAS experiment, it uses different technical solutions and a different magnet-system design.
  • The CMS detector is built around a huge solenoid magnet.
  • This takes the form of a cylindrical coil of superconducting cable that generates a field of 4 tesla, about 100,000 times the magnetic field of the Earth.

The legend of Alluri Sitarama Raju

Context

Prime Minister unveiled a 30-foot-tall bronze statue of Alluri Sitarama Raju at Bhimavaram in Andhra Pradesh as the year-long celebrations of the freedom fighter’s 125th birth anniversary.

About

Alluri Sitarama Raju:

  • Raju is believed to have been born in present-day Andhra Pradesh in 1897 or 1898.
  • He is said to have become a sanyasi at the age of 18.
  • He gained a mystical aura among the hill and tribal peoples with his austerity, knowledge of astrology and medicine, and his ability to tame wild animals.
  • He channelled the discontent of the hill people in Ganjam, Visakhapatnam, and Godavari into a highly effective guerrilla resistance against the British.
  • Colonial rule threatened the tribals’ traditional podu (shifting) cultivation, as the government sought to secure forest lands.
  • The Forest Act of 1882 banned the collection of minor forest produce such as roots and leaves, and tribal people were forced into labour for the colonial government.
  • While the tribals were subjected to exploitation by muttadars, village headmen commissioned by the colonial government to extract rent, the new laws and systems threatened their way of life itself.
  • The Rampa or Manyam Rebellion continued in the form of a guerrilla war until May 1924, when Raju, the charismatic ‘Manyam Veerudu’ or Hero of Jungle, was finally captured and executed.

Recognition:

  • In 1986, the Indian Postal Department issued a stamp in honour of Raju and his contribution to India’s struggle for Independence.
  • In July 2019, on the occasion of Raju’s 122nd birth anniversary, the government of Andhra Pradesh announced the naming of a district after the legendary freedom fighter, acceding to a long-standing demand of the tribal population of Andhra Pradesh.
  • The district of Alluri Sitharama Raju came into being in April 2022, made up of Paderu and Rampachodavaram of the existing districts of Visakhapatnam and East Godavari respectively.
  • These two areas have tribal populations of 10.4 per cent and 4.1 per cent.

Carnivorous plant catches prey underground, found in Indonesia

Context

A first-of-its-kind carnivorous plant that traps prey underground has been found on Indonesia's Borneo Island in the country's North Kalimantan province.

About

About the new species:

  • The newly found species of pitcher plant was unearthed in the Indonesian province of North Kalimantan, on the island of Borneo.
  • Nepenthes pudica has modified leaves, known as pitfall traps or pitchers that its prey falls into before being consumed.
  • No other species of pitcher plant known to science catches its prey underground.
  • The plant forms specialized underground shoots with small, white, chlorophyll-free leaves.
  • The pitchers are much larger than the leaves and have a reddish color.
  • This species places its up-to-11-cm-long (4.3-inch-long) pitchers underground, where they are formed in cavities or directly in the soil and trap animals living underground, usually ants, mites and beetles.

Carnivorous plants:

  • Carnivorous plants attract, trap and digest animals for the nutrients they contain.
  • There are currently around 630 species of carnivorous plant known to science.
  • Although most meat-eating plants consume insects, larger plants are capable of digesting reptiles and small mammals.
  • Smaller carnivorous plants specialise in single-celled organisms (such as bacteria and protozoa) and aquatic examples also eat crustaceans, mosquito larvae and small fish.

A glacier collapsed in Italian Alps

Context

Part of a mountain glacier collapsed in Italian Alps.

About
  • The avalanche took place on the Marmolada (3300 m), which is the highest peak in the Dolomites.
  • It is a range in the eastern Italian Alps straddling the regions of Trento and Veneto.
  • It was not clear what caused the ice to break way but an early summer heatwave across Italy saw temperature rise abruptly, including on the Marmolada. 

About the Alps:

  • The Alps are the highest and most extensive mountain range system that lies in south-central Europe.
  • The mountain range stretches approximately 750 miles (1,200 kilometers) in a crescent shape across eight Alpine countries: France, Switzerland, Monaco, Italy, Liechtenstein, Austria, Germany, and Slovenia.
  • The Alps are an interzonal mountain system (Orobiome), or a “transition area” between Central and Mediterranean Europe.
  • The Alps have high habitat diversity, with 200 habitats classified throughout the mountain range. This mountain range is home to a high level of biodiversity.


    Rivers:
    • The Alps provide lowland Europe with drinking water, irrigation, and hydroelectric power.
    • Although the area is only about 11% of the surface area of Europe, the Alps provide up to 90% of water to lowland Europe.
    • Major European rivers flow from the Alps, including the Rhine, the Rhône, the Inn, and the Po.
  • Glaciers:
    • The major glacierized areas in the Alps are situated along the crest of the mountain chain, with the largest glaciers often found at the highest elevations. There are smaller glaciers scattered throughout the Alps.

Putin declares victory in Donbas region of Luhansk

Context

Russian President Vladimir Putin recently declared victory in the eastern Ukrainian region of Luhansk, one day after Ukrainian forces withdrew from their last remaining bulwark of resistance in the province.

About

The area, its significance:

  • Donetsk and Luhansk are the two areas that together make up the Donbas region on the Ukraine-Russia border.
  • Donbas is a key industrial hub and important from a resource perspective having the largest coal reserves in Ukraine.
  • These two areas broke away from Ukrainian government’s control back in 2014 and proclaimed themselves independent “people’s republics”, but were not formally recognised by Russia until February 2022. 
  • In late February, Putin formally recognised the ‘Luhansk People’s Republic’ and ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ and ordered Russian troops into these areas for “peacekeeping” which eventually escalated into a full-blown conflict.
  • As the border region between Ukraine and Russia, the area is an example of the disagreements and complexities in the relations between the countries.
  • Having a large Russian-speaking population and around 40 per cent ethnic Russian population, Donbas has always had a greater affinity for Russia.
  • Many sea ports in Russia are not navigable in winter due to extremely low temperatures. Access to the Black Sea and warm water ports in Crimea such as Sevasopol allows it to access important trade routes throughout the year.

Russia’s next move

  • After capturing the border region of Luhansk in eastern Ukraine and the city of Lysychansk, Russia will now aim to capture the neighbouring Donetsk region

Editorial

The need for space sustainability

Context

On June 23, the U.K. hosted the fourth summit for Space Sustainability in London in collaboration with the Secure World Foundation and a new ‘Plan for Space Sustainability’ was announced.

What does sustainability in outer space mean?

  • Orbital crowding - One of the hot issues when it comes to space sustainability is orbital crowding. It poses a direct threat to the operations and safety of a mission and is likely to cause legal and insurance related confl
  • Space Debris- Space debris is another prominent issue. After the completion of a mission, an ‘end­of­life protocol’ requires space objects to be moved to the graveyard orbit or to a low altitude. Neither of the options are sustainable in the long run.
  • Space research and development of technology - Long­term sustainability looks toward space research and development of technology to ensure the reuse and recycling of satellites at every stage.

What does the U.K. plan for space sustainability entail?

  • “Astro Carta” for space sustainability - The U.K. calls for an “Astro Carta” for space sustainability, based on the Artemis Accords model for sustainable space exploration.
  • Primary elements -The U.K. Space Sustainability plan mentions four primary elements: to review the regulatory framework of the U.K.’s orbital activity; to work with organisations such as the G­7 and the UN to emphasise international engagement on space sustainability; to try and develop safety and quality­related metrics that quantify the sustainability of activities; and, to induce additional funding of $6.1 million on active debris removal.
  • Investment in collision assessment services - The U.K. also confirmed investments in its National Space Surveillance and Tracking Programme, which works on collision assessment services for U.K.­licenced satellite operators.
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ThinkQ

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QUIZ - 5th July 2022

Mains Question:

Q1.  The world is in the middle of an “ocean emergency”. In the light of this statement, discuss measures required to protect oceans  at the national and international levels. (150 words)

Approach

  • Introduction- Briefly discuss oceans and significance for the world
  • Challenges faced by the world ( coastal erosion, rising sea levels, warmer and more acidic waters, marine pollution, overexploitation of fish stocks and decrease of marine biodiversity)
  • International regulation 
  • Required measures 
  • Conclude accordingly 
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