Heatwaves don’t feel like a “climate topic” anymore. They feel personal like stepping outside into air that burns, with sleepless nights in homes that trap heat, the news headlines of temperatures touching 48–50°C and people collapsing at bus stops, worksites, and crowded lanes has always made us think about how we are dealing with extremes of climate change. And the hard truth is this: what we’re experiencing isn’t just a hotter summer. It’s the outcome of how we’ve built our cities, managed our land, treated our water, and ignored the quiet warnings nature kept sending.

Over the last few years, the pattern has become impossible to ignore. Heat is intensifying, monsoons are increasingly unpredictable, and extreme events like floods, landslides, wildfires are showing up with uncomfortable regularity. The temperature spike is often blamed broadly on ‘global warming,’ but I’ve come to believe that focusing only on the phrase misses the real story. The real story is what’s happening on the ground: rapid urbanization, shrinking green cover, disappearing water bodies, and the replacement of natural landscapes with concrete surfaces that trap heat, disrupt water cycles and water recharging.

Wherever there is vacant land, a new building appears. Ponds and lakes are filled in. Wetlands are treated like ‘unused space.’ Rivers are narrowed and boxed in. And when we disrupt these natural systems, the consequences don’t arrive politely, they arrive as heatwaves, floods that return every year, and water scarcity that grows alongside expensive construction.

Heat, especially, exposes inequality. It punishes those who have the least protection like infants and young children, older adults, pregnant women, people with chronic illnesses, outdoor workers, and anyone living without secure shelter, ventilation, or steady electricity. I remember a time when drinking tap water didn’t feel like a gamble. A time when air felt cleaner. Many of us did. But that baseline has shifted so much that the present generation is growing up in conditions we would have considered abnormal. Now tap water is mistrusted, air is dust-laden from constant construction, and even stepping out for a short walk can be a health risk during peak summer.

This is why urban planning isn’t just an engineering discipline. It’s public health policy.

We talk about development, but development without hydrology is self-sabotage. Cities need to be designed with their water systems in mind where rainwater should flow, where water should collect, where it should soak in, and which areas should never be built upon. The irony is that ancient civilizations understood this deeply. From the Indus Valley to other early urban settlements, drainage and water management were not afterthoughts; they were foundational. Today, we build houses first without proper planning and then panic later when the drainage fails.

Flooding in places like Chennai, Kerala, and Assam isn’t only because it rains. It’s due to the    mismanaged land that can no longer absorb and move water the way it used to. Illegal and unregulated construction blocks natural drains. Deforestation loosens soil. Hills are cut for minerals. Rivers get choked with silt. When monsoon water has nowhere to go, it spreads into homes, hospitals, and streets. And after every flood, predictable diseases follow like typhoid, cholera, jaundice because floodwater mixes with sewage and contaminates drinking water sources. These aren’t random outbreaks. They are environmental health events.

What makes this harder is that by the time a settlement exists, relocation is rarely realistic. So the question becomes: how do we reduce harm now?

Some solutions are not glamorous, but they work. Protecting and restoring water bodies is one. Reforestation and stabilizing slopes in vulnerable regions is another. Planning drainage based on real rainfall patterns not outdated assumptions is essential. And perhaps most importantly, we have to stop treating wetlands, floodplains, ponds, and lakes as ‘free land.’ They are climate buffers. They are cooling systems. They are flood defenses.

Even our choices in agriculture and vegetation shape climate stress. I’ve started paying more attention to how casually we introduce water-intensive crops into regions that are already water-stressed, simply because demand or hype has shifted. The logic sounds modern to grow what sells but nature doesn’t care about market trends. A crop that needs enormous water inputs can deepen scarcity and worsen heat vulnerability in the long run. The same goes for certain trees planted without thinking through ecological impacts. Some species consume so much groundwater that they suppress surrounding vegetation and quietly alter local water tables. These decisions are rarely debated with the seriousness they deserve.

Then there’s biodiversity often treated like a separate conversation, but it isn’t. Loss of biodiversity is directly tied to climate, disease patterns, and food security. The disappearance of sparrows is one of the most common examples people recognize, but it isn’t sentimental. Sparrows help control pests naturally. When pest-control species decline, pest pressure rises, and farms compensate with more pesticides. More pesticides degrade soil and leak into water. Degraded soil needs more fertilizer. Fertilizers run off into water bodies and suffocate aquatic life. This is how ecological imbalance becomes a chain reaction that ends in human health consequences.

Pollution has evolved too. We still talk about air, water, soil, and noise, but emerging contaminants have entered daily life so quietly that many people don’t realize they are part of the problem. Personal care products, disinfectants, residues from household chemicals, and pharmaceuticals now move through wastewater systems that were never designed to filter them out completely. Sunscreens and similar products wash into rivers and lakes. Disinfectants and cleaning chemicals disrupt microbial ecosystems in septic tanks and treatment systems. And antibiotics, perhaps the most alarming are everywhere.

Antimicrobial resistance is often framed as a medical issue, but it is also an environmental one. Antibiotics enter the environment through human use, hospital discharge, and pharmaceutical manufacturing waste. If wastewater treatment systems rely mainly on older processes that don’t remove these compounds effectively, antibiotic residues persist in waterways. Microbes are exposed repeatedly. Resistance grows. And slowly, the world moves toward a future where infections become harder to treat not because we lack intelligence, but because we polluted our way into microbial evolution.

Hospitals, in particular, deserve attention. Their wastewater contains higher loads of antibiotics and resistant organisms than domestic wastewater. If hospital discharge mixes directly into municipal sewage without pre-treatment, it increases the burden on treatment plants and spreads risk downstream. A practical step one that feels achievable even within constraints is for hospitals to have their own wastewater treatment systems, or at least partial treatment before discharge. It is not a perfect solution, but it’s a meaningful one.

Plastic is another unavoidable reality. Even products marketed as ‘paper’ e.g. paper cups, cartons, packaging often contain plastic linings that make them functionally non-biodegradable. We can’t pretend we live in a plastic-free world. We also can’t ignore what studies increasingly suggest: microplastics and plastic-associated chemicals are making their way into food chains, into water, and into human biology. The question is no longer whether plastic is “bad” in theory; the question is how we reduce exposure and reduce leakage into ecosystems when plastic has become infrastructure for modern consumption.

People often ask why greener solutions are bioplastics, algae-based fuels, advanced clean technologies but they aren’t everywhere available in the present scenario. One reason is that innovation isn’t the same as adoption. A technology can be brilliant and still fail if it’s too expensive, too hard to scale, or too inconvenient for everyday users. That doesn’t mean we stop innovating; it means we design solutions that can survive outside laboratories and pilot projects.

Sustainability, in practice, rests on three pillars: society, economy, and environment. A solution must be environmentally sound, economically feasible, and socially acceptable. If any one of these fails, implementation stalls. This is why the path forward isn’t only about discovering new technologies; it’s also about building systems that make better choices easy affordable, accessible, and normal.

Waste management is a perfect example. Everyone talks about segregation, but many people feel discouraged when they see waste collected in the same bags or mixed again downstream. Yet the failure of systems doesn’t excuse our own habits. At home, many of us still throw vegetable waste, batteries, plastics, and e-waste into the same bin because we don’t know where else it should go. If we want real change, we need both awareness and infrastructure: neighborhood kiosks for e-waste, buy-back incentives for old electronics, clear drop points for batteries, and consistent municipal handling that doesn’t punish citizen effort.

And at the household level, there are simple practices that matter more than we admit. Composting organic waste is an old method that still works. Returning nutrients to soil reduces dependence on chemical fertilizers. Growing plants is helpful but we must be honest: a few indoor plants cannot compensate for deforestation or the loss of wetlands. Real environmental protection requires protecting real ecosystems, not decorating around their disappearance.

What I keep coming back to is this: climate action cannot stay abstract. It has to show up in how we build and where we build, in whether we protect water bodies, in what we dump into drains, in how hospitals handle waste, in how we farm, and in whether we treat the environment as a partner or as disposable space.

If we want the next generation to be healthier, we have to stop handing them a world where clean air and safe water are privileges. We don’t want children learning about forests only through endangered-species lists. We want them to experience a living ecosystem not a memory of one. And we can’t get there through one grand gesture. We get there through many small, consistent decisions: restoring green cover, respecting hydrology, reducing chemical loads, treating wastewater properly, managing medical waste responsibly, and choosing sustainability not as a trend, but as a discipline.

Charity begins at home, but in the climate era, so does survival.

Authors Biography

Dr.Debleena Bhattacharya, Associate Editor, InnoHEALTH magazine and Assistant Professor at Marwadi University,Rajkot,Gujarat. Her scientific endeavour includes her contribution in various national and international scientific journals. She has co-authored with (Late) Dr. V.K Singh and published a book under CRC Press, U.S.A. titled ‘Climate Changes and Epidemiological Hotspots’

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Menstrual leave policies are in place in nations around the world like Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, China, Indonesia, Zambia, and Mexico. This policy was first put into effect in 1947 in Japan. Japan as a nation was very concerned about the significant population loss that occurred during World War II. Because they could bear children and repopulate the country, women in their “reproductive ages” came under the protection of the government. The exploitative and abusive working conditions, which include long, hard hours without breaks, are a common theme in these nations. Therefore, women did not require rest while they were menstruating; rather, it was the lack of it.

It is not a new initiative to implement such policies in India. The Bihar government has provided two days of menstrual leave each month since 1992. The Menstrual Benefits Bill 2017 was introduced in Parliament in 2017 by Arunachal Pradesh MP Ninong Ering to give both public and private employees two days of menstrual leave each month. Gozoop and Culture Machine, two Mumbai-based businesses, were the first private businesses in India to offer first day of period (FOP) leave in 2017. Zomato will begin offering its female and transgender employees up to ten days of menstrual leave annually starting in 2020. Since then, similar policies have also been implemented by private businesses like Swiggy and Byju’s.

To understand the debate over menstrual leave’s wider implications, it is necessary to situate it socially and historically. Utilizing menstrual leaves might violate some cultural norms in a nation like India where menstruation is still stigmatised and connected to ideas of imperfection and pollution. The disclosure of a woman’s menstrual status may increase her vulnerability to subtle discrimination because it is seen as impolite and meant to be kept private. Many times, a woman’s role in childcare and housework is blamed for her absence from the workforce. Previously, the Maternity Benefit Act’s (1961 and 2017) enactment demonstrated how such a policy could also support myths that women are more difficult to work with, unreliable, and expensive to hire than men. It has been demonstrated that these harmful beliefs have an effect on how many women participate in and are employed in the formal labour force.

But how does it actually work out in a masculine society like India, which is already widespread with negative stereotypes about women who are menstruating?

People experiencing difficulties should be encouraged to consult a doctor, as the feeling of extreme pain and difficulty during this time should not be normalised.

Menstrual leaves are helpful for people with a variety of menstrual cycle-related illnesses, including mood disorders, endometriosis, dysmenorrhea, and polycystic ovarian disorder (PCOD). A policy like this might also promote more candid conversations about women’s health and menstruation and lessen the stigma associated with these subjects.

Menstruation is being medicalized and treated as a “disease” or a “illness” by creating a separate category of leave for a natural biological process. This supports the notion that menstruation is “difficult and painful” for most women, which prevents them from functioning effectively at the time. While having a menstrual leave policy may help some women who struggle with menstrual disorders, it’s important to realise that not everyone who menstruates experiences their period the same way. It is important to raise awareness of menstrual health and related issues rather than viewing menstruation as a “disorder” in and of itself.

People experiencing difficulties should be encouraged to consult a doctor, as the feeling of extreme pain and difficulty during this time should not be normalised. While the majority of women do not want to disclose that they are on their period, some wonder why this should always be the issue. A special period leave might be used as yet another justification for discrimination in a traditional society like India where menstruation is still taboo.Instead of framing the issue as one of menstrual health, the policies should aim to enhance working conditions and increase access to healthcare.

“Dr. Sahya S. Dev is a medical practioner with an MD in Community Medicine. “

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Population and Biodiversity are closely related to each other and they have direct relationship with each other. Population ecology is the study of how the population of plants, animals or other organisms change over time. Critically speaking we are mentioning the population of humans here. It was during the Independence period, India was left with many issues including population explosion along with crippled economy, poverty etc. During Independence, India was one of the most populous countries of the world with 350 million people, since then it continued to grow at a higher rate with 1.37 billion people as of 2020.

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Causes of Population Explosion in India:

• Hot Climate: One of the main reasons for the population explosion is the hot climate. Due to tropical climate maturity comes at an early age in boys and girls, due to which they give birth to children at earliest.
• Early Marriage and Multi Marriage: 80% of girls of the country are married between 15-20 years. Thus the effect of early marriage comes in the form of long married life (long reproductive age period) and more childbirth.
• Poverty, Illiteracy, High life expectancy (from 35 years in 1947 to 69 years in 2021), low Death Rate (from 45 per Thousand in 1947 to 8 per Thousand in 2021), Refugee migration etc. are some other causes of Population Explosion in India.

Relationship between Population Explosion and Loss of Biodiversity and its Effects:

Population Explosion has a direct relationship with Loss of Biodiversity. Population growth affect biodiversity in following ways;

• Deforestation: Human greed is the main enemy of biodiversity. More forest habitat is being converted into agricultural and urban land as it pollutes the habitat through production of waste which adds to the loss.
• Increased Resource Consumption: Increase in resource consumption is directly proportional to overpopulation, more the population more resources are needed for existence.
• Farming Impacts: Due to increase in population, demand for food has also increased. This is achieved by cutting down forests more or less with government support to convert forest land into agricultural land. As a result of this practice, forest area is shrinking day by day thereby damaging the environment and natural habitat.
• Pollution: Increase in population leads to increased waste production thereby polluting the environment and habitat.
• Eutrophication: A process by which water bodies are enriched with minerals or chemical substances that increase in phytoplankton production. This is through direct or indirect human activity. 
• Global Warming and Climate Change: Another negative impact of overpopulation is in the form of Global Warming. Global Warming is a current challenge of almost all the countries in common and Southeast Asia ( India) in particular. There have been many agreements by different countries to tackle climate change and global warming. One of them is the Paris Agreement 2015, according to which the signatory countries are expected to lower their carbon emissions. India is also a signatory of this agreement.
• Increased Emergence of new Pandemics due to Overpopulation and its effect on Environment: There’s a strong correlation between emergence of new Pandemics and Overpopulation. According to Dr Peter Daszak due to the increase in population we are witnessing new variation and emergence of more diseases.

Direct Activity includes Sewage Deposition in or around water bodies.

Indirect Activity includes washing away fertilizers ( from agricultural land) or other chemicals during floods.

• Global Warming and Climate Change: Another negative impact of overpopulation is in the form of Global Warming. Global Warming is a current challenge of almost all the countries in common and Southeast Asia ( India) in particular. There have been many agreements by different countries to tackle climate change and global warming. One of them is the Paris Agreement 2015, according to which the signatory countries are expected to lower their carbon emissions. India is also a signatory of this agreement.
• Increased Emergence of new Pandemics due to Overpopulation and its effect on Environment: There’s a strong correlation between emergence of new Pandemics and Overpopulation. According to Dr Peter Daszak due to the increase in population we are witnessing new variation and emergence of more diseases.

Solutions and Future policies to prevent overpopulation and Loss of Biodiversity

Solutions to Overpopulation: Overpopulation is the problem that didn’t arise overnight and nor it’s solution can be made in a day. Overpopulation is a very complex process to tackle and is a long term process which needs a long term planning.

• Legislation: Legislation is an important factor to tackle overpopulation. Recently the Population Control Bill was proposed in 2019 to control the population growth of India. The bill was proposed but unfortunately it is yet to become a law in the country.
• Family Planning
• Women Empowerment
• Education (Sexual and Adult Education) about the control methods (Contraception).
• Poverty Alleviation ( Equity, Opportunity, Empowerment).
• Maternal Education (One of the main approaches to reduce IMR and decrease Poverty).

Solutions to Conserve Biodiversity: By reducing Overpopulation has a direct effect on biodiversity conservation. We can conserve biodiversity through different approaches viz;

• Effective Legislation: Legislation to conserve natural habitat and natural resources.
• Afforestation: This is an important and long term approach to tackle climate change, global warming and to conserve biodiversity.
• Reduce Climate Change: Global Warming can be reduced by minimising carbon emissions and shifting to alternative energy sources as signed to Paris Agreement 2015.
• Sustainable Living: Sustainable Living is something that can be done at an individual level. It helps to reduce resource depletion.
• Use Of Eco Friendly Products

Overpopulation and Loss of the environment is a great challenge in front of us because it puts our existence in danger.

Overpopulation and Loss of the environment is a great challenge in front of us because it puts our existence in danger. The fact is we can’t compensate for the loss we have done to our environment but it is our responsibility to protect it from further damage by taking small steps  that could surely make a big change in the environment like from closing a running tap during brushing teeth to planting a tree. Are we really doing justice to our environment?

Composed by: Dr Sameer Ul Haq is doing his Masters in Public Health from Indian Institute of Public Health, Shillong. He has many achievements to his badge in various fields like Public Health, Global Health,Epidemiology besides having clinical skills. He is currently working on a Mental Health project.

Photo from Unsplash

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Water, as we all know, is the utmost need of our survival. Human body comprises around 60% water and the fact that less consumption of water leads to various diseases in the future. Apart from facts and figure, one simple question we often forget to inquire is where this water is coming from? Surface water i.e. lakes, rivers and ponds or groundwater i.e. tube wells, bore well, well as these are the two sources that give us a glass of water.

Health Organization in India: To know the near-exact extent of AMR, AMR surveillance networks were initiated by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) and the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) in 2013 and 2014, respectively. In 2015, these two organizations along with the support from Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) USA, started a systematic assessment of the prevailing IPC practices in India with the aim of formulating new guidelines for preventing hospital-acquired infections.

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