The Hindu Business Line : STEC report on Kerala's environment on anvil

THE Kerala State Council for Science Technology and Environment (STEC) is in the final stages of preparing a `State of the Environment Report' for Kerala.

The report's draft is ready and has been submitted to the Union Environment Ministry for its comments, said Dr K.R.S. Krishnan, Director, STEC and Additional Secretary, Kerala Science Technology and Environment Department.

"We hope to publish the final report by the end of March," he told Business Line.

The `State of the Environment Report' highlights the current state of various aspects of Kerala's environment.

It is part of a deliberate effort to introduce environmental monitoring in the State, said Dr Krishnan.

"We decided to make a beginning with the report, which was prepared in less than a year."

STEC would like to publish a similar report at regular intervals, perhaps every two or three years, he added.

Divided into seven sections that look at various aspects of the environment, the report has been prepared in partnership with more than 10 different organisations, including various Government departments.

The biggest challenge was to find reliable data, Dr Krishnan said. Hence, the report is the synthesis of the existing efforts of the various organisations that participated in the project.

The most interesting aspect of the report is that it confirms many popularly held beliefs.

For instance, it reveals that water quality is a critical issue for Kerala and one that the State will need to tackle urgently.

Similarly, the draft report also confirms that vehicular emissions are very severe in the State's three main cities - Thiruvananthapuram, Kochi and Kozhikode.

Besides examining air quality and the status of Kerala's water resources, the report also looks at noise pollution; climatic changes and ozone depletion; the condition of the marine and costal environment; solid, hazardous and biomedical waste, and nature and biodiversity.

Each section of the report is devoted to a specific aspect of the environment and follows the DPSIR framework for organising information about the state of the environment, according to Dr Krishnan.

The DPSIR framework looks at the driving forces of change on each environmental parameter, the pressures on that parameter, the state of the environment on that parameter, the impact on that environmental parameter, and the response.

In addition, each segment of the report also contains recommendations on actions that can be carried out to improve the state of each aspect of the environment.

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