Fundamentals of Environmental Sciences II: Earth, Man and Environment, Biogeographic Provinces and the Agro-Climatic Zones of India, Sustainable Development, Natural Resources, Remote Sensing and GIS, and Environmental Education and Ethics

Wallace (1876) divided the world's fauna into six zoogeographic realms: Palaearctic, Nearctic, Neotropical, Ethiopian (Afrotropical), Oriental (Indomalayan) and Australian. The Wallace line, running between Bali and Lombok and between Borneo and Sulawesi, marks the sharp faunal break between the Oriental and Australian realms. For conservation planning Udvardy's classification (1975), prepared for IUCN and UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere programme, divides the land into 8 biogeographic realms, which are subdivided into 193 biogeographic provinces, each characterised by one of 14 biome types. India lies where three realms meet, the Palaearctic, the Indomalayan and the Afrotropical, which is one reason for its high biodiversity.

Rodgers and Panwar (1988), at the Wildlife Institute of India, divided the country into 10 biogeographic zones, later refined into further provinces: the Trans-Himalaya, the Himalaya, the Desert, the Semi-Arid zone, the Western Ghats, the Deccan Peninsula, the Gangetic Plain, the North-East, the Coasts and the Islands. The Deccan Peninsula is the largest, covering over two-fifths of the country. The classification is used to plan a representative protected-area network, so that every zone has its share of national parks and sanctuaries.

The fifteen Planning Commission regions are the Western Himalayan, Eastern Himalayan, Lower, Middle and Upper Gangetic Plains, Trans-Gangetic Plains, Eastern, Central, Western and Southern Plateau and Hills, East Coast Plains and Hills, West Coast Plains and Ghats, Gujarat Plains and Hills, Western Dry Region, and the Island Region. They were drawn so that each region could be given a development strategy suited to its resources rather than a single national cropping plan.

The World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland, defined sustainable development in Our Common Future (1987) as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". It rests on three pillars, economic growth, social equity and environmental protection, and it contains two key ideas: the priority of the needs of the poor, and the limits that technology and social organisation place on the environment's ability to meet present and future needs. Herman Daly turned it into operating rules: harvest renewable resources no faster than they regenerate; emit wastes no faster than the environment can assimilate them; and deplete non-renewable resources no faster than renewable substitutes are developed. Weak sustainability allows natural capital to be replaced by manufactured capital so long as the total does not fall; strong sustainability holds that critical natural capital cannot be substituted. The Sustainable Development Goals, adopted by the UN General Assembly in September 2015, set 17 goals and 169 targets for 2030.

Natural resources are renewable (solar energy, water, forests, fisheries, soil when managed), non-renewable (fossil fuels and minerals) or, in older schemes, inexhaustible and exhaustible. Assessing them has three parts. The physical inventory asks how much exists: the McKelvey box separates identified from undiscovered resources on one axis and economic from sub-economic ones on the other, so that a "reserve" is only the identified, economically recoverable part of a resource and grows with price and technology. The ecological assessment asks how much can be used without degradation: sustainable yield, carrying capacity and assimilative capacity. The economic assessment asks what the resource is worth, using total economic value, the sum of direct and indirect use values, option value and non-use (existence and bequest) values, measured by market prices or by travel-cost, hedonic-pricing and contingent-valuation methods; the UN System of Environmental-Economic Accounting brings such figures into national accounts.

Remote sensing records the electromagnetic energy reflected or emitted by the Earth's surface from a platform that does not touch it. Passive sensors record reflected sunlight or emitted thermal energy; active sensors, such as radar and LiDAR, send their own pulses and record the return, so radar can image through cloud and at night. Energy is recorded only in the atmospheric windows, the wavelength bands that the atmosphere transmits. Each surface has a characteristic spectral signature: healthy vegetation absorbs strongly in the blue and red because of chlorophyll and reflects strongly in the near infrared because of the internal structure of the leaf, giving the sharp "red edge"; clear water absorbs almost all near-infrared energy and appears dark; dry soil reflects more steadily across the spectrum. The normalised difference vegetation index exploits the vegetation contrast: NDVI = (NIR − Red) ÷ (NIR + Red), ranging from −1 to +1, with dense green vegetation high and water negative. With a near-infrared reflectance of 0.5 and a red reflectance of 0.1, NDVI = 0.4 ÷ 0.6 ≈ 0.67.

Geostationary satellites orbit about 35,786 km above the equator and stay over one point, giving continuous weather coverage at coarse spatial resolution. Earth-resource satellites use near-polar sun-synchronous orbits, a few hundred to about 900 km up, crossing each latitude at the same local solar time so that illumination is comparable from pass to pass. India's first operational remote sensing satellite, IRS-1A, was launched in 1988, and the Resourcesat, Cartosat, Oceansat and RISAT series followed. Digital image processing then proceeds in stages: pre-processing (radiometric and atmospheric correction, and geometric correction and georeferencing to ground control points); enhancement (contrast stretching, filtering, false-colour composites, in which the standard composite shows vegetation red); transformations (band ratios, NDVI, principal components); and classification. Supervised classification uses training sites of known cover and a rule such as minimum distance, parallelepiped or maximum likelihood; unsupervised classification lets the computer find natural clusters, as in ISODATA and k-means, which the analyst then labels. Accuracy is assessed with an error (confusion) matrix, giving overall, producer's and user's accuracy and the kappa coefficient, which corrects for chance agreement.

Ground truthing is the collection of field observations, usually located with GPS, that are used to choose training sites and to check the classified map; without it, classification accuracy is unknown. A geographic information system stores, analyses and displays spatially referenced data. Its data models are vector (points, lines and polygons with attribute tables, suited to boundaries and networks) and raster (a grid of cells, suited to continuous surfaces and imagery); its core operations are overlay, buffering, network analysis, interpolation and terrain analysis from a digital elevation model. The syllabus's applications all combine the two: land-use and land-cover mapping and change detection, and the measurement of urban sprawl (for example with Shannon's entropy of built-up area across zones); vegetation and forest mapping with NDVI, which underlies the biennial India State of Forest Report; natural-resource and watershed mapping; waste management, where landfill sites are selected by overlaying distance from water bodies, settlements, geology and slope in a multi-criteria analysis; and climate change, through glacier retreat, sea-level and coastline change, snow cover and land-surface temperature.

The international framework for environmental education was set in two meetings. The Belgrade Charter (1975), from an international workshop, set its goal and six objectives: awareness, knowledge, attitude, skills, evaluation ability and participation. The Tbilisi Declaration (1977), from the first intergovernmental conference on environmental education, organised by UNESCO and UNEP, confirmed five objective categories, awareness, knowledge, attitudes, skills and participation, and stressed that environmental education should be lifelong, interdisciplinary and directed to real problems. In India the Supreme Court in M.C. Mehta v Union of India directed that environmental education be made a compulsory subject at every level of education, and the Centre for Environment Education (Ahmedabad, 1984) and the National Green Corps eco-clubs carry awareness into schools and communities.

Leopold's land ethic is the most quoted: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." Two essays of the late 1960s framed the debate: Lynn White's "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" (1967) and Garrett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (1968), which argued that freely accessible resources are overused because each user gains the whole benefit of extra use while the cost is shared. Elinor Ostrom later showed that many communities manage commons successfully under their own rules, so the tragedy follows from open access rather than from common ownership as such.