Report: Africa’s glaciers to disappear soon

 World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and other agency released its new report on October 19, 2021. In its report, these agencies warned that, Africa’s rare glaciers are going to disappear in next two decades because of climate change.

Key facts

• The report was released ahead of “U.N. climate conference” which is scheduled for October 31, 2021 in Scotland.
• As per report, 1.3 billion people of Africa remain extremely vulnerable as African continent warms more and at a faster rate than the global average, even though 54 countries in Africa contributes for less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
• Report notes that, shrinking glaciers of Mount Kenya, Mount Kilimanjaro, and the Rwenzori Mountains in Uganda are the symbol of rapid and widespread changes to come. Present retreat rates of these glaciers are higher than global average. If this continues to happen, there will be total deglaciation by 2040s.
• By 2030, around 118 million extremely poor people, or people living on less than $1.90 a day, will be exposed to floods, drought and extreme heat in Africa.

Economic effects of climate change

Estimates of economic effects of climate change vary in the African continent. However, in sub-Saharan Africa, climate change will decrease the gross domestic product by 3% by 2050.  Cost of adapting to climate change in Africa will increase to $50 billion per year by 2050.

Famine in Madagascar

United Nations has warned that “climate change has resulted into famine-like conditions in Madagascar, located in Indian Ocean Island. It also notes that, South Sudan are going through the worst flooding in about 60 years.

Climate change set to worsen resource degradation, conflict: IEP report

 

Afghanistan gets the worst score on the report, which says its ongoing conflict has damaged its ability to cope with risks to water and food supplies, climate change, and alternating floods and droughts.

A vicious cycle linking the depletion of natural resources with violent conflict may have gone past the point of no return in parts of the world and is likely to be exacerbated by climate change, a report said on Thursday.

Food insecurity, lack of water and the impact of natural disasters, combined with high population growth, are stoking conflict and displacing people in vulnerable areas, the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) think-tank said.

IEP uses data from the United Nations and other sources to predict the countries and regions most at risk in its “Serge Stroobants, IEP director for Europe, the Middle East and North Africa said the report identified 30 “hotspot” countries – home to 1.26 billion people – as facing most risks. This is based on three criteria relating to scarcity of resources, and five focusing on disasters including floods, droughts and rising temperatures.Ecological Threat Register”.

“We don’t even need climate change to see potential system collapse, just the impact of those eight ecological threats can lead to this – of course climate change is reinforcing it,” Stroobants said.

Afghanistan gets the worst score on the report, which says its ongoing conflict has damaged its ability to cope with risks to water and food supplies, climate change, and alternating floods and droughts. Conflict in turn leads to further resource degradation, according to the findings.

Six seminars including governments, military institutions and development groups last year returned the message that “it is unlikely that the international community will reverse the vicious cycles in some parts of the world”, IEP said.

This is particularly the case in the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, which has seen more and worsening conflicts over the last decade, it said. “With tensions already escalating, it can only be expected that climate change will have an amplifying effect on many of these issues,” the report said.

Source: Indian Express, 7/10/21

Challenges like climate change call for farm research to take centre stage, just like during the Green Revolution

Agriculture and climate change are too important to be left only to generalist bureaucrats, economists and activists.

Indian agriculture’s major challenge in the initial decades after Independence was to increase crop production and yields at any cost. Today, it’s about boosting farm incomes, while simultaneously ensuring production that is cost-competitive, resource-use efficient and climate-smart. The release of a new herbicide-tolerant rice variety by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) that can be directly sown, instead of requiring transplantation, is therefore welcome. Farmers transplant and grow paddy in flooded fields mainly to control weeds, which cannot emerge under water that acts as a natural herbicide. The IARI variety contains a mutated gene making the paddy plant “tolerant” to Imazethapyr, a herbicide effective against a wide range of weeds. This chemical when now sprayed will kill only the weeds, while the paddy can be cultivated without any nursery preparation, transplanting, puddling and flooding. Farmers would save about 30 per cent water, Rs 3,000-per-acre labour costs and 10-15 days’ time from direct seeding, compared to conventional transplantation.

The IARI variety — there’s a need for many more of these — highlights the importance of investing in public agricultural research. The first challenge that India confronted, of feeding its population and achieving a modicum of grain self-sufficiency, couldn’t have been met without the high-yielding semi-dwarf varieties bred during the 1960s and 1970s. The same goes for today’s challenges, especially from climate change. Average temperatures are rising, winters are getting shorter and the number of rainy days is falling even with overall “normal” monsoons. Growing crops and rearing animals under such circumstances — of extreme hot and cold or prolonged dry weather and intense downpours — is becoming increasingly tough, with farmers also facing problems of depleting water-tables, soaring energy costs and emergence of new pests and diseases. Coping with these stresses requires new breeding approaches (including gene modification and editing) and low-input, high-output agriculture technologies.

All this also means putting farm research on centre stage just like during the Green Revolution. Agriculture and climate change are too important to be left only to generalist bureaucrats, economists and activists. Research, unlike subsidies and welfare schemes, may not yield political dividends or pay in the short run. But the returns from farm research — IARI varieties alone account for over 95 per cent of India’s Rs 32,000-crore annual basmati rice exports and nearly half of its total wheat area — are more sustainable.

Source: Indian Express, 30-09-2021

Children born in 2021 to be twice as affected by climate change: Study

 A new study showed that today's young generation will be much severely affected by climate extremes like wildfires, droughts, floods etc than today's adults.

Researchers have found that today's children will be hit much harder by climate extremes than today's adults.The findings of the study were published in the journal 'Science'.

During their lifetime, a child born in 2021 will experience on average twice as many wildfires, between two and three times more droughts, almost three times more river floods and crop failures, and seven times more heatwaves compared to a person who's for instance 60 years old today, the researchers found based on data from the Inter-sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP).

This is under a scenario of current greenhouse gas emission reduction pledges by governments which will be a topic at the upcoming world climate summit COP26 in Glasgow.

"Our results highlight a severe threat to the safety of young generations and call for drastic emission reductions to safeguard their future," said lead-author Wim Thiery from Vrije Universiteit Brussel.

"We even have strong reasons to think that our calculations underestimate the actual increases that young people will face," added Thiery.

Regarding droughts, heatwaves, river floods and crop failures, people under the age of 40 today will live what the researchers call "an unprecedented life".

"The good news: we can indeed take much of the climate burden from our childrens' shoulders if we limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by phasing out fossil fuel use," said Katja Frieler, who is coordinating ISIMIP, she's a leading scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-author of the study.

"If we increase climate protection from current emission reduction pledges and get in line with a 1.5-degree target, we will reduce young people's potential exposure to extreme events on average by 24 per cent globally," explained Frieler.

"For North America, it's minus 26 per cent, for Europe and Central Asia minus 28 per cent, and in the Middle East and North Africa even minus 39 per cent. This is a huge opportunity," added Frieler.

For instance, under a scenario of current insufficient climate policies, dangerous heatwaves that affect 15 per cent of the global land area today could increase to 46 per cent, hence triple by the end of the century.

Yet limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, which is the ambition of the Paris Climate Agreement signed by almost all countries worldwide, would reduce the affected land area to 22 per cent. This is more than today but significantly less than with unmitigated warming.

The analysis is the first of its kind. To assess age-dependent extreme event exposure, the researchers took a collection of multi-model climate impact projections from the ISIMIP project building on the work of dozens of research groups worldwide.

The researchers combined this with country-scale life-expectancy data, population data and temperature trajectories from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

Source: Hindustan Times, 27/09/21

How India can balance emission and growth

To meet its climate targets, the country must invest heavily in eco-friendly transport, power generation and buildings.

The Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change ( UNFCCC) requires countries to set targets called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) that would help the world collectively move toward curtailing the temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius and that can set the world on a low-carbon, climate-resilient future pathway. India made ambitious commitments and the two fundamental elements of India’s NDCs are 33-35% reduction in emission intensity of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) by 2030 compared to 2005 levels and a conditional increase in the cumulative share of non-fossil fuel energy in installed capacity up to 40% by 2030.

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in its series of research based policy analysis of NDC have said time and again that these two pillars to achieving the NDC goals in countries such as India require early uptake of advance climate-friendly technologies, while appreciating the level of ambition.

This study by International Energy Agency (IEA) released last week questions the ambition of these targets and the level of effort put in by governments towards achieving these targets. Reducing the carbon intensity of electricity generation requires that non-fossil fuel-based power generation should grow at a higher rate than fossil fuel-based power. Even though Indian government is pushing renewable energy generation through focused missions and schemes, reducing the share of fossil fuels would require comparatively larger capacity installation of non-fossil-fuel power systems (other than nuclear and hydro power) in order to meet the increasing demand for electricity due to higher projected growth. That is going to be an uphill task for India.

Estimates made by the government indicate that India could achieve part of its NDC goals more than a decade earlier than targeted, based on the impetus on renewable energy. But a question still remains over the future of coal. India’s National Electricity Plan (NEP), adopted earlier in 2018, is aimed to guide India to remain on track to achieving the renewable energy pillar of the Paris Agreement targets ahead of its time. It could potentially also become a global leader in combating climate change if it were to abandon plans to build new coal-fired power plants. The draft NEP contained no expansion of coal power after 2022, however the final NEP took a step backward and included more than 90 GW of planned coal-fired capacity, with an added risk of these becoming stranded assets. So coal in India is here to stay in India defining its development pathway, but that’s not the only defining element as it used to be a few decades ago.

A 2018 report by the national coal mining company, Coal India, confirms declining future costs of solar and renewable electricity storage (Coal India, 2018), which is likely to foster low-carbon investments. Investment in renewable power in India topped fossil fuels for the first time in 2017, according to the IEA, which is a consolation even in the wake of this current study by IEA. Therefore, with sustained growth, larger upfront investments in new transport infrastructure, buildings and power sector will be critical to India achieving its NDC targets.

Vidya Soundarajan is India regional programme manager, Action on Climate Today

Source: Hindustan Times, 2/04/2019

A clarion call to combat climate change

The Green New Deal acknowledges the responsibility of the U.S. for its historical emissions

When almost all news about climate change concerns catastrophic events, there are a few shining lights in the U.S. and Europe. One is Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, 29, the newly elected member of the U.S. House of Representatives. The other is Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old Swede whose school strike outside the Swedish Parliament, in a clear-minded effort to force politicians to act on climate change, has inspired students in many countries to walk out of their classrooms and make similar demands. If Ms. Thunberg’s voice is inspiring for the way it has roused the youth, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is daring in her imagination and policies.

The Green New Deal “is a four-part programme for moving America quickly out of crisis into a secure, sustainable future”. It takes its name from U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt’s famous New Deal, a series of economic and social measures launched in the 1930s to end the Great Depression. The Green New Deal audaciously aspires to make sweeping changes to the environment and economy and meet all of the U.S.’s power demand from clean, renewable and zero emission energy sources by 2030, while at the same time addressing racial and economic justice. Thus, in many ways, it is more than just a climate change plan. Ms. Ocasio-Cortez along with Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey introduced the resolution in the House and Senate on February 7.

What the deal says

The resolution acknowledges the 1.5° report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment. It identifies the worldwide effects from warming, the disproportionate responsibility borne by the U.S. as a result of its historical emissions, and calls for the country to step up as a global leader. It speaks about the fall in life expectancy, economic stagnation, erosion of workers’ rights, and rising inequality in the U.S. Climate change that will asymmetrically affect the most vulnerable sections of U.S. society and ought to be considered a direct threat to national security.

The resolution goes on to recognise the momentous opportunity available to take action. It states that it is the responsibility of the federal government to create a Green New Deal, which would meet its power demand through renewable sources in 10 years. It calls for a 10-year national mobilisation that would build infrastructure, eliminate pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, as much as is technologically feasible, and reduce risks posed by the impacts of climate change.

These goals entail dramatic changes in manufacturing, electricity generation, education, livelihoods, sustainable farming, food systems, an overhaul of transportation, waste management, health care, and strong pollution-control measures. The resolution also calls for international action by the U.S. on climate change. It recognises that public funds would be needed for these changes and need to be leveraged. It states that the federal government needs to take the full social and environmental costs of climate change into consideration through new laws, policies and programmes. Importantly, the Green New Deal calls for a federal jobs guarantee for all.

A welcome surprise

How far this resolution will go and whether and how it will be diluted in the U.S. Congress is unclear. Many details of the proposal still need to be worked out. It has been called “ridiculous” by some Republicans and has made some Democratic leaders uneasy as well.

But various progressive elected officials, groups, and some activists have lent their support. Almost all Democrats who have announced their candidacy for the 2020 election have backed the resolution. A poll conducted by Yale and George Mason Universities showed that there was support for the deal among most Democratic voters and a majority of the Republicans. One does not know if this appetite for the deal will be sustained, but if extreme events related to climate change continue, people are likely to view radical change as essential. If we look at the political situation when Roosevelt passed the New Deal, both Houses of Congress were under the Democrats. On the other hand, the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were passed by President Richard Nixon and were regarded as being radical in their time.

If any country has the “capability” to increase its commitment in renewables, it is the U.S. This clarion call by Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Mr. Markey is therefore a welcome surprise. The share of fossil fuels in total electricity generation in the U.S. in 2017 was 63%, the share of renewables was 17%, and the share of nuclear was 20%.

The future

It should be noted that until now no U.S. agency or civil society group has publicly acknowledged the responsibility of the country for its historical emissions. The Green New Deal is the sort of resolution the U.S. should have passed after the Kyoto Protocol in 1997. Instead, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Byrd-Hagel Resolution, according to which the U.S. ought not to be a signatory to any protocol or agreement regarding the United Nations Climate Convention that would reduce greenhouse gas emissions for Annex-1 Parties, the wealthy countries, unless developing countries were also similarly required to limit their emissions.

Meanwhile, Ms. Thunberg’s school boycott movement has inspired protests in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Australia and elsewhere. If this spreads to many more countries, it can help apply pressure on governments and the fossil fuel industry and create a bottom-up movement led by the youth for major changes in dealing with climate change.

The Green New Deal is an acknowledgement by politicians that economic growth, the environment and social well-being go together. While these bold moves by two young women have opened windows to winds of change, how far these can progress and whether they will bring the scale of change needed as rapidly as it is required to deal with the world’s dire challenge remains to be seen.

Sujatha Byravan is a scientist who studies science, technology and development policy

Source: The Hindu, 14/02/2019

India must focus on resilience and adaptation

Policy makers must also use traditional knowledge to deal with climate change.

Pointing towards a rise in catastrophic weather events in India, the India Meteorological Department (IMD) has said that the year 2000 was a “tipping point” for the impact of climate change led warming in the country. The IMD’s report — ‘Statement on Climate of India during 2018’— has documented a gradual, significant rise in the annual mean temperature from 2000 and linked this trend to climate change because India’s warming trends are similar to the pattern of global warming.

In India, 11 out of 15 warmest years occurred during the past 15 years (2004-2018). The past decade (2009-2018) was also the warmest decade on record in the country. Reacting to the IMD report, scientists said India is projected to experience a temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2040 if measures are not taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions. This could have devastating impact on agriculture, coastal communities, and cost several animal species their natural habitat.

There is only one way to tackle such temperature variability. One must plan proper climate adaptation strategies and do everything possible to implement them without delay. Unfortunately, that is not happening at either the speed or scale required. For example, India may lead the Solar Alliance, but when it comes to the nation’s electric mobility policy, there has hardly been much movement beyond piecemeal strategies.

Or, for that matter, are our cities ready to tackle climate change? No. Most are yet to firm up resilience and adaptation strategies such as climate-resilient infrastructure, proper waste management and water harvesting to tackle this enormous challenge.

There are many reasons for this. Most city governments struggle to deal with other day-to-day development challenges such as education, infrastructure and health, and so climate resilience and adaptation figure low on their list of priorities.

Second, big cities such as Delhi and Mumbai have no city resilience plans because there is a multiplicity of authorities, which tend to work in silos whereas climate change cuts across several departments: public health, water, environment, energy, and social justice to name a few.

In a war as big as this, it’s important to use all knowledge resources available to tackle climate change. But there is a severe lack of interest among policy makers in using India’s wide repository of traditional knowledge in different sectors, such as water and waste management, to deal with the climate-induced disruption that is taking place. This is not just unfortunate but short sighted behaviour on the part of policymakers and citizens.

Source: Hindustan Times, 22/01/2019

India must climate-proof its rural and urban infrastructure

We must take action to reduce its vulnerability to weather extremes using latest climate science and modelling simulations.

The Paris Rulebook adopted at the climate negotiations (COP24) in Katowice on Sunday is an opportunity for India to set its house in order. The Rulebook states that under Article 7 of the Paris Agreement, all signatories have to submit and update an adaptation communication periodically to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Adaptation essentially means anticipating the impact of climate change and making cities and villages resilient in the face of a 1.5 degree rise in global warming over pre-industrial levels by the early 2030s. The warming can be as high as 2 degrees for many parts of Asia, including India. India must use this opportunity to climate-proof its rural and urban infrastructure by adopting strategies that reduce the impact of droughts through forestry; use crop diversification with a focus on resilient varieties; promote and deliver agriculture and climate insurance: and adopt flood- and heat stress control in cities. India has already proposed using the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act to conduct drought-proofing and afforestation activities and the move has been applauded by climate scientists as it is expected to reach the most vulnerable populations across the country.

The Rulebook has also established a system to ensure developed nations deliver climate finance to developing countries. At COP24, parties agreed that new finance targets will be established from 2025, over the current target of mobilising $100 billion per year by 2020 to support developing countries. Developed countries have the choice to include all kinds of financial instruments— loans, grants, aids from public and private sources — to ensure the flow of funds, which has so far been slow and unpredictable. According to a report of the UNFCCC standing committee on finance, the total climate specific finance flows from developed countries in 2016 was $38 billion — less than 40% of the target. Money apart, countries such as India need to draft a strategy to use funds effectively to minimise the impact of climate change; In India, the Kerala floods of 2018, and the 2013 flash floods in Uttarakhand were both extreme weather events caused by climate change .

The India Meteorological Department recently acknowledged that the country is facing climate change-led aberrations in long-term meteorological trends, with a sharp rise in ‘extremely heavy rainfall’ events and the number of ‘dry days’ in the past few decades. Instead of wearing blinkers like the oil-rich nations that include Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Russia and the US did at COP24, India must take action to reduce its vulnerability to weather extremes using latest climate science and modelling simulations.

Source: Hindustan Times, 19/12/2018

New rules on the block

Katowice climate negotiations have yielded a disciplined rulebook for future. It’s now time to deliver.

As the latest UN climate negotiations finally drew to a close this weekend in Katowice, Poland, negotiators finalised a new set of rules to operationalise the 2015 Paris Agreement, as well as a year-long “Talanoa Dialogue”, focused on finding new ways to enhance action and ambition. While doing so, the international community also hoped to send an urgent political signal, given the dire warnings in the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s special report on 1.5°C and the 2018 UNEP Gap Report, highlighting just how far states are from this temperature goal.

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Although deep political divisions muted the Katowice signal, negotiators did indeed deliver the bulk of the rules to operationalise the Paris Agreement — a significant diplomatic achievement in the current geo-political context. Particularly with the US’s announced withdrawal from the Paris Agreement and hearty embrace of coal, and, the newly-elected Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro’s equivocation on the agreement and withdrawal of its offer to host next year’s conference. While the rules on markets remain out of reach for now and the rules in general could have been more robust, the basic rules needed to implement the Paris Agreement are now in place.

The Katowice rules will perform several important functions. First, they seek to instil discipline in a process governed by “national determination”. Under the Paris Agreement, states have complete autonomy on the nature and type of climate actions they choose to take, subject to the expectation that they represent a progression on past actions. However, the rules now require them to provide detailed information of their actions. If states have absolute economy-wide targets, they need to provide quantifiable information on their reference points for measurements, the gases covered, their planning processes, assumptions and methodological approaches, how they consider their contribution as fair and ambitious, and how it contributes to the objective of the regime.

Second, the rules flesh out the obligations of states identified in the Paris Agreement, and make them meaningful. For instance, the Paris Agreement contained a general obligation for developed countries to report biennially on their provision and mobilisation of climate finance. The rules identify 15 specific pieces of information that states should submit in these reports, including “projected levels of public financial resources to be provided to developing countries”.

Third, the rules operationalise the key processes established by the Paris Agreement — a transparency framework, a “global stocktake” and a compliance regime — that seek to impose accountability and facilitate implementation. The transparency framework requires states to report on indicators for measuring progress in achieving their targets, which is significant as the Paris Agreement does not impose a binding obligation on states to achieve their targets. More broadly, the transparency rules phase in uniform reporting requirements on developed and developing countries in 2024, something India had consistently opposed. In deference to the concerns of developing countries, the rules allow developing countries to self-determine the reporting flexibility they need. Developing countries, with capacity constraints, can choose both how often and in what detail to report. They will also be provided support in addressing these capacity constraints.

The rules operationalising the global stocktake include information from a wide variety of sources, including non-state actors, and on the full spectrum of issues including loss and damage, equity and science, to assess collective progress towards the long-term goals of the agreement. Although quantitative indicators to operationalise equity in the global stocktake, advocated by many developing countries, proved unpalatable to developed countries, equity features prominently in the global stocktake. The political headwinds favouring national autonomy having proven impossible to resist, the rules specify that the results of the global stocktake will simply identify challenges and opportunities in relation to action and support. It will not have an “individual focus” and will only include “non-policy prescriptive consideration of collective progress”. Nevertheless, the steady flow of information on the “ambition gap” will generate its own pressure on states. The Talanoa Dialogue, the alarming IPCC 1.5°C Report, and various catastrophic climate events this year, have elicited promises from several countries that they will submit more ambitious actions by 2020.

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Finally, the rules operationalising the Paris Agreement’s facilitative compliance and implementation mechanism seek to infuse accountability and facilitate implementation. They permit a compliance committee to consider cases where countries have breached binding procedural obligations. Thus, if a state does not submit a contribution every five years or a developed country does not submit its report on provision of finance, the committee will step in. The committee can also step in if there are significant and persistent inconsistencies in reporting. However, it can do this only with the consent of the state concerned. The committee is empowered to assist the defaulting state in identifying and addressing the challenges to implementation. The committee is also authorised to identify systemic challenges in compliance and implementation faced by many parties, with a view to addressing them.

The Katowice rules — detailed, complex and science-based — seek to instil discipline and accountability in the climate regime. While far from perfect, they strike a fine balance between competing interests, create hooks for all parties to operationalise equity, and privilege the flow of information within the system. It’s now time to take the pressure off the international negotiations to set the rules, and begin the arduous process of following them. With new rules in hand, it’s finally time to begin implementing the Paris Agreement and delivering action on the ground.

Source: Indian Express, 18/12/2018

Only together can we fight climate change

With 98% urbanisation, Delhi already has the highest urban cover in India. It may be located far away from the melting glaciers and the surging seas, but it still faces the threat of climate hazards such as storms, floods, drought, heat waves, smog, groundwater depletion and outbreak of vector- and- water-borne diseases.

As global warming was hotly debated over the past two weeks in Poland’s Katowice, experts agreed that much of the responsibility of fighting climate change rested on cities that together contribute to over 70% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

A ‘Summary for Urban Policymakers’, released in Katowice last week, emphasised that changes to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius must be made not only by national governments and the private sector but also by cities and its citizens. The report sought interventions in the use of energy, land and ecosystems, urban infrastructure and industry.

With 98% urbanisation, Delhi already has the highest urban cover in India. It may be located far away from the melting glaciers and the surging seas, but it still faces the threat of climate hazards such as storms, floods, drought, heat waves, smog, groundwater depletion and outbreak of vector- and- water-borne diseases.

Studies have shown that during 1991-2013, high-temperature days in Delhi increased by 6.3 days per decade and that, since 1990, there was a consistent increase in the night temperatures in the city, leading to an overall warming. Researchers blamed rapid urbanisation and over-concretisation of land surfaces for turning Delhi into a heat island. This is aggravated by machine heat generated by vehicles, generators and air-conditioners.

After a long wait, the Delhi government says it has formulated a five-year climate change action plan, which it will soon submit to the Centre for approval. Like all other state plans, this one, too, will have to be revised next year to include the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions and the targets of the Paris Agreement. But an official involved in drafting the plan said the broad contours based on seven national missions — solar power, energy efficiency, sustainable habitat, water, greening, agriculture and strategic knowledge — will remain the same.

The biggest threat that Delhi faces, according to the official, is water stress. The NITI Aayog has already warned the city could effectively run out of groundwater by 2020. The natural sources have shrunk and the Yamuna water is over-extracted, leaving little to maintain the minimum flow required to keep the river alive.

Demand-side management and investment in recycling and reuse of water will be the key measure in Delhi’s climate change action plan, said the official. But no such plan can be complete without reviving the Yamuna, which remains the city’s best bet for long-term water security.

Methane fumes damage the climate, and according to the United Nations Environment Programme, waste reduction and management can cut global emissions by 20%. But garbage management is perhaps the most challenging aspect of Delhi’s climate action plan.

Three of the city’s four landfills ran out of space a decade ago but only one has been sealed for reclamation. In two of these, trash emits harmful methane and frequently catches fire. Landfills should anyway be the last option for waste management. Recycling reduces the trash load sent to dumpsites but is yet to take off across the city. Instead, municipalities have been installing waste-to-energy plants, which experts say, release toxic pollutants.

Coal-fired power plants are the biggest emitters of carbon dioxide. To decarbonise the grid, Delhi’s draft climate plan seeks to increase the share of renewable energy, mainly solar and wind. Right now, Delhi has only 3% of its power sourced from the renewables while at least 62% comes from coal.

Having shut down its coal-fired Badarpur plant, the government says it is making efforts to reduce dependence on older, inefficient thermal units located outside the city. It also set a target to source 18-20% of Delhi’s electricity from renewables by next year. This shift and schemes to augment local generation will be necessary to power the electric vehicles that the government aims to roll out soon.

Promotion of energy-efficient buildings, green streets and pavements, non-motorised transport and increasing tree cover etc are some of the other key priorities spelt out in the city’s climate action plan, the official said. But the real test will be on how quickly and efficiently it is implemented.

In a city where basic governance suffers due to multiple authorities, getting all agencies on board will be a task. At the same time, the plans chalked out by the neighbouring states may or may not mind or address the challenges of the National Capital Region. As we finally brace to meet the challenge, let’s remember that climate change follows no boundaries — administrative or political.

Source: Hindustan Times, 17/12/2018

Why farms of every type and size have to be climate smart

This climate impact on agriculture is a cause for worry: the sector accounts for a large share in gross domestic product (16%) and employment (49%). Poor agricultural performance can lead to high inflation, rural distress, and political restiveness, as recent rural agitations and farmer suicides have shown.

An annual review by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), a wing of the agriculture ministry, has said that crops, plantations and livestock in 151 districts, or slightly more than one-fifth of the total districts in India, are susceptible to the impact of climate change. Using data sets created by the University of Delaware and India Meteorological Department, the review projected that climate change could reduce annual agricultural incomes in the range of 15-18% on average and up to 20-25% in unirrigated areas. About 54% of India’s sown area has no access to irrigation. The report is shocking, but is in line with earlier climate warnings --- the 2018 National Economic Survey found a long-term trend of “rising temperatures” and “declining average precipitation” ---- and anecdotal evidence from farmers across the country. This climate impact on agriculture is a cause for worry: the sector accounts for a large share in gross domestic product (16%) and employment (49%). Poor agricultural performance can lead to high inflation, rural distress, and political restiveness, as recent rural agitations and farmer suicides have shown.

Even as the agriculture sector deals with this, it has to work on ways to maximise productivity, returns to farmers, and optimise the use of soil and water. To face this challenge, farms of every type and size have to be “climate smart”. A paper on ‘Climate change and Indian agriculture’ by Arvind Subramanian (Peterson Institute of International Economics), Parth Khare (University of Chicago), and Siddharth Hari (Virginia Tech Department of Economics), published in Ideas for India (IFI) outlines three policy interventions. The first is to increase irrigation cover. “The central challenge here is that this spread of irrigation needs to take place against the backdrop of diminishing ground water reserves, particularly in parts of north India,” says the authors. Second, increase research in agriculture technology to develop crop varieties and cropping techniques which are more climate-resilient. Third, rationalise subsidies (power and fertiliser) that favour the indiscriminate use of water.

While the authors don’t expand on the second, genomic profiling of Indian millet varieties such as finger millet, pearl millet and sorghum suggest that they are climate-smart crops ideal for environments prone to drought and extreme heat. The growing of climate-resilient crops needs to be encouraged, instead of providing state support for water-guzzling crops. There should also be better linkages between scientists and farmers. The latter need improved techniques to conserve soil moisture, appropriate seeds and farm inputs, and also access to short-term climate information such as weather advisories. Farmers must also have better access and control over water resources. Finally, long-term climate information must be incorporated into decision making.

Source: Hindustan Times, 19/11/2018

There’s a near total exclusion of women from decision-making on mitigating climate change

Maybe this is too much to hope for, but what a mighty leap it would be for India both economically and socially to invest in capacity and skill building for women to combat climate change

It is that time of the year when one routinely encounters people hacking and coughing in the metros, thanks to the toxic pea soup that is the atmosphere. With this come expert opinions on why this is so and how the air can be cleared. By and large, the consensus is that the poisonous air is part of climate change in progress, whether man-made or natural.

It is also the time of the year when many people are forced to stay away from work thanks to the debilitating effects of pollution or other climate-related issues. And here is where the gender factor comes into play, especially in a low income country like India. Women face a much higher risk of the ill-effects of climate change. For a start, a majority start life with nutritional deficiencies as a result of prejudices against the girl child. Climate affects health through a multiplicity of ways from extreme heat or cold, poor air quality, poor water quality and lack of food security.

All these factors are common to both genders but where women are at a disadvantage is in their lack of or limited access to healthcare. Despite commendable strides in making healthcare accessible to all, facilities in rural areas, even in many urban ones , are not geared to cater to climate-related health problems. Women do not go to clinics or hospitals due to lack of transportation, fears related to their safety, and the simple fact that their health is a low priority for the family. . Unlike educated and empowered women, rural or uneducated women who suffer pollution-related illnesses don’t even realise this. There is little public communication and awareness of this. They believe their illness is just tiredness or a fever which will pass.

Cooking indoors using wood or coal is another reason why women suffer from pollution-related ailments. In rural areas, women spend much longer inside their homes cooking with fuels which give off carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons and particulate matter all of which are detrimental to their health. Many of these pollutants affect not just the women but their unborn children as well.

Poverty plays a major role in the health of women who are forced to migrate from rural to urban areas. The homeless in cities are often forced to make do with inadequate housing or none at all leaving them vulnerable to polluted air and toxins from poor cooking or heating infrastructure.

The big problem in countries such as India is the near total exclusion of women from the decision-making process on mitigating climate change. Women are powerful vehicles of social change in many areas. Rather than a faceless bureaucrat or expert in a distant place speaking about the benefits of decreasing the impact of climate change, women who are at the greatest risk should. They should be among the key stakeholders in marrying traditional knowledge with scientific and technological inputs.

Now that it is election season and pollution and other climate change aspects are talking points, all parties have a chance to take this up as a serious development issue. Maybe this is too much to hope for, but what a mighty leap it would be for India both economically and socially to invest in capacity and skill-building for women to combat climate change. The first thing to be done should be institute mechanisms to gather data on area-specific environmental problems. Many of us think a pastoral life is conducive to clean living. It is not. The threats are different but they are there.

It is not as simple as distributing smokeless chullas which many NGOs believe to be a panacea. The answer has to come with local inputs and local knowledge. The number of work days lost and the health costs of pollution in Delhi alone, if computed, should give an idea of how short-sighted it is to let things slide once the visible signs of danger are over. The problems are clear and present all year around to millions who do not have air purifiers, masks, clean water or fuel. When it comes to cleaning up the air (and the environment), women can lead the way. They just need to be given a chance to do so.

lalita.panicker@hindustantimes.com

Source: Hindustan Times, 11/11/2018

How climate change can affect national security

As predicted, parts of the earth would become too hot to sustain life and the rising sea levels would submerge islands and low-lying coastal areas of various countries. Resultantly, the rising seas, droughts, food and water shortages will trigger large scale relocation of people both within their countries as also trans-international borders.

The recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released at Inchon, South Korea, has said that to avoid far-reaching effects of global climate change, the international community must act with greater urgency. As per its assessment, global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius between 2030 and 2052, if it continues to rise at the current rate. The planet has already warmed up by about one degree Celsius as compared to the pre-industrial age temperatures and every 0.5 degree Celsius rise in warming, portends dire consequences. The report has also underscored India’s vulnerability.

As predicted, parts of the earth would become too hot to sustain life and the rising sea levels would submerge islands and low-lying coastal areas of various countries. As a result, the rising seas, droughts, food and water shortages will trigger large scale relocation of people both within their countries as also across international borders. These movements will drive intrastate and interstate instability and future conflicts.

While the issue is being dealt with by the signatory nations to the Paris Agreement through comprehensive strategies, militaries all over the world, will have to innovate, adapt and transform to remain ready and relevant to fulfil their national security mandates in an environment beset by the perils of climate change. In the Indian context, melting of glaciers, flash floods, encroaching seas, cyclones, rising temperatures in the deserts and plains, forest fires and higher water levels in the riverine terrain will necessitate a conscious re-examination of the ways we fulfil our constitutional obligations. Our military’s peacetime locations, operational deployments, equipment profile, organisational structures, logistic sustenance, tactics, operational art and war fighting strategies will have to be revisited. Internal security management architecture, too, would require sprucing up. Since transformation in large organisations is a time consuming process, we need to act fast to think through the challenge with collective wisdom and draw up necessary road maps.

The policymakers will have to be mindful of the littoral surrounding the Bay of Bengal, which is among the most vulnerable regions of the world and can be the source of regional instability. As per the assessment of some subject matter experts, additional global warming will submerge the coastal areas in Bangladesh, Myanmar and the Indian states of West Bengal, Orissa and parts of Andhra Pradesh thus setting off large scale migration of the so called climate refugees towards India. As per Muniruzzaman, the chairman of the Global Military Advisory Council on climate change, the number of such refugees could well be around 20 million. Preventing their entry via our land borders and the coastline will be a huge challenge for the security forces. It will require a review of the border and coastline management resources along with the rules of engagement, which will require revision in the backdrop of our national policy in the 2030s. This policy will have to strike a balance between our national security interests and the humanitarian obligations.

We should strengthen the regional collaborative mechanisms as part of our national strategy on climate change. The defence cooperation between the militaries of the region should focus on creating joint parallel command structures to facilitate a synergised response in the wake of a natural or a man made calamity. These mechanisms should also be effectively interfaced with the UN agencies and other non-governmental organisations operating in the region. As an emerging great power, India should be seen leading this initiative.

We could consider raising additional ecological Territorial Army battalions with the retired military personnel to undertake the much needed afforestation in areas that have been plundered over the years by some unscrupulous elements of our society. Moreover, the retired military engineers could also be co-opted in the climate geo-engineering initiatives, when launched to remove carbon dioxide from the air and limiting the sunlight reaching the planet surface.

The IPCC report will certainly raise the awareness levels of the international community on the stark reality of climate change. Hopefully it will also urge President Trump to further tone down his obdurate stance on the issue. Incidentally, the United States had ranked second among 20 countries that were identified as major emitters of carbon dioxide by the International Energy Agency in 2015. Political will is the key to successful implementation of the Paris Agreement, which aims at ensuring the temperature levels remain below 1.5 degree Celsius. Since time is running out, all nations must remain focused in fulfilling their commitment to climate change goals.

Source: Hindustan Times, 5/11/2018