Ease of living without a clean environment is meaningless

In the last few months, the environmental status of the country has been in the news for all the wrong reasons. Delhi’s air pollution became an international incident when Sri Lankan cricketers wore face masks during the third Test against India at the Feroz Shah Kotla Stadium. Some of the players vomited on the ground due to noxious smog.

 A national action plan to combat air pollution backed with
significant budgetary allocation would have been appropriate. 

At the World Economic Forum meet in Davos, Switzerland, where Prime Minister Modi gave the opening address, a report on the environmental performance index of countries published by the Yale and Columbia Universities, ranked India as 177th out of the 180 countries. Only Burundi, Bangladesh and Congo were found worse than India.

Lastly, the Economic Survey 2018 found that climate change is now hurting Indian agriculture and farmers considerably. The survey found that the effect of extreme temperature shocks on productivity in un-irrigated areas, which account for more than half of our agricultural land, is significant. An extreme temperature shock in unirrigated areas reduces yields by 7 per cent for Kharif and 7.6 per cent for Rabi. Similarly, extreme rainfall shocks lead to 14.7 per cent and 8.6 per cent reduction in yield for Kharif and Rabi, respectively. These losses could rise significantly in the coming years as the warming level reaches 1.5 degrees Celsius in the next 10 years.

With the country in the throes of an impending crisis, one was hoping that the Finance Ministry Arun Jaitley would give due recognition to the environmental challenges in his last full budget before the general elections next year. Alas, it was a damp squib.

Read the Down to Earth story by Chandra Bhushan - “Ease of living without a clean environment is meaningless.”

Ideology again stands in the way of genuine mitigation efforts

I

deology is being employed to protect Australia’s status quo.

Under the guise of earnest effort the Abbott-coalition has done some climate change mitigation window dressing, but just today Lisa Cox and Tom Arup have written in the Melbourne about a Grattan report that declares the efforts were “designed to fail”.

The story - “Direct action's emissions safeguards 'designed to fail': Grattan Institute” – says, “Proposed safeguards to limit greenhouse gas emissions from big polluters have been designed by the Abbott government to fail, according to the Grattan Institute.”

Chaning climate will undoubtedly worsen humanity's health status

The unfolding difficulties associated with our changing climate will undoubtedly complicate, and worsen, humanity’s health status.

An organization acutely aware of those complications is the 2010 established “Climate and Health Alliance”.

The alliance is a coalition of health care stakeholders eager to see the threat to human health from climate change and ecological degradation addressed through prompt policy action.

“This commitment,” it says, “is based on the understanding that further global warming poses grave risks to human health and biodiversity and if left unchecked, threatens the future of human civilization”.

Alliance members acknowledge that they have a particular responsibility to the community in advocating for public policy that will promote and protect human health.
In advocating for policy action to prevent further global warming, the CAHA recognizes that this must include dramatic and urgent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and removal of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to restore a safe climate.

More details about the alliance can be found on its website.