Manmohan Singh’s move to declare the Ganga as the country’s first national river, for direct management by a river basin authority that he will head, is well-intended but little more than a re-enactment of what Rajiv Gandhi had done in 1984. The chief difference between the two is that while Mr. Gandhi took the initiative at the beginning of his term as prime minister, giving himself ample time to show results (which, sadly, remained elusive), Dr. Singh is doing so towards the end of his term—with hardly any time left for worthwhile action, let alone results. The new avatar of the Ganga River Basin Authority is mooted to be a fully empowered body for planning, implementing and monitoring all activities that impact the Ganga along its entire stretch of 2,510 km, form the mountains of Uttarakhand to the Bay of Bengal. The objectives are to save this vital and iconic river from dying, and restoring the purity of its water, which has degraded and become unusable for drinking, and even for bathing or washing clothes.
The timing of the move has bred some unfortunate misgivings, for it is being viewed in political quarters as a pre-poll gimmick to gain voter sympathies in the Hindi heartland, through which the river flows. Questions are being asked as to why the centre continues to delay acceding to the long-pending demand for constituting a similar body for the Brahmaputra. There is also the danger of fanning centre-state and inter-state river water conflicts, as regulating water flows is a state subject.
These misgivings may be unfounded, and little more than political conspiracy-theorising in the run-up to general elections. The real issue is whether this initiative, too, will meet the fate of the Ganga Action Plan of a quarter-century ago. That the Rs. 1,500 crore spent on that project virtually went down the drain has been confirmed by reports of the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG), as well as of the amicus curiae appointed by the Supreme Court to monitor progress. Even the initiatives taken by the apex court have achieved little, because the edicts that it has issued for closing down the tanneries around the river and for the treatment of all the sewage and industrial waste being released into it, have been futile exercises. Nearly a billion litres of untreated sewage continues to pour into the river along a course dotted with 100 towns and cities, small and big. Less than half of the major effluent-discharging industries are reckoned to have set up treatment plants, and a sizable number out of these either do not function or are sub-standard installations. The net result, as corroborated by the Central Pollution Control Board, is that the quality of Ganga water is worse now than it was in 1984. What heightens the danger to the survival of this once mighty and sparklingly clean river is the revelation that the Gangotri glacier, which is the river’s source, has been shrinking by over 18 metres a year. This makes it imperative that decisive action is taken to restore the health of this vital river. If the prime minister’s move succeeds in doing so, it will indeed be a boon for the country.
Business Standard (New Delhi), 14 Nov. 2008
‘Big Dams Can Never Solve Water Problem’
Environmentalist Sunderlal Bahuguna needs no introduction. He is the man behind the anti-Tehri dam movement and moreover the source of various environment movements. His association and contribution in spreading the historic ‘Chipko Movement’ is also highly commendable.
However, Tehri dam has been constructed and is producing electricity too. Whether Bahuguna is a defeated man after his two decade long anti-dam movement?
“No I am not, I along with numbers of common citizens and activists have been able to convey the world that big dams can never solve the water problems,” says the octogenarian environmentalist.
Bahuguna still sticks to his stance as far as Tehri dam is concerned. He underlines that the dam will never be filled and all the money and effort that is now going into it will go waste.
“Gaumukh glacier, the primary source for feeding the dam is receding. I believe that in next 20 years glaciers will vanish. What will they (authorities) do after that?” questions Bahuguna.
Getting required water level for the production of electricity has already become a major concern in Tehri, he adds.
He says that dams are neither small nor big. They just harm the environment. Bahuguna also feels constructing dams is a temporary solution of a wider problem.
“Make electricity from the natural force of river. Don’t make dams over them and just ensure there is enough water available in the rivers of Uttarakhand for power generation,” he says.
Adding that water sources are shrinking fast with glaciers melting at a rapid pace, he suggests: “Lift water from the river to the top of the hills and use it for irrigation of trees and saplings.”
Bahuguna has been for long advocating plantation of fruit bearing trees in the Himalayan belt.
“Not alone in Uttarakhand, but also in the other hill states plantation of fruit bearing trees is essential.” Trees like nuts, flowering trees, fiber trees and so on should be planted. Bahuguna sees double benefit behind growing fruit bearing trees in the Himalayas.
“They will provide fruits and other useful items like fodder and fiber for the daily needs. At the same time trees will also help in generating
natural water sources.” Bahuguna emphasizes. He is strongly against growing pine trees in hills. “It was Britons who had planted pine trees in hills and they are subsequently have become major threat for the environment of the hills. Pine sucks all the ground water resulting in drying up of natural resources. “Bahuguna is equally concerned about the migration of youths from the hill districts of the states. “Ours is a state which shares its boundary with Nepal and China. Hills are getting empty as youths are moving to plains in search of jobs. This is one more reason why I am stressing for the plantation of fruit bearing trees. Production of fruits on a large scale will give employment opportunities to the youths. This is one of the way that they can remain in their homes,” says Bahuguna.
Hindustan Times (New Delhi), 25 Nov. 2008
Wind Power Can Prevent Climate Change: Study
Wind power could produce 12 per cent of the world’s energy needs and prevent 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions within 12 years, according to a report.
The ‘Global Wind Energy Outlook 2008,’ published by the Global Wind Energy Council (GWEC) and Greenpeace International, looks at the global potential of wind power up to 2050 and found that it could avoid as much as 1.5 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year, which would add up to over 10 billion tonnes in this timeframe. The report also explains how wind energy can provide up to 30 per cent of the world’s electricity by the middle of the century.
China has the world’s fastest growing wind power market and is expected to become the biggest manufacturer of wind energy equipment by 2009-end.
Wind energy has already become a mainstream power generation source in many regions around the world and it is being deployed in over 70 countries. In addition to environmental
benefits, wind energy provides a sustainable answer to increasing concerns about security of energy supply and volatile fossil fuel prices.
It is becoming a substantial factor in economic development, providing more than 3,50,000 ‘green collar’ jobs both in direct and indirect employment. By 2020, this figure is projected to increase to over 2 million.
The existing power sector is responsible for around 40 per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions and there are only three options to reduce this by 2020 — energy efficiency, fuel switching, and renewables, predominantly wind power.
A coalition of wind companies, associations and non-governmental organisations will launch a campaign shortly to increase government action on wind energy globally. Entitled ‘Wind Power Works,’ the campaign will run for a year until the next round of climate change talks at Copenhagen in December 2009.
The Hindu (New Delhi), 3 Nov. 2008
Climate Change’s Future Impacts Predicted
Ecologists and oceanographers have predicted the future impacts of climate change by reconstructing the past behaviour of Arctic climate and ocean circulation. The research team comprised of Charles Greene of Cornell University and colleagues, who reconstructed the patterns of climate change in the Arctic from the Paleocene epoch to the present.
Over these 65 million years, the Earth has undergone several major warming and cooling episodes, which were largely mitigated by the expansion and contraction of sea ice in the Arctic.
"When the Arctic cools and ice sheets and sea ice expand, the increased ice cover increases albedo, or reflectance of the Sun's rays by the ice," said Greene, the lead author on the paper. "When more of the Sun is reflected rather than absorbed, this leads to global cooling," he added.
Likewise, when ice sheets and sea ice contract and expose the darker-coloured land or ocean underneath, heat is absorbed, accelerating climate warming. Currently, the Earth is in the midst of an interglacial period, characterised by retracted ice sheets and warmer temperatures.
The Asian Age (New Delhi), 10 Nov. 2008
Climate Change Meeting Generates Heat As Ministers Spar
A ‘clash’ of sorts broke out between Mani Shankar Aiyar, minister for panchayati raj, and Kapil Sibal, minister for science and technology and earth sciences, on Monday, over ways in which the country is dealing with climate change.
It was the national action plan on climate change, drafted after many consultations with various ministries a few months back, that was the prime focus of the debate.
The government, in June 2008, had announced the plan to deal with climate change, under which, eight missions were formed. These focused on areas like solar energy, enhancing energy efficiency, etc.
Aiyar, speaking at a seminar here, questioned the effectiveness of such action plans, as they do not involve local communities or panchayats. He stated categorically that his ministry ‘was not consulted’ for the discussion while the paper on the action plan was being formulated. “It reflects a major lacunae in what we want to do to mitigate the adverse impact of climate change on local communities,” Aiyar said.
Kapil Sibal, countering Aiyar’s views, said the purpose for setting up the eight missions was to understand and study the impact of global warming from the scientific point of view and the different missions would submit detailed implementation strategies to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in December.
“We do not know enough about the science of climate change,” he said. Sibal also added that till scientific data is collected, and the causes and impacts of climate change established, it would difficult for the government to involve panchayats or local communities in the mitigation.
Sibal also emphasised the need for developing or transferring green technologies, and said there that a lot of research and data collection has to be made before initiating mitigating strategies. “We need to marry technology with local needs as panchayats, NGOs, scientists must work in tandem for addressing the vulnerable section who would be adversely impacted by climate change,” he said.
Both the ministers were speaking at a seminar on ‘National policy dialogue on adaptation to climate change’ jointly organised by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation and the M.S. Swaminathan Foundation.
Under the Kyoto Protocol (2008-2012), ratified under the United Nation Framework Convention on Climate change (UNFCCC), India does not have any legal or binding obligation to reduce carbon emission.
A national action plan on climate change has however been formed, so that the country gradually shifts from carbon-based energy production to non-carbon based production from renewable sources.
The plan also stresses on the importance of solar energy by stating that photovoltaic cells are becoming cheaper with new technology. “The Himalayan ecosystem has 45 million people who practice hill agriculture and whose vulnerability is expected to increase on account of climate change,’ it says.
While actual data on India’s present greenhouse emissions is yet to be compiled, the present data goes back to 1994, when the per capita emission was just 0.87 tonne per person per year, which, according to an estimate, has increased to 1.1 tonne per person now. This is still very ‘low’ compared to developed countries like the US, which emits roughly 20 tonne of green house gases, and China, which emits 4 tonne.
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 11 Nov. 2008
Various cultures of the world have adopted different plants as their main food crop, or staple. However, there are some societies that eat almost entirely plants, whereas others use a substantial amount of animal-derived foods. For example in India, plants contribute 80 per cent of the dietary protein (cereals and legumes), but in the United States plants provide only 20 per cent of dietary protein. The remaining comes from animals and animal products.
The dietary differences have developed among regions, social classes and people of various religious groups. Before humans first practised agriculture, ancient hunter gathers had evolved a complex relationship with their environment. With the development of agriculture, people narrowed their food selections so drastically, that now all over the world only three cultivated plants, viz. wheat, rice, and maize make up two-thirds of the human diet. The same is true of animal protein products which are mainly pork, chicken and beef.
It may be noted that it takes three to five times as many farm resources to produce a single calorie or a gram of protein of meat or dairy product, compared to cereal grains, legumes, or tuber crops. Global meat production has increased fivefold since 1950 and in 2004 estimated production was 258 million tons. This huge production is possible only through factory farming. In China alone, there are an estimated 14,000 confined feeding operations, and about 15 per cent of its pork and chicken production comes from factory farms.
This production of meat does not come without environmental costs. The FAO has calculated that meat production accounts for nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions. Dr. R.K. Pachouri thus before proceeding to the International Meet on Climatic Change has made a powerful point that to save the world from global warming: We have to develop the habit of eating less meat. His argument that by skipping meat once a weak, the emissions can be brought down, needs credence. Obviously, eating meat does not cause emissions, but the problem lies in the production processes, huge land clearances required for ranching animals, the mounds of farm waste produced and the way feed is grown for animals.
Meat production also comes at the cost of oil as each stage of production, from growing feed to transporting and processing animals, is highly energy consumptive. Producing one calorie of beef takes 33 per cent more fossil fuel energy than producing a calorie of potatoes. Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) are operations that crowd hundreds of animals, cows, pigs or chickens, or turkeys together, with little or no access to light and fresh air and little opportunity to act naturally. This artificial environment creation themselves require large amount of energy for heating, cooking and lighting.
The CAFO waste high in nitrogen, comes largely from animal feed, or from the fertilizer used to grow it. Factory farm depends on chemical fertilizers to grow food rather the manure waste, as it can be readily shipped to corn growers and feed
corn to factory farms. In each case, the basic input is no longer produced by the landscape in which it is used for sustainable production. For example in the United States, of the total annual production of 600 million tons of waste annually, only half of it gets effectively used into the crop cycle, the remainder ends up polluting air, water and the soil itself. This raw waste, exposed to air, produces large amounts of gaseous ammonia, not only a source of immediate public health problems but also contributing to global warming. Next is methane produced during the process. Methane is sixty times more potent at capturing heat energy than carbon dioxide.
The Tribune (Chandigarh), 14 Nov. 2008
Scientist for ‘Climate Emergency’ Term
The totality of climate change’s effect on the globe are going to be drastic and the term “climate change” is “more passive” as compared to its effect. A biologist and practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, Dr. John Stanley wants “climate emergency” to replace the term climate change as the issue needs more urgent attention and mitigation measures. The scientist was speaking on the theme “Climate Breakdown at the Third Pole: Effects of Global Warming on China, Tibet and India.”
Dr. Stanley, who has published over 90 papers in international scientific journals and carried out extensive review of global warming and “climate emergency”, said the Earth will bear effects of global warming much earlier than predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
reports. Citing wild fires of California to Australian drought, the scientist said, the North Pole ice cover has reduced by over 1.2 million square kilometer in the last three decades.
He said Arctic has witnessed ice loss in summers of 2007 and 2008, which has exposed one million square miles of open ocean. He said this loss is seven decades ahead of what IPCC has predicted highlighting on glacier meltdown, Dr. Stanley said glaciers on Tibetan plateau and the Himalayas are melting at fast speed as a consequence of global warming.
He said large populations dependent on glacier-fed rivers in Asia – around 360 million on the Ganga and around 388 million on the Yangtze in China alone – will be affected.
The Asian Age (New Delhi), 18 Nov. 2008
India to Take Up Climate Change Deal with UN
India is going to take up the issue of financial package for developing nations for technology transfer at the United Nations Frame work Convention on Climate Change meeting, scheduled for December in Poznan, Poland.
India said, it is taking “convincing steps” on reducing climate change effects. India feels that there is not enough mobilisation on the issue of financial assistance to developing nations for technology transfer to which developed nations had agreed.
On Tuesday, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel, at the first Indo-German Environment Forum, said his country understands India’s stand on mandatory cuts on emissions.
The minister also warned that any effect of financial crisis on the global initiative for climate change will have serious consequences. China, which is another important player on the issue, has already warned international community not to ease up in their action against climate change in the present financial meltdown scenario.
“Financial aspect is very important… But it should be seen that multilateral commitments (on climate change) should not get diluted in anyway,” said the German environment minister who said technology transfer is important for developing nations like India and without which “international solidarity” on fight against climate change cannot be achieved.
The Asian Age (New Delhi), 19 Nov. 2008
Barack Seeks India Help on Climate
Promising a $15 billion annual catalyst investment fund to build a clean energy future, President-elect Barack Obama has sought help from countries like India to launch a “new era” of global cooperation to combat climate change.
“My presidency will mark a new chapter in
America’s leadership on climate change that will strengthen our security and create millions of new jobs in the process,” Mr. Obama said in a surprise video message to a bi-partisan Governors’ Global Climate, Summit in Los Angeles.
“Too often, Washington has failed to show the same kind of leadership. That will change when I take office.”
The Democrat, who had made climate change a major issue in his historic run for the White House, said his administration will start with a federal cap and trade system.
“We will establish strong annual targets
that set us on a course to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2020 and reduce them and additional 80 per cent by 2050,” he said.
The US will invest $15 billion annually to catalyse private sector efforts to build clean energy future, Mr. Obama said. “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking,” he said and pointed out that Washington alone can not combat climate change.
“The US cannot meet this challenge alone. It will require all of us working together.”
The Asian Age (New Delhi), 20 Nov. 2008
Govts’ Green Infra Spends Can Help Avoid Recession, Says Report
Deutsche Asset Management (DeAM) in its research report on “Investing in Climate Change” has observed that the accelerating pace of global warming will force governments to invest more in climate change mitigation and adaptation despite financial setbacks. An economic downturn offers governments across the developed world a prime opportunity to boost their spending on ‘green’ infrastructure as a stimulus to avoid severe recession.
According to the report, government regulation, including carbon pricing, traditional regulation (mandates and subsidies) and innovation policy (incentive and subsidies) are major drivers of investment opportunities in climate change. Carbon pricing, which prices the externality associated with greenhouse gas emissions, is the key, market related climate change policy.
When it comes to assessing a specific project for investors, a set of complex variables comes into play at a granular level in a specific region and market context. Aggregate level analysis, while useful, needs to be articulated to a project-level. Clean technologies are becoming broader and deeper over time. It is important to understand their stage of development for investment purposes.
For venture capitalists, driving costs down the learning curve is a key focus for any technology investment. In the long run, the most sustainable breakeven point for renewables is when they are commercially viable without subsidies, but with a carbon price regime as a de-risking backstop. The report claimed that there has been a political support for a “Low-Carbon Industrial Revolution”. Policymakers across the political spectrum have also emphasized the potential for low-carbon
prosperity.
In the US, both presidential candidates have talked about renewable energy in particular as a source of growthand job creation while the UK prime minister has stated that a low-carbon economy can be a new engine of productivity and economicgrowth.
Further, the German chancellor has argued that climate change can be a “win-win situation” if Germany invests in growing clean industries and creating new jobs. Chinese officials have underscored the importance of environmental protection in China’s development and the Indian prime minister has said that sustainable development can go hand-in-hand with India’s growth objectives. In the very long-term, the underlying climate change sectors have the potential to grow to very large scale - in the multi-trillion dollar energy, automotive and industrial markets.
Mark Fulton, DeAM’s global head of Climate Change Investment Research said, “The current crisis is making the necessity of tackling climate change an opportunity to stimulate growth through investment opportunities.”
“He adds, “Encouraging investment in renewable energy is a key focus. Energy efficiency technologies are obviously highly desirable in economies facing recession. Infrastructure stimulus can be tied directly to climate-sensitive sectors such as power grids, water, buildings, and public transport, which present a vast field for the creation of new technologies and jobs. Governments have before them a historic opportunity to ‘climate proof’ their economies as they upgrade infrastructure as a core response to any economic downturn.”
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 22 Nov. 2008
Measure Emissions to Check Climate Risks
If what gets measured gets managed, then a majority of the Indian companies have begun well to take on the climate change challenges. More than half (55 per cent) of Indian companies are maintaining either complete or partial greenhouse gas (GHG) inventory, according to the trends emerging from the FE-EVI Green Business Survey. The inference is based on the responses of 200 firms.
GHGs like carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, hydrofluorocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride cause anthropogenic or human induced global warming. Corporations use GHG inventories to track the sources of their emissions to minimise them and comply with mandatory or voluntary caps. A GHG inventory also serve as a source for baseline data for companies engaged in emission trading under Clean Development Mechanism (CDM).
While 15 per cent Indian companies claim that they have developed a complete GHG inventory, another 40 per cent say that they maintain a partial GHG inventory. Most of the
energy intensive power companies (84 per cent) claim to keep either partial or complete GHG inventory. The remaining 45 per cent organisations have not made any GHG inventory. PSUs lag Indian private sector companies and MNCs in developing GHG inventories.
Conducted by The Financial Express (FE) and Emergent Ventures India (EVI), a climate change mitigation advisory company, the survey aims to track the greening of Indian businesses, and showcase success stories for building a low-carbon economy.
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 24 Nov. 2008
It is vital to protect the fragile Himalayan region, endowed with glaciers, forests, and rich biodiversity, from climate change and other environmental risks. Otherwise, the well being of its remote communities and the conservation of life forms cannot be guaranteed over the long term. Himachal Pradesh, a verdant state with glaciers covering nearly 17 per cent of its mountains, has notified a green fund. The Himachal Pradesh Environment Fund aims to protect and conserve, to restore, mitigate and build. It will be financed by direct contribution from government-nominated sources and donations from individuals, industrialists, NGOs, associations and corporate bodies. Collection by government employees in the discharge of official duties has been barred. Since donations can come in only by way of demand draft or cheque, there is a promise of integrity and transparency. To these instructions, the state can add one more — complete reporting of the fund’s working on a website. The fund has the potential to become a trendsetter for other states, particularly regions that face creeping sea-level rise, disastrous weather events, and high levels of pollution.
Himachal Pradesh has five major perennial rivers that either originate in or pass through the state. Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal cites scientific estimates of the annual
economic value of environmental services rendered by Himachal’s environment and forests being as high as Rs. 150,000 crore. But there is reason to be concerned about the health of these resources. Studies conducted since 1990 record unusual annual rates of retreat of major Himalayan glaciers such as the Parbati, causing worry that future climate change will worsen the trend. Many glaciers feed rivers with precious melt and endow the region with high tourism value. A loss of ecology will have direct economic consequences, above all, on livelihood. Mr. Dhumal has been making the progressive suggestion that India must move to green accounting, which would mean provisioning for environmental losses while calculating the Gross Domestic Product. His government has expressed a preference for run-off river projects rather than disruptive dams and water impoundment, for solar-passive technologies, afforestation, and curbs on coal use. On top of their intrinsic virtue, these policies will help the state earn carbon credits. As an early mover on climate issues, Himachal Pradesh is an invited participant at the forthcoming summit of the Climate Group, a non-profit organisation that coordinates a coalition of governments and business leaders, in Poznan, Poland. The state must now aim for higher levels of environmental performance.
The Hindu (New Delhi), 5 Dec. 2008
To sensitise the youth with impending hazards of climate change, the British Council in partnership with The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), launched the second edition of the 'The International Climate Champions' programme. As part of this programme, 60 Indians and five Sri Lankan students will be selected as ambassadors to communicate the message of climate change and work towards mitigating its effects in India. A memorandum of understanding (MOU) was signed recently between the British Council and TERI to implement this programme.
"The International Climate Champions programme is one of the four facets of the 'Low Carbon Futures Project' that has been initiated by the British Council to reduce the scale of carbon emissions across key cities of South East Asian countries," explains Les Dangerfield, acting director, British Council, India. The other strands of this project include establishing global networks of low carbon scientists, initiating workshops where experts can exchange ideas in terms of constructing green buildings and sensitising writers, journalists and film makers so that they can effectively comprehend and communicate issues related to greenhouse/carbon emissions.
According to Dangerfield, this project mirrors the UK government's commitment to reduce green house emissions by 30 per cent in the coming decade. Incidentally the UK became the first country in the world to introduce a legally binding framework to cut greenhouse gas emissions with three major pieces of legislation - the climate change, energy and planning bills receiving Royal assent on November 26 this year.
R.K. Pachauri, director general, TERI and chair Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says, "Controlling green house emissions is one of the key challenges for combating global warming and all countries have to adopt eco-friendly and sustainable energy alternatives. However, in doing so there are a different set of challenges that developed countries and developing/emerging
countries have to contend with."
Explaining this in the context of India and UK, Pachauri says, "In UK, most of the infrastructure in terms of public amenities is already in place and is technologically advanced. Hence the challenge there is assessing the eco-friendly quotient of existing technologies and going through a phase of transition and replacement where required. However, in India, a considerable amount of infrastructure building is still in process. The challenge here is developing and implementing technology in infrastructure that is eco-friendly." Pachauri added that partnerships with developed countries would help in transferring technology to the developing world.
The Times of India (New Delhi), 8 Dec. 2008
Green Buildings to Change India’s Skyline by 2010
There will be over 1,000 green buildings dotting the Indian skyline by 2010 saving energy and environment. Already 375 buildings are under construction. Indian industry will also be a key player in the $40-billion green building material business in the world. There will be over 50,000 accredited green professionals in the country to make India a leading player in green building business and technologies.
The green building goal is set by the Indian Green Building Council (IGBC). It envisages one billion sq. ft. of green building footprint to be registered for certification by 2012, 1,000 green buildings to be registered by 2010, a major share in the $40-billion market for green building materials by 2012 and training of 5,000 IGBC accredited green building professionals by 2010.
“With a modest beginning of 20,000 sq. ft., green footprint in the country in 2003, today about 375 green building, including 77 houses, measuring over 25 million sq. ft., are being constructed all over India under the IGBC Green Homes Certification programme’’, C.N. Raghavendran, chairman, IGBC, Chennai chapter, said here on Monday. With the current growth rate, India would be one of the world leaders in green buildings and technologies, he said.
In his address at the three-day `Energy Summit 2008’ - energy efficiency in buildings, organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), he said, green buildings save up to 30 per cent to 40 per cent energy compared to other new buildings mainly through an integrated approach to design and construction. “Upon completion, these
375 buildings going green now will result in a national savings of 2 billion units of electrical energy every year, which is equivalent to Rs. 1,000 crore saved a year’’, he said.
Raghavendran said to realise the IGBC goals, all sections of the building industry must keep pace with the market growth. There was greater need for trained manpower to carry out specialised services in energy modelling and simulation of green buildings. Another crucial area was commissioning of the complex and integrated energy, water treatment, fire suppression and security systems. The skills of the people managing the facilities have to be continually upgraded, he said. K. Vasudevan, chairman, Energy Summit and director, Alstom Projects India Ltd, said, since 1994 the summit has been a biennial event with the eighth edition opening on Monday. Its primary objective was “accelerating energy efficiency in India’’. He said various studies by CII have shown that Indian industry has a energy saving potential of Rs. 20,000-crore. “The investment potential is equivalent to Rs. 40,000 crore’’, he told the Energy Summit.
Manikam Ramaswami, chairman of CII-Tamil Nadu said the Eleventh Plan energy saving target was 10,200 mw. “Large number of technological measures are needed to achieve this goal in short, medium and long-term in energy-intensive industries like aluminium, cement, ceramics, glass, pulp and paper, sugar, textile, foundry,iron and steel, fertiliser and engineering industries.
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 9 Dec. 2008
The FE-EVI Green Business Survey – 2008 will be released on December 19. Conducted by AC Nielsen-ORG MARG, the survey promises to offer an insight into the perceptions, policies and practices of corporate India in its endeavour to convert the risks of climate change into business opportunities.
This survey assesses the climate change awareness of corporate India and the gap between awareness and the follow up action. The survey questions were structured to find out how business leaders look at climate change, India’s position under the Kyoto Protocol and whether they are measuring their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to better understand impacts and challenges they may face from climate change.
To know more about the actions contemplated by Indian businesses, the survey looked for the drivers of this change and whether these are external players like regulators, investors and consumers or internal players like senior managements and employees.
The next level of questions sought to weigh climate change challenges and differentiate between physical, operational and regulatory risks and how they impact different sectors and categories of companies.
Finally, it was followed up with questions to understand how to turn climate change risks into business opportunities and find out who is shouldering the responsibility and leading from the front.
The survey covered 213 companies from the FE 500 list of 2007. The FE 500 list is a composite ranking of India’s top 500 companies by net sales, total assets, gross profits, market capitalisation, return on net worth, return on assets and return on sales. The survey is important in terms of the spread of the number of top Indian
companies interviewed.
Purposive sampling was done with a focus on energy intensive industries, which have a high level of direct or indirect GHG emissions. A quantitative questionnaire was used to collect the information from surveyed companies. The information was collected through face-to-face structured interviews with CEOs and CIOs. In some of the cases, the interview was conducted with senior executives deputed by them.
The maximum number of companies (20 per cent) was from the manufacturing sector. Another 12 per cent each were from the metals and cement and BFSI (banking, financial services and insurance) sectors. Companies from the real estate sector comprised 10 per cent of the respondents. Others belonged to pharma, services, auto, oil, gas and mining, chemicals and fertilisers.
The surveyed companies included about 70 per cent leading Indian private companies, 17 per cent multinational companies (MNCs) and 14 per cent public sector. The survey covered 17 per cent of the top 100 companies, 21 per cent top 100-300 companies and 62 per cent top 300-500 companies, as per the FE 500 list.
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 15 Dec. 2008
Year of Interlinked Food Shortages, Climate Change and Recession
No one could have predicted quite how dramatically 2008 would have ended. Even as President Bush was slashing his way through U.S. environmental protection laws, President-elect Obama appointed Nobel prize-winning Physicist Steve Chu as the next U.S. energy secretary. Chu is seen as the repudiation of everything that Bush stood for, and predicts temperatures will rise by a staggering 6.1oC by the end of the century, if nothing is done. Although it does not mean the oil age is over, if you want a sign that 2008 was a tipping point, it could not have been clearer.
But go back to the start of the year. Empty shelves in Caracas, riots in India and Mexico, and rice shortages in Dhaka, Manila, and Kathmandu. Traders in at least 12 sub-Saharan African countries were hoarding food, and soaring maize and rice prices were leading to political instability. Governments were being forced one after the other to step in to protect supplies and control the cost of bread and dairy products.
The problem, said the analysts, was a mix of climate change and extreme weather leading to poor harvests in major grain-growing countries such as Australia. But the blame was also laid on the many millions of acres of maize, wheat and other crops planted in the U.S. and elsewhere in 2007 to provide biofuels for cars rather than food for people. Catastrophe loomed, said the U.N.
It happened slowly and out of sight of the cameras, in the burgeoning cities that are becoming the new frontline of deep poverty. Proof came one week ago, when the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) reported that 2008 had seen the biggest increase in malnourished people in decades. According to its preliminary data, more than 960 million people — one in every six people in the world — now go to bed hungry, and 40 million suffered malnourishment in 2008 because of higher food prices.
This year will go down as the year of interlinked food shortages, climate change and the recession. But it was also the year when it may have dawned on governments that hell-for-leather, western fossil fuel-based, car-centred growth only ends in social and ecological disaster.
There was soaring air pollution, from transporting a record 622 million passengers, and near record loss of Amazon and other tropical forests. But climate change dominated the international agenda.
A flood of scientific papers showed Arctic ice melting faster than ever and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet close to becoming irreversible. Methane, one of the most damaging climate change gases, was found bubbling up from the Tundra and the Arctic ocean. There were record temperatures and near-record hurricane seasons, and scientists and environment groups who believed only a year or two ago that it would be possible to just about hold global temperature to a 2oC rise accepted privately that this could now be impossible.
But it also became clear in 2008 that climate change was disproportionately impacting on the poor. Subsistence farmers around the world reported a pattern of increasingly unpredictable seasons and social problems linked directly to water and higher temperatures.
In north-east Brazil, which has always been drought-prone but which has seen temperatures rise at least 1oC in only 30 years, more than 1.5 million people now cannot access enough water, and must leave home to find work in the biofuel fields in the south of the country each year. In Bangladesh, Uganda, Niger, Malawi, Nepal and elsewhere people also said that temperatures were becoming hotter and rains less and less predictable.
Another trend became apparent. Rich countries, worried about fast rising global populations and dwindling food and fuel supplies, began buying up farmland in poor countries.
In the U.K., Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said that Britain’s food supplies, which come increasingly from abroad, were over dependent on oil — a situation, he said, that “must change.”
But the most extreme admission of oncoming climate and food problems came from Mohamed Nasheed, the new president of the low-lying Maldives, who said he was looking for a new homeland, possibly in India, for the time when his country was swamped by rising seas.
The big, still unanswered question of 2008 was how far the financial, food and ecological crises were linked. The best evidence may come from a 1972 study. A group of economists and ecologists were commissioned to predict the consequences of a rapidly growing world population, rapid industrialisation in developing countries, and growing pollution. Their famous book, Limits to Growth, predicted widespread and growing hunger, oil shortages, and ecological and economic collapse by the mid-21st century if countries did not rethink economic growth.
Actually, for much of this year, it looked as if the rich world had begun to address sustainable development. Europe committed itself to generating 20 per cent of all its energy from renewables by 2020, and banned incandescent light bulbs; Britain became the first country in the world to set itself a legal target of 80 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050; and more than 70 countries now have national goals for accelerating the use of renewable energy. Businesses, U.N. agencies, U.K. politicians and many individuals all genuinely tried to reduce emissions.
Led by Britain, pressure mounted for a global trading scheme, and Gordon Brown’s forest adviser, Financier Johan Eliasch, recommended that a multibillion-dollar fund be set up to pay the owners of the world’s rainforests not to cut them down. The irony was that a separate study by the Woodland Trust found that ancient woodland in Britain was being felled at a rate even faster than the Amazon rainforest.
Clean energy took off in 2008, and climate change mitigation became an industry, backed by the world’s biggest companies. According to the banking giant HSBC, companies in the climate mitigation business now generate $300b in revenues each year. Last month, the International Energy Agency predicted that renewable energy would overtake natural gas to become the second largest source of power generation worldwide within two years, and that global wind and solar generating capacity would increase by more than 30 per cent.
The energy revolution that had been predicted to start after 2015 appeared to be well under way. Architect Norman Foster designed Masdar, a car-free, solar- powered ecotopia for 40,000 people in the Arabian desert. Sheikh Khalifa Bin Zayed Al Nahyan, Abu Dhabi’s ruler, was so impressed he ordered two, at $15b each.
In mid-summer, with oil at over $130 a barrel and government-level talk of oil supplies “peaking,” there was concern that the price could top $200 a barrel. As people rushed to buy smaller cars, fit better boilers and get into wind and solar power, it seemed possible that the constant rise of emissions might genuinely be reversed. Yet by this month, the global economy was crashing its gears, and oil had dropped to under $40 a barrel.
Whether the world weans itself off oil and fossil fuels will probably determine global sustainability over the next 20 years. Low oil prices traditionally push energy efficiency off the policy agenda. Economic recessions have punctured green economic bubbles in the past. When times are tight, the wisdom goes, no one invests in new or risky technologies, and countries stick to cheap and dirty energy.
That was happening in part by the end of 2008. Plummeting demand for recycled materials, especially in China, has drastically lowered prices for old paper, plastic and metals. U.S. and European cities were forced to scale back recycling programmes. Meanwhile, South Africa decided this month that it could not afford “clean” nuclear power stations and plans to increase massively its cheaper but dirtier coal-burning stations. Britain, too, went ahead with plans for more opencast mines.
A more optimistic group of people say the recession may not only check unsustainable growth but also provide breathing space for the world to move to more sensible policies. Governments, said leading greens, have a historic opportunity to “climate proof” their economies in response to economic troubles. Obama and Gordon Brown both said that millions of jobs could be created in green building, wind power, solar thermal and other green technologies.
They were backed by energy gurus such as Amory Lovins, co-director of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Environmental Analyst Lester Brown, who argued that the needs to deal with both climate change and energy security have set renewable
energy on a path that cannot be reversed. The consensus is that 2008 was volatile and dangerously unpredictable. But if governments don’t change, it may come to be seen as a calm before the storm.
The Hindu (New Delhi), 18 Dec. 2008
This week when climate change negotiators from across the world meet in the city of Poznan in Poland for the 14th conference of parties to the climate convention, they have a tough job on hand. They know that the threat of climate change is real and urgent. They also know that combating this threat will require deep and drastic cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, which after years of protracted negotiations have not happened. In fact, between 1990 and 2006, carbon dioxide emissions of the industrialised rich countries have increased by 14.5 per cent. In this situation, the only option is to point fingers at the emerging rich countries — from China to India — and to blame their growing industries for the crisis before us.
The question is how does the world move forward? The first agenda in Poznan is, how the world will recommit the industrialised world to serious reduction of its emissions. We need action, hard and fast, not just excuses and small change.
Climate change is about sharing growth between nations and people. It is about creating ecological space. And clearly, this has not happened till date. Forget historical emissions. Between 1980 and 2005, the total emissions of just one country—the US—were almost double that of China and more than seven times that of India. In per capita terms, the injustice is even more unacceptable, indeed immoral. We have seen no real change. No change that we can believe in.
It is here that Poznan must agree to cut to the chase. And not waste more time in finding every way to circumvent the core principles of the climate change agreement — that the rich must reduce so that the poor can grow. This is when the developing world, at the last conference of parties held in Bali, agreed to take on national actions to mitigate emissions. We know that countries like India and China provide the world the opportunity to avoid additional emissions. The reason is that we are still in the process of building our energy, transport or industrial infrastructure. We can make investments in leapfrog technologies so that we can avoid pollution.
We also know it is not in our interest to first pollute and then clean up; or be inefficient and then worry about saving energy. But we also know
that high-end technologies needed for energy efficiency and transition to low-carbon futures are costly. It is not as if China and India are bent on first investing in dirty and fuel-inefficient technologies. We invest in these, as the now rich world has done: first add to emissions; make money; then invest in efficiency. We can change this pathway. But the world must give real change. Change we can believe in.
So the second agenda at Poznan, is to agree how the national mitigation actions by developing countries will be financed and how high-end technologies for big-ticket changes will be transferred. The options are clear. The world should either set up a global trading system based on equal per capita entitlements of every individual. Or agree on a carbon tax (one which hurts) on the developed world, so that the fund can pay for national actions to mitigate emissions including avoiding emissions from deforestation.
The third agenda is to agree on the fund for adaptation, based not on charity, but the right to development of the poor and the victims of climate change. It would be pathetic if the same world, which has spent trillions to bail out its banks and industry, cannot find ways to compensate the victims of its excesses.
Poznan is coming at more significant times — the US election, which has brought in a new president, who has committed in a recent conference to his recalcitrant and renegade country taking on real emission cuts. US President-elect Barack Obama has said that he will bring US emissions down to 1990 levels by 2020. That still means no drastic emission cuts — something that is desperately needed — but much more than what the world was getting from the US till date. But this is also when the world is facing a recession. On one hand, the r-word brings some relief to climate change targets as countries cut fossil fuel use. It also brings the opportunity to use the massive public spending on building a new and different economy. But the reality is that it also brings out even more of the worst, the rich world’s unwillingness to pay for its excesses and to pay for ways to avoid emissions in the emerging world.
But Poznan should also be clear that it is also when the time for postponement is over. It is now or never.
Business Standard (New Delhi), 5 Dec. 2008
In Poznan, Rich Nations Want Emission Reduction Target for Developing Ones
After more than a week of commencement of mega meet on mitigating adverse impact of climate change currently being held in Poznan, Poland, the negotiations has narrowed down to solely on the agenda of getting the emerging economies like India, China and Brazil to take up commitment to reduce carbon emission rather than the developed countries, which are main carbon emitters.
Amidst global financial crisis mostly threatening economies of developed nations, more than 10,000 delegates representing governments, industry associations are discussing host of issues mostly revolving around building global consensus on climate change mitigation prior to the next mega meet scheduled in Copenhagen in December 2009.
“There is hardly any progress in arriving at any consensus on global reduction of carbon emission as rich nations are working extra time to force the emerging economies to commit cut on carbon emission while the advanced countries want to buy carbon credit at a cheap rate and without any domestic carbon reduction,” an Indian delegate attending the 14th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change(UNFCC) being held in Poznan told FE.
The Poznan meet was seen as critical to fight issues arising out of climate change as the countries are for the first time moving towards a ‘negotiating mode’ following the Bali Action Plan, which categorically stated that climate change was real and imminent.
As per the US Department of Energy figure of 2007, during 1980 – 2005, the total emissions of the US were almost double that of China and more than seven times that of India. With just 15 per cent of the world population, rich countries account for 45 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions.
Not only the governments of the developed world are pushing them to taking emissions cuts, the NGOs from the North are also doling out new proposals to lure developing
countries. Environmental Defense Fund, an US based NGO, has come out with a proposal to ‘reward’ developing countries who take voluntary commitments to reduce emissions.
“There is no talk about the un-kept promises of emission reduction by the Annex 1 or developed countries,” an official with Ministry of Environment and Forest said. With two more days to go, hectic negotiations are expected for arriving at some kind of commitment on global carbon reduction strategy.
Representatives from India initiated discussion cautiously on the challenges of maintaining high economic growth while maintaining low per capita energy intensity and low carbon intensity compared to developed countries.
“The current low carbon baseline in India is not driven by sustainable development plan but its low income and low energy paradigm of its economy that is already threatened to undergo massive change,” P.R. Shukla, an expert on climate change issue from Indian Institute of Management, Ahemedabad said in the meet.
As India pushes for ‘equitable’ global sharing of carbon space while dealing with negotiations on climate change mitigation, the message from the developed countries were to rethink development to avoid carbon intensive growth in Asia.
The Chinese delegation, which presented a paper on ‘Carbon budget for equity and sustainability’ stated that there is no space in the world for luxurious and wasteful emissions and to provide for geophysical needs of the world.
Under Kyoto Protocol (2008-2012) ratified by the UNFCCC, India does not have a legal or binding obligation to reduce carbon emission.
However, the United States, the biggest polluters or carbon emitter continue to state that emerging economies like China, India, Brazil and South African must also take action on reducing carbon emission.
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 11 Dec. 2008
Massive Deforestation Leading to Climate Change, Species Loss
Deforestation is leading to close to 20 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, which in turn are leading to climate change and possible extinction of 20-30 per cent of all species on Earth. Negotiators at the Dec 1-12 summit of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in this western Poland city are struggling to find money for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) in a post-2012 climate deal.
If they do manage to find a significant sum of money, the Carbon and Biodiversity Demonstration Atlas produced by the World Conservation Monitoring Centre (WCMC) of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) will come in very handy indeed.
“At a time of scarce financial resources and economic concerns, every dollar, euro or rupee needs to deliver double, even triple dividends,” said UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director Achim Steiner.
“Intelligent investment in forests is a key example where climate benefits and ecosystem benefits can be achieved in one transaction,” he said.
Produced with support from the German government and the Humane Society International, the atlas maps those places that contain major species concentrations and where efforts to stop deforestation will produce maximum benefit.
UNEP spokesman Nick Nuttall said, “The research gives preliminary indications of where investments in reducing emissions from deforestation can not only assist in combating climate change, but can also help the conservation of biodiversity, from amphibians and birds to primates,”
India’s Western Ghats are among the hotspots identified in the atlas.
“By pinpointing where high densities of carbon overlap with high levels of biodiversity, the atlas spotlights where governments and investors can deal with two crises for the price of one. This does not include the other benefits from investing in forests ecosystem infrastructure, from stabilising soils to conserving and boosting local and regional water supplies,” Steiner said. The atlas includes regional as well as national maps for six tropical countries showing where areas of high carbon storage coincide with areas of biodiversity importance. It also shows where existing protected areas are high in both carbon and biodiversity.
The Earth’s terrestrial ecosystems store an estimated 2,000 billion tonnes (Gigatonnes) of carbon (GtC) in the biomass above ground and in the soil, with a significant proportion of this in the tropics.
The tropical Andes, for example, is the richest and most diverse biodiversity hotspot in the world while the Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest continuous rainforest area, hosts an estimated quarter of the world’s terrestrial species. High biodiversity areas within the tropical Andes and Amazon account for 11 per cent of the total carbon stock in the area the experts call the neotropics. In tropical Africa over 60 per cent of the high biodiversity areas are in high carbon areas and contain a total of 18 billion tonnes of carbon.
Employing the techniques used in then atlas would make it possible to identify where areas of high carbon density and high density of great apes overlap, in order to find where REDD investment could also benefit great ape conservation.
The national maps in the atlas illustrate different ways of identifying areas of biodiversity importance and their overlaps with high carbon areas. In Tanzania, key biodiversity areas contain 17 per cent of the country’s carbon stock. Vietnam’s protected areas cover 32 per cent of the land area that has been identified as having high values for both carbon and biodiversity, demonstrating the potential value of the protected area system for meeting both carbon and biodiversity goals.
In Papua New Guinea the map illustrates how the centre of the country, which is high in biodiversity, also contains areas of large areas of high carbon stock. It also shows that existing protected areas overlap with only 14 per cent of the high carbon areas. “Nature has spent millions of years perfecting carbon capture and storage in forests, peatlands, soils and the oceans while evolving the biodiversity that is central to healthy and economically productive ecosystems,” said Steiner.
Barney Dickson, head of the Climate Change and Biodiversity Programme at WCMC, said that the new maps are just a first step towards demonstrating how combining different types of data, with relatively simple techniques, can help to identify areas where opportunities and benefits overlap for storing carbon and protecting biodiversity. His team has used global datasets and biodiversity priorities for this demonstration atlas. These could be improved by using national level data, “Decisions to reduce emissions at the national level need to be made against national priorities and with the best national data on carbon stocks and biodiversity,” Dickson said. Such decisions will also need to account for specific pressures that can lead to environmentally destructive changes in land use, such as clearing forests for pasture or growing crops for biofuels, he added.
The Pioneer (Dehradun), 9 Dec. 2008
The global negotiations, under way in Poznan (Poland) on working out a successor to the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change that expires in 2012, have been strategically mistimed, and it would be a surprise if they delivered any satisfactory build-up to the final Copenhagen conference scheduled for a year from now. The backdrop is that the record of the rich countries since Kyoto has been poor—instead of cutting back on emissions, using 1990 as a base year, they have increased emissions by about 15 per cent. The long-term goals now being talked about, for 2050, do not have proper milestones marked for intervening years, even as efforts continue to move away from the two fundamental principles of equal per capita entitlement and polluter-must-pay. The timing of the conference is another negative, because the US, which as the world’s largest polluter has to play the key role in any post-Kyoto emission reduction programme, is in transition with a new administration waiting to take charge. Many other countries, adversely hit by the economic crisis as they are, are wary of making concrete commitments at this stage.
President-elect Barack Obama has proposed plans for curbing greenhouse gas emissions, and this marks an important departure for a country that had chosen to walk away from the Kyoto agreement. Mr. Obama’s offer to cut US emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, and to reduce them further by 80 per cent by 2050, is an improvement on whatever President Bush would have put on the table, but it is also not good enough. Had the US participated in the Kyoto effort, it would have had to resort to a cut of 7 per cent from the 1990 level, by 2012, whereas Mr. Obama is now offering the 1990 level by 2020—or a significant slide back from the Kyoto target in terms of both target year and level of pollution.
The issue of funding clean development efforts is clouded by the economic downturn. Going by UN estimates, the developing countries will need at least $300 billion annually to support their clean development. That kind of money is a pipedream; even the climate change adaptation fund, set up last year, is virtually a non-starter so far. Since a part of the financial burden will have to be borne by the polluting industry, the corporate sector has
become circumspect. That explains why over 150 global investors and companies have chosen to circulate a joint statement at the Poznan meet, drawing attention to the economic impact of climate policies on their costs and investments.
The Poznan talks can, at best, dwell on issues of a technical nature without taking concrete decisions, and that is what seems to be happening. Contentious issues like emission reduction targets, financing mechanisms and technology transfer will have to wait for subsequent deliberations. Countries like India and China, on which the developed countries want to impose mandatory emission cuts, too, can do little more than re-state their well-articulated on all these issues. The only real purpose that Poznan can hope to serve is to come up with a more efficient alternative to the carbon trading-based clean development mechanism, and an acceptable system of technology transfer to the developing countries.
Business Standard (New Delhi), 11 Dec. 2008
A New Climate Deal Based on Human Progress and Justice
The Kyoto Protocol ends in 2012 and the global community must decide on a new agreement in Copenhagen 2009. A preparatory meeting is taking place in Poznan, Poland (December 1-12). It is a very important meeting since it must pave the way for the agreement that we all hope to reach next year in Copenhagen. This agreement probably represents the world’s last chance to bring climate change under control before it is too late.
But as the United Nations gathers the world’s environment ministers in Poznan, the economic underpinnings for a muscular new treaty appear shakier than ever. The executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, Yvo de Boer, recently said in an interview that, “yes things have changed but I don’t think anyone will show the stupidity to focus on the short term and ignore the long-term issue because these decisions will be with us for 30 years.” This statement also reflects the position of U.S. President-elect Barack Obama and the European Union. Both players have vowed to stick to commitments to cap emissions of carbon dioxide, arguing that government action and investing in new green technologies and renewable energy is a sustainable way to stimulate the economy and create new jobs, i.e. smart growth.
We have engaged as co-chairs in the climate initiative “Road to Copenhagen” which is an open and web-based network that calls not only for smart growth but for climate justice. We have committed to this initiative because we believe that the climate debate, and a new treaty, needs a more stringent focus on the human and social implications of climate change.
Most of the expected 2.6 billion rise in global population by 2050 will come from the poorest regions in the world. These are regions which have no convergent economic growth, are the most unstable politically and will be the hardest hit by climate change. Jefferey Sachs speaks about the paradox of a unified global economy and a divided global society where the poverty trap is self-reinforcing, not self-corrective. It is an alarming trajectory which constructs a “sustainability gap” that must be addressed. It is clear that we will not be able to mitigate climate change unless we address poverty.
Climate change is happening now. We can see that the poorest people and countries, those least responsible, are and will be hardest hit. For example, Africa as a continent is responsible for 3.8 per cent of global CO2 emissions yet the impact of climate change will be unfairly devastating.
The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimates that adaptation costs for developing countries are in the tens of billions per annum — by 2050 they will amount to $86 billion a year. Absorbing the climate change impacts will hamper achievement of many of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), including those on reducing poverty and child mortality and combating HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases.
At best, one per cent of the resources required is currently available via the levy on the Clean Development Mechanism. Therefore, in order to ensure climate justice and meet the MDGs, we need to develop innovative ways for capacity building and technology transfer. More importantly, we need ensure that the funds available for adaptation measures in developing countries are fair and proportionate — clearly reflecting the “polluter pays” principle, respecting human rights frameworks and gender equality, i.e. climate justice.
Prevention is better than cure. Acting early makes sense not least from an economic point of view. According to the 2007/2008 Human Development Report issued by the UNDP, every U.S. dollar invested in pre-disaster risk management in developing countries can save $7. Hence, industrialised countries must take strong and immediate steps to increase assistance to the least developed countries for adaptation.
While mitigation is global, adaptation is local. This is why a new climate agreement must place adaptation on equal footing with mitigation. Furthermore, it must address the issue of climate justice and human rights in a development perspective.
Ultimately, achieving sustainability and a low-carbon economy will not only depend on technological innovation, but will require far ranging social and political innovation. Let us not forget that technology does not have the ability to eliminate poverty, respect human rights, ensure gender equality, stop climate change and build a sustainable society — people do. That is what the initiative Road to Copenhagen is about — and the agreement in Copenhagen must be about — climate justice for all peoples. The Nobel peace prize laureate Wangari Mathai puts it very simply: “there can be no sustainable development without an equitable development; and there can be no equitable development without gender equality.”
The Hindu (New Delhi), 12 Dec. 2008
Climate Meet Begins Amid Distrust
The high-level segment of the 14th meet of the UN Climate Convetion (COP-14) began on Thursday in the background of distrust and suspicion that has dogged this meeting from day one.
Though UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon began the plenary session by calling for a Green New Deal, his middle approach, urging industrialized countries to deliver and coaxing the developing world to limit the emissions, showed there might not be light even at the end of Copenhagen next winter. Hoping that the new US administration would deliver and EU would resolve its internal differences, Moon praised India, China and Brazil for their efforts in greening their economies.
The only positive outcome, if one can call it, has been the resolve of all parties to reach an agreement at Copenhagen. Otherwise, all eyes are trained on Brussels where EU heads of state and government are meeting to devise a common climate change policy till 2020. With the fight within the group being played out in Poznan, a historical city in Poland it remains to be seen if EU unambiguously commits to a binding 30 per cent reduction target by 2020.
Delegates from various countries, including India, point out that in the past 10 days,
the developed world has done nothing except avoiding commitment of any kind and looking for new reasons to justify why it is hard for them to reduce emissions.
On the sidelines, G-77-China held a separate meeting on the contentious adaptation fund. The group saw an overwhelming view that the World Bank should not be made custodian of the fund which would defeat the `one-nation, one-vote' principle by allow the World Bank donor countries to have the last word in the disbursement of fund.
Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, chairperson of the UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues and one of the most vocal critics of World Bank's role in climate change, said, "World Bank is the most undemocratic organization. Putting the climate fund under it would mean taking away the consensus principle that governs climate change negotiations."
In the absence of Indian Minister Namo Narain Meena, Environment Secretary Vijai Sharma would be speaking in the plenary on Friday.
The Indian delegation is satisfied with the outcome so far. India's climate change plans and programme have been appreciated and noted. The country has also managed to get its position on forestry endorsed.
The Times of India (New Delhi), 13 Dec. 2008
European Union Agrees on Climate Package
European Union leaders reached a unanimous agreement on an ambitious climate change package at the end of a two-day summit in Brussels today, French President Nicolas Sarkozy said. “It is quite historic what has happened here,” Summit Chairman Sarkozy told a press conference.
“No continent has given itself such binding rules that we have adopted with unanimity.” The EU’s climate-energy package, the “20-20-20” deal, seeks to decrease greenhouse gas emission by 20 per cent by 2020, make 20 per cent energy saving and bring renewable energy sources up to 20 per cent of total energy use.
Sarkozy said that the targets had not been watered down during the negotiations amid calls by several states for amendments to the initial package at a time of recession.
“The objectives remain the same,” said Sarkozy. “No way can the (economic) crisis be used as an excuse not to move on the environment.” European Commission President Joze Manuel Baroso said the agreement showed that the 27- nation bloc was serious about tackling global warming. These are the most ambitious proposals anywhere in the world,” he said.
“Europe has today passed its credibility test. We mean business when we talk about climate.”
Baroso said the recent election of Barack Obama as US president offered a chance for a joint effort between Europe and the world’s biggest economy to combat global warming.
We are asking him to join Europe and with us lead this global effort,” he said.
The Tribune (Chandigarh), 13 Dec. 2008
Poor Nations to Get Funds to Fight Climate
Negotiators at a U.N. climate conference broke through red tape and freed up millions of dollars to help poor countries adapt to increasingly severe droughts, floods and other effects of global warming.
"This could be the one thing to come out of Poznan," said Kit Vaughan of WWF-Britain.The decision in the final hours of the two-week conference could begin to release some $60 million within months, according to delegates and environmentalists following the closed-door talks.
"This is an important step," said Delegate Mozaharul Alam of Bangladesh. Alam said ministers and senior delegates from dozens of countries decided to give a blocked fund's governing board the authority to directly disburse money to developing countries for projects to reduce greenhouse gases.Until now, the UN-backed Adaptation Fund board could not operate as its board had no right to approve and sign those contracts.
The fund is derived from a 2 per cent levy on offset investments that industrial nations make on green projects in the developing world. The negotiators have been discussing ways to ramp up the fund into the billions.
The agreement was one of the few concrete goals the delegates set for Poznan when the talks began on December 1. Delegations from 190 countries are negotiating a new climate change pact, to be completed next December in Copenhagen, to succeed the Kyoto Protocol when it
expires in 2012.
Former US Vice President Al Gore, who shared last year's Nobel Peace Prize for raising awareness of climate change, urged the conference to stay focused on the task of reducing global carbon emissions that have already begun to change the conditions of life on Earth.
Winning cheers and ovations, Gore called on heads of state to convene several climate change summits over the next 12 months to spur on the talks ahead of the crucial meeting in Copenhagen. This challenge "affects the survival of human civilization," Gore said. "We cannot negotiate with the facts, we cannot negotiate with the truth about our situation, we cannot negotiate with the consequences of unrestrained dumping of 70 million tons of global warming pollution.
"There is still time to rescue the minimum acceptable outcome from Poland, but we need to ensure that in 2009 we hit the ground running," said Julie-Anne Richards of Oxfam, a British-based humanitarian agency.
The conference marks the midway point in a two-year negotiating process begun last year in Bali, Indonesia, to reach a new treaty in December 2009. Progress has been slowed as negotiators wait for the new and more climate-friendly government of President-elect Barack Obama to take over from the outgoing Bush administration, which is to happen in the third week of January next year.
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 14 Dec. 2008
Summing up what many scientists, environmentalists and politicians now think about the threat of climate change is simple: the world is drinking in the last chance saloon.
Time is still available to tackle the warming of the atmosphere, which every government (including that of George Bush) today accepts is real, and being caused by human actions. But the window of opportunity is rapidly closing, and the last chance for the world to act in concert to bring the process under control is clearly visible: it is the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen scheduled for December 2009.
The international community will meet to try to agree a new global deal to cut rising emissions of greenhouse gases – the waste gases from industry and transport, principally carbon dioxide, which are retaining the sun's heat in the atmosphere and causing temperatures to rise.
But, if such a deal is not achieved in Denmark, many observers feel it will be too late subsequently to stop climate change causing devastating problems for the world in general and human society in particular, from the widespread failure of agriculture to the swamping of low-lying countries by sea-level rise.
This week, in the Polish industrial city of Poznan, a dress rehearsal for Copenhagen is taking place. Diplomats and officials from every member state of the United Nations have come together to shape the outline of next December's agreement – or at least, to try. For it would be difficult enough to get 150-plus delegations, each with its own domestic pressures and national interests, to agree on the colour of an orange, never mind what, if it is successfully negotiated, will probably be the most complex treaty the world has seen.
Who is to do what? That's the simple, but fantastically difficult question at the heart of everything. Most of the excess CO2 (above normal historical levels) currently in the atmosphere was put there by the rich developed countries such as the USA, Britain, Germany and Japan, in the two centuries since industrialisation began, and particularly in the years since the end of the Second World War when economic growth shot forward so dramatically. But developing countries such as China, India, Indonesia and Brazil are rapidly catching up, and it is probable that China, for example, with its exploding economy growing at 10 per cent a year, has overtaken the USA to become the largest CO2 emitter in the world.
So who is more to blame? How are we to balance what is known in the jargon as the burden-sharing? How are we to divide up the pain? (For cutting carbon emissions out of your economy is costly and may restrict your economic growth.) Can China cut less CO2 than the US, even if it is emitting more? Will the USA even be willing to make cuts under those circumstances?
The first world climate treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, signed in 1997, recognised that nations had "common but differentiated" responsibilities and so it committed the industrialised countries, including Britain and the rest of the European Union, the USA and Japan, to making fairly modest reductions in their CO2 by 2010, while the developing countries, led by China, began to monitor their emissions, but were not obliged to cut them. But Kyoto ran aground. Never mind that few nations (Britain being a rare exception) will meet their modest Kyoto targets. George Bush withdrew the US in 2001 and robbed it of its significance; without the world's biggest polluter involved, Kyoto ceased to mean anything.
What is to be negotiated at Copenhagen is a successor treaty to Kyoto, and it is clear what that must involve, if it is to succeed. First, all the major industrialised countries, including America, must agree a programme of deep cuts in their emissions. They have to lead the way.
Second, the developing countries, led by China, have to do something in terms of reducing their emissions- they cannot simply continue with business as usual.
Third, there will have to be new flows of funds from the rich nations to the developing countries, to help them take action, both to cut their emissions and to protect themselves against the effects of climate change which will be unavoidable such as sea-level rise.
And fourth, there may have to be a special agreement to protect the world's forests, which lock up a vast amount of the Earth's carbon.
If such a deal is eventually done, it will be close to the wire; it will be behind closed doors in Denmark, brokered at the last minute between pragmatic and powerful people. The original Kyoto agreement was reached in this way, in the early hours of the morning. An important player was Al Gore, who was then the US Vice-President (and who has since gone on to become, with his film An Inconvenient Truth, the world's single most influential voice on climate change). Another was Britain's John Prescott, who then combined the jobs of Deputy Prime Minister and Environment Secretary – Kyoto was probably his finest hour. Perhaps the key player was the Argentine Raul Estrada, chairman of the central negotiating committee, who rescued the talks when they seemed on the brink of collapse.
Such figures will be necessary in Copenhagen. One of them will almost certainly have to be Chinese. But, towering above them all is one new figure: Barack Obama. The President-elect has already made it clear he sees tackling global warming as a priority, and he will reverse George Bush's obstructionism and fully re-engage with the talks. The election of Mr. Obama was like an electric shock: it changed the dynamic and meant a deal was possible; if the USA were to take a leading role, it would mean it was very possible. Britain's new Energy and Climate Change Secretary, Ed Miliband, who is taking part in the Poznan talks this week, wants a leading role for Britain, although the UK position, of course, is part of the position of the European Union.
Therein lies a difficulty, as the EU is presently trying to finalise its own energy and climate package – with some difficulty. This aims ambitiously at member states providing 20 per cent of their energy requirements from renewable sources by 2020, and cutting 20 per cent of EU carbon emissions by the same date, if no global climate deal is achieved at Copenhagen – and 30 per cent if a global deal is achieved. Some member countries, principally Poland, Italy and the Czech Republic, are unhappy with this, and it is possible that European heads of government may have to secure their adhesion by watering it down.
This possibility worries environmentalists and other observers in Poznan, who were hoping that if the EU set a forceful example, a very positive statement about the way forward to Copenhagen might be agreed by the end of the week. Another worry is that the Obama effect is not yet being felt: remember that it remains the Bush Administration until the new president is inaugurated on 20 January. It is possible that the Poznan declaration may not be as positive as many would like.
But what cannot be disregarded is the pressure of the science, which gets more ominous. "The world desperately needs an effective equitable global deal to be secured in Copenhagen next year, and Poznan fires the starting gun on that process," said Robin Oakley, head of climate and energy for Greenpeace UK.
"At the moment, we are heading for
something like four degrees of temperature rise, which would be catastrophic," said Ed Matthew, head of Climate Change for Friends of the Earth. "We are running out of time."
The Statesman (New Delhi), 14 Dec. 2008
Global Finance Leaders Unveil New Climate Change Principles
Five global financial institutions have come together to guide best practice for the sector to address climate change risks and opportunities. Crédit Agricole, HSBC, Munich Re, Standard Chartered and Swiss Re have joined hands with The Climate Group, an international NGO, to launch The Climate Principles.
The initiative will seek to guide responses to climate change risks across financial products and services including research, asset management, retail banking, corporate banking, insurance and re-insurance, investment banking and project finance. It will also guide the commitments on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission reduction.
The aim is to encourage retail banks to enable customers take action to become climate friendly and insurance institutions to inform clients on climate risks and mitigation technologies. Financing solutions for investment in low-carbon technologies are expected to come from corporate and investment banks. Investment banks will also get leads to create an enabling environment for emission trading, weather derivatives, renewable energy credits and other climate related commodities. Project financiers will be asked to pursue disclosure of GHG emissions and offset solutions.
The initiative will complement the existing initiatives by stimulating environmental rigour, standardising responses, pitching for transparency and pushing the debate and practices forward. The aim is to formulate responses to emerging challenges and follow up with the financial sector on its existing commitments on climate change.
It's understandable because the founding
members of The Climate Principles are already on a environment friendly path. For example, HSBC went carbon neutral in 2005. The bank is also following the Principles of Responsible Investment, the Equator Principles and the UN Global Compact. Its other climate friendly initiatives include Climate Partnership, Global Environment Efficiency Programme, Climate Confidence Index 2007, Global Climate Change Benchmark and Climate Change Fund,
Crédit Agricole is already taking measures to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, following its carbon footprint assessment. Customers are also offered commercial products for investing in cleantech. The top French banker is also involved with Responsible Investment Principles, the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Institutional Investors Group on Climate Change.
Some of them are also on top of the current climate change debate. Munich Re is a pioneer in climate change research. The leading global reinsurer submitted a proposal for an insurance mechanism to help poor people adapt to climate change related risks at the recent UN climate change summit in Poland. (Read below what the founding members said at the launch.)
Going forward, the founding members of The Climate Principles have their task cut out. One of the first tasks is to expand the membership base. It will be led by the steering committee, chaired by HSBC’s Francis Sullivan. The secretariat of The Climate Principles will be hosted by The Climate Group, which works with governments and companies to seek climate change solutions and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy.
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 15 Dec. 2008
Think Globally: But Act Locally
These are some of the issues that are crucial in the present context and the sustenance of future generations. To begin with Dr. R.S. Tolia, chief information commissioner, observes, "The country faces an uphill task of not only convincing the global community but even environmentalists in the country about the feasibility of the National Action Plan on Climate Change."
He particularly focuses on what each state should do in general and how Uttarakhand should respond to this global challenge, contributing whatever is possible through its state apparatus, various institutions and individual citizens.
"The action agenda consists of as many as eight missions and of these as many as six have a direct bearing on Uttarakhand. First in promoting sustainable habitats great care has to be taken to enforce land-use laws and regulations and our Bhagirathi River Valley Authority and its extended application has to be immediately put in place as totally unregulated development of numerous valley systems on the one hand and near absent enforcement mechanism in the so called regulated areas have already become a matter of grave concern. Instead of holding workshops and seminars showing concern, time has come to ask questions as to how existing laws are being regulated and enforced. It is questionable how the so called master plans are being postponed. Here again sheer lack of will is the villain of the piece."
Another important observation he makes concerns the preservation of glaciers. Tolia states that it is the states concerned, where these are located, who should be the prime movers and not merely the scientific institutions involved in the study of the recession of the glaciers, "Excepting the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology and now perhaps to some extent the GBP Himalayan Institute of Environment and Development, no other state apparatus seems to be either concerned or involved. Isn’t it time that a set-up like the Uttarakhand Council of Science and Technology (UCOST) be made the nodal agency to coordinate at the state level whatever needs to be coordinated and they prepare a status paper on action to be taken at Uttarakhand level and also network the efforts which might be contemplated? Climate change is a challenge that can be addressed best through advance action, effective networking for adaptation rather than the usual post-event knee-jerk action."
The other mission that he talks about includes water resource management, protecting mountain eco-system, improving eco-system services and making agriculture more resilient and adaptable to climate change. He adds: "It is ironical that even though mountains are seen as the water towers of the world, the availability of water is most scarce in the state that gives to India mighty rivers
such as the Ganga and the Yamuna. The on-going dilly dallying on SWAP both at the policy level and praxis has resulted in loss of precious time. No longer can we shy away from policy reforms in the water sector," he warns.
Tolia points out that it was Uttarakhand that had presented in a forceful memorandum to the Finance Commission that considerable amount be earmarked for forest management to various states. Now this issue requires to be further projected with the next Finance Commission. It has to be especially projected that the concern for the management of existing forests must be included in the ’plan side’ as well.
Uttarakhand’s effort at promoting the organic movement has been acknowledged by the Planning Commission, Tolia states with elation. "Now this effort has to be leveraged further for accessing more plan funds and carbon credits. Here is where a nodal institution like UCOST can play a major role," he adds.
These, says Tolia, have great import for Uttarakhand vis-à-vis climate change. "In the ultimate analysis Uttarakhand stands to gain tremendously if all these are put in place in the right perspective. The opportunity has come its way through the NAPCC. The need of the hour is for the state to position itself intelligently. In enhancing solar energy contribution in total energy mix and introducing energy efficient steps, the state has taken steps through UREDA. Now more opportunity comes its way through the carbon credits window," he concluded.
The Times of India (New Delhi), 17 Dec. 2008
Climate Change: India Needs a Timebound Policy Paradigm
There’s much talk of action to counter climate change, or so it seems. While the UN climate change jamboree, in Poznan, Poland, ended last week in a flurry of declarations and announcements, the domestic policy process to cope and negate the effects of climate change seems to be longdrawn and elaborate when it comes to pious intentions and objectives, but woefully short on specifics and timelines.
The National Action Plan on Climate Change does call for chalking out concrete policy proposals for the various sub-missions, by December 31. But India’s stated principle of “common but differential responsibility” in coping with the effects of green-house gas emissions and consequent global warming may well stultify policy revamp. Instead, what’s required is proactive climate-change policy to innovatively remove poverty when it comes to everyday energy usage, and rev up efficiency of energy systems right across the board. The subsequent payoffs would be huge indeed. In parallel, what’s needed is initiative to summarily improve the methods and data available for policy analysis in the domain of the environment and apparent climate change in the offing. Let us set up a premier body such as a National Centre for Environmental Economics–complete with a vigorous programme of publishing working papers, for better informed policy design. In tandem, widespread energy poverty and poor efficiency levels in energy supply and logistics need to be addressed. Imperative is forward-looking policy to better diffuse alternate, sustainable energy resources such as solar and wind power.
Such a policy stance would concurrently reduce emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs), with the relative decline is the usage of fossil fuels, the main source of additional GHGs in the atmosphere.
The latest UN meet does call upon member governments to diffuse ‘green,’ environmentally-friendly technology and to “promptly initiate and expeditiously facilitate the preparation of projects for approval and implementation...” too. If only things were so simple! When it comes to actual policy implementation and follow through, far from being sanguine, there would be a host of rigidities on the ground. So instead of hoping for “manna from heaven” and green technology easily available off the shelve, what’s required is a suitably conducive policy environment to step up investments for requisite diffusion and development of hardware, skills and knowledge in the domestic tariff area, preferably with heightened FDI flows. The UN communiqué does also–in a somewhat grandiose manner–mention the Special Climate Change Fund, and besides “welcoming the outcome of pledging meeting of potential donors” to the corpus, goes on to note that $60 million “have been pledged” for the purpose. For what is supposed to be a global fund, it’s much too small and inconsequential. In the midst of a severe global economic slowdown, there are of course a panoply of other, more pressing concerns for governments. But the point remains that resource mobilisation for climate change would need to be largely and perhaps overwhelmingly domestic, especially for a large, turnaround economy like India. Hence the need for appropriate policy design.
However, it does not necessarily follow that the monies for climate change would need to be budgeted from scratch. The fact of the matter is that tens of thousands of crores are already spent each year on open-ended energy subsidies, with the questionable objective of boosting usage of fossil fuels. So what’s needed is vision to prioritise expenditure and policy induce sustainable, less
fossil-fuel intensive energy. Specifically, what’s needed is a scheme to diffuse such alternative energy aides as solar lamps and well-designed cookers, and pay for it by limiting and withdrawing subventions on account of kerosene, cooking gas and agricultural power. As various pilot studies show, such a policy substitution would quickly pay for itself and so effectively bring down energy subsidy levels. It would also hand-in-hand do much to remove energy poverty and stepup fuel usage as well.
There remains the need to increase thermal efficiency in our power plants, which would be more capital-intensive than the change over required for domestic sustainable energy resources. Power plants emissions are the single largest source of carbon dioxide, the most prevalent GHG. But here again, the prospect of generating up to a third more power from practically the same amount of coal ought to be attractive enough for corrective action. And suitable changes in power policy can better coagulate funds for high-efficiency, super-critical boilers and the like. The point is that the environment is the basis of all activities, be they ecological, economic or social, and it would make policy sense to strive for less degradation even as we boost newer energy resources. The future after all begins now!
The Economic Times (New Delhi), 18 Dec. 2008
Climate Change, Human Rights, Potable Water Gaining Priority
The global crisis in financial markets and looming economic recession has focused the corporate world’s attention on critical non-financial issues – such as climate change – important to its future survival, the head of the United Nations initiative for ethical business said in a press statement.
He said that climate change, human rights, anti-corruption and access to water are among the hot topics that are factoring into investor and business decision-making processes.
“It is understood that an obsession with short-term quarterly share maximization is not necessarily synonymous with long-term sustainability,” said Executive Director of the UN Global Compact, Georg Kell.
The Global Compact, set up in 2000, is a UN created alliance in which close to 5,000 participating businesses in 130 countries have pledged to align their operations and strategies with 10 universally accepted principles in areas ranging from human rights and labour to the environment and anti-corruption practices.
“Initially the idea of the Global Compact was in essence to call upon business to engage in support of UN goals, to embrace the principles and act upon them,” Mr. Kell told reporters, as he highlighted current trends and developments in corporate responsibility, particularly in the context of current market turmoil.
A significant development over recent months is the serious damage to public faith and confidence in the private sector, and the growing distrust is “fanning populist reactions to global economic integration,” according to a Global Compact paper titled the Global Economic Downturn.
“We are convinced, as we have been for many years already, that engagement on non-financial issues is a way to restore and rebuild trust,” said Mr. Kell, adding, “so we do believe that the Compact can be, at least a part of the answer, by challenging companies, in particular to demonstrate responsibility.”
The environment is one direction in which commercial enterprises are turning their attention, said Mr. Kell, noting that the Secretary-General has repeatedly suggested a “Green New Deal’ as a way of combining stimuli packages with attention to environmental issues.
“This kind of thinking needs to develop much faster and much more rapidly because the necessity for doing so is clearly out there,” he stressed.
The reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent is necessary to avoid disastrous implications, but “at this point nobody knows now to do this but everybody knows in order to achieve it ultimately fundamental economic and social transformations are required.
“Already 1.1 billion people don’t have access to water. So the whole natural resource issue clearly is bound to be amplified in the months to come, and we strongly believe that next year will be the year of sustainability where sustainability of markets will be intimately linked with climate, water and through it also food and related issues.”
Mr. Kell pointed out that the Compact had also launched an initiative in 2006 at the New York
Stock Exchange, with investors in stock markets who are concerned with establishing principles for responsible investment.
The Principles for Responsible Investment initiative now has over 450 institutional supporters – representing $18 trillion in assets under management – increasingly paying attention to environmental, social and governance issues when making assessments for investments.
The Himachal Times (Dehradun), 20 Dec. 2008
As the demand for information technology (IT) increases, the infrastructure required to support this also grows. IT is a major consumer of energy in an organisation and the power needed to support this is very high. Organisations are realising the need to conserve energy and are taking steps to reduce their carbon footprint in the world.
Driving energy efficiencies across IT infrastructure by addressing the power and cooling challenges, making the computing infrastructure more power efficient, ensuring the lowest power ratings for devices are a few of the green mandates that business houses can and have adopted.
IT can play an important role in going green and can reduce the carbon footprint by over 98 per cent on a global scale. It currently consumes over 2 per cent of the world's overall energy. Enterprises can achieve this by automating, substituting and dematerialising various processes within the organisation. IT currently consumes over 2 per cent of the world's overall energy.
Going green provides an opportunity to save cost as well as an opportunity to be a responsible corporate citizen. IT can be used to determine where and how people work and how much they travel. This translates into the amount of energy consumed by them and also the amount of expensive resources used, such as paper and petroleum.
Leveraging computing can drive energy conservations in many different ways. Automation is one of them that is making what is done today incrementally more efficient whether by smart power consumption, robotics or smart grids. This will considerably reduce carbon footprints. Substitution is another such power saving practice. By changing the way things are done, one can radically reduce the cost, increase the speed. It could either be video conferencing, e-commerce or a paperless office. The third such green practice that IT corporate houses could adopt is dematerialisation. In this method, one can literally eliminate atoms and turn it to bits in the process.
To do all of this, one will have to identify and this can be done by having benchmarks and mechanisms also need to be put into place to check the power consumption. This will help reduce the global carbon footprint. Real-time monitoring of these elements will enable analysis for optimisation. This can be managed by putting proactive systems in place.
Banking used to be entirely paper based and then it moved onto ATMs. This was one of the most important green initiatives in the sector. Now e-banking has caught on where people bank using the Internet. This has helped reduce the carbon footprint as there is no travel required and there is lesser fuel consumption for the same.
On the manufacturing end as Moore's law continues to be taken to new heights and the number of transistors increase, they also become smaller. This increases the chances of a leakage, thus reducing the power efficiency of the transistor. The transistor should have minimal halogen atoms and lead to make it more eco-friendly.
Three years ago, the annual energy consumption of a desktop was high as IT managers needed the systems to be on day and night. As desktops transformed from CRT displays to LCD, the power consumption reduced from 1015 KWh per year to 938 KWh per year. When the dual core processor was introduced the power consumption saw a significant drop to 215 KWh per year. Over a short period of 7 years, the energy platform ahs dropped by 17 times and resulted in dramatic cost savings.
With the move of energy efficient technologies, multi-core platforms and the continuing and relentless pursuit of Moore's Law, the data centre has been transformed remarkably.
From 2006 to 2008, data centers across the world uses 57 per cent less floor space and the annual energy costs have reduced by 64 per cent. This has translated into $57,000 savings on the energy savings front and has exceeded the server acquisition cost too in the past three years. However, the delivery and performance of these data centers has not been affected in any way. They continue to deliver the same, if not greater level of performance. There are significant gains in delivering energy efficient performance.
Dr. Sunil Sherlekar CEO Tata CRL cited the example of how a 42,000 square foot system has been designed in such a way that it consumes only 2.5 MW of power. With the help of similar technology efficient automobiles, power generators, wind turbines can be designed which reduce the total energy consumption.
In 2000, the total energy consumed by data centers in the US was 30 billion KWh per year, which was about 0.8 per cent of total electricity consumed in the US. In 2006, they used 80 billion KWh per year. By 2011, the projected energy consumption by data centers is a little over 120 billion KWh that is 2.9 per cent of the projected power consumption by US.
"For the IT industry it is a 2 per cent opportunity as they currently consume so much energy worldwide. However, there is a 98 per cent opportunity as one can use computing to improve energy savings outside information and communications technology." said Patrick P. Gelsinger, Sr. V.P., GM (Digital Enterprise Group) Intel Corporation.
There are various reasons why businesses are following green IT practices. Some do it as it is a compliance issue and clients ask for it. Most do it as it is a great cost savings effort or think it is fashionable to do so. While some also put it as enforcing such mechanisms is a good public relations exercise.
Mahesh Khera, CMO (Corporate Strategy and Business Excellence) Reliance Commun-ications said that, "Aim of every service provider is to operate cost-efficiently. Reduction of power consumption automatically reduces the carbon footprint in the environment." Thus power reduction is directly linked to a company's reduction in operating costs without it compromising on quality.
According to a study conducted by Intel, around 90 per cent of computers in the corporate world have power-management mechanisms. However of this 90 per cent, hardly 70 per cent have switched to the option thanks to various reasons like complexity of turning it on among others. The same amount of energy could have been used to run multiple coal plants offline. Hence, installing power-saving hardware platforms by companies is just a beginning in what can be perceived as a long-term process. Intel is committed to climate saving computing, a new environmental effort, which has set aggressive, targets for energy-efficient computers and promoting power management tool worldwide.
In many companies the average age of employees makes it easier or difficult, as the case may be, to adopt green IT practices. For instance the average age of a TCS employee is 28 years and every one of them at an individual level is concerned about the environment.
Ananth Krishnan vice-president and CTO, TCS admitted that convincing everyone in the office to shut their computers when they are not being used is a difficult task. However, TCS has it's own social computing initiative and suggestions like shutting PC's when not in use has come from the company's own staff. Adopting environmental-friendly technology is a mantra across all the Tata Group of companies. Hence, to a certain extent implementation of such practices depends on the company's culture.
But for State Bank of India (SBI) things are different as the average age of an employee is around 50 years. In comparison to a 28+TCS employee who is a 'digital native', the concept is more challenging for SBI employees who are 'digital migrants.' There are big differences between people who are born with the technology and people who have learnt to use the technology.
B.R. Nath CIO of SBI felt that with proper knowledge about power savings, power consumption in firms could easily be reduced up to 10 per cent. For instance, a small notice like, "Have you switched off your computer monitor?" would always make the employee realise his responsibility towards energy consumption.
Mr. Krishnan further added that, the question to be asked is: "How to harness all the innovative and creative suggestions on energy efficiency? And how do we make it into meaningful initiatives?" Companies which have been adopting these practices from a long time, are today in a position to sell this concept to a business unit. After tackling the initial hiccups, these companies are advising clients on efficient management of power consumption.
Technology always has a helping hand to play in the implementation of such practices. For instance modern-day machines can be timed to go to sleep at a particular time even if it is not in use. Going green should make economic sense to a company. However, most of these products are either highly priced or sometimes not available in particular geographical locations according to Sudipto Majumdar, CTO Zapak and COO Kyphy.
Many companies have successfully adopted green IT practices and managed to increase their operational efficiencies. Mr. Gelsinger cited one such example of an American firm that used eco-friendly applications to track the delivery and routing of its trucks. The application resulted in the firm recording a 10-15 per cent jump in its operational efficiency and directly resulting in carbon footprint savings. There are many such examples across the world backed by solid data.
Data centers across the globe have been nicknamed as heat and power-guzzling 'monsters.'
However, Mr. Sherlekar said that the solution to the problem lies in changing the design and operational elements of a data center. Hence, while designing a data centre its cooling system can be conceived in a specific manner or the centre can be set up in a cooler ambience. On the operational side, if some of the servers in a firm are not being used they can be shut down to save power. Or a job can be equally split across two servers, thus reducing the load on a single server. However, implementing such practices are quite challenging as one has to write the software in a particular way, observed Mr. Sherlekar.
Echoing similar sentiments, Mr. Khera said that need of the hour is infrastructure that can function according to different configuration needs on a day-today basis especially for the telecom industry. "An average lifecycle of a server is 5 years, but if it used for 8-8.5 hours in a day its lifespan can easily extend to another year.," he said.
In the process of adopting green IT practices there is always a risk of companies overcomputing themselves. Commenting on the same Mr. Majumdar said that, "CTO's are always under pressure to never let services down. A lot of upgrades happen on PCs some of which are vendor-led or fashion-led." However, companies should concentrate more on going 'green' and cutting costs.
The government also has to play a very important and pivotal role in promoting green IT practices. According to Mr. Krishnan, "It would certainly help if the government came out with some kind of regulatory framework or standard. Many governments are now considering environment as a serious issue."
To expand their carbon footprints many companies are now providing their annual report online. Companies should identify a positive risk reward behaviour, which would help future business
decisions. A manager might adopt an environment-friendly process successfully with full expectations of incentives from the government. Incentives could be financial in nature or others like tax breaks and carbon credits. Firms should be instilled with 'fears' over violation of environmental norms and at the same time they should have the 'greed' to earn incentives for good green practices.
Companies should voluntarily measure and manage their commitment to the environment. Commitments can be in the form of measuring the current amount of power the firm is consuming or what kind of greenhouse gas emissions it would be responsible for. While electricity bills might be a good measure of power consumption, at a core level they are not enough for deciding on business processes.
Practices like managing airflow, deployment of next generation technologies in the best manner. Adopting applications of power in servers and being able to balance virtualisation. Across the range of adopting these practices across data centers, IT will not only be able to flatten, but also decrease the amount of energy despite increasing number of servers going into data centers of the future. If even 2 per cent of the companies are convinced to opt for green IT practices following the footsteps of firms like SBI, TCS among others, a huge change can be expected from the rest 98 per cent.
The Economic Times (New Delhi), 7 Nov. 2008
Just Global Dimming, Not Warming
The haze, or an atmospheric brown cloud hanging over major Asian cities including Delhi and Mumbai, essentially affects local conditions and can be swept away by a new weather system or winter rains as is often the case in the capital. A day after the UNEP released a report pointing out that the haze could impact health and food supplies, experts feel that phenomenon is not new and its linkages to global warming are suspect. The brown cloud remain suspended over cities for a while but could also dissipate just as quickly.
R.K. Pachauri, chairman of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, said, “Unlike CO2 and other greenhouse gases which mix freely in the atmosphere irrespective of where they are emitted, soot and fine particles don’t. Since they absorb incoming heat from the Sun, they impact local climate.” It is the fine soot particle which do not settle and deflect the incoming radiation.
But Pachauri disputed the argument that brown clouds are a substantive factor in global warming. “The issue here is that we have not yet been able to arrive at any clear cut conclusions. The UNEP report has spoken specifically about changes in rain and temperature patterns in India but research on it is still on, it is not possible to ascertain this.”
Like other Indian scientists, Pachauri seems to feel that the conclusions of US-based experts like V. Ramanathan, who was part of the study that first pointed to brown clouds in 1999, are a bit of a stretch. Ramanathan feels that reducing brown clouds will delay the onset of global warming, but the thesis has been challenged by developing countries with Indian experts pointing out that such a haze takes place all the time due to emissions from vehicles and burning of biofuels.
Officials speaking off the record also said the issue was a local problem that hardly needed a global prescription. “The brown clouds are distributed in the middle atmosphere. Local pollution in terms of specific cities has nothing to do with it. The problem in India really is vehicular and industrial emissions and those from burning traditional fuels like coal and wood in rural areas.” The process, known as “global dimming” is completely opposite to that of global warming where outgoing radiation is absorbed and not allowed to escape. The official said the fine soot was really a rural phenomenon but was very much subject to seasonal fluctuation depending on wind and rain. During monsoon for instance, the haze is literally washed away.
Anumita Roy Chowdhury, who heads the Clean Air Campaign for Centre for Science and Environment said. “The impact is still very hazy and should not be linked to local pollution. Our concentration should be to reduce emissions in general due to their impact on public health.” She pointed out that bringing climate change into the picture was incorrect as this would mean equating “luxury’ emissions of West to the “survival” emissions of developing countries. Other experts admit that pollution levels in Indian cities have gone up and are contributing to the haze but also question whether this can be “mixed” with climate change. “Pollution levels have risen but the immediate impact is on local health. The claims made in the UNEP report are yet not proven. The concept of soot precipitating on glaciers is just a hypothesis,” said J. Srinivasan, from IISc, Bangalore. It has been suggested that soot settling on Himalayas reduced the ice albedo, or property to reflect light.
‘Haze due to pollution and duststorms’
Atmospheric brown clouds are not new to scientists in India, who have been researching their occurrence for some years, and recent efforts have pointed to dust storms and local conditions as being responsible for the phenomenon.
While some Indian experts call ABCs a “dead issue”, the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology recently released a paper titled ‘Aerosol Radiative Forcing During Dust Events Over New Delhi’ which dealt with dust particles seen in the region during different parts of the year and their impact on the local area.
According to the study, the dimming effect, which is caused when incoming solar radiation is absorbed by soot and dust particles in the atmosphere, is specially large in the Asian monsoon regions owing to heavy pollution and frequent occurrence of dust storms. “Dust aerosols from neighbouring deserts are transported over northern India between April and May.
The presence of aerosols controls the cooling or heating of the Earth surface and the warming or cooling of the atmosphere. The increase in anthropogenic absorbing aerosols is found to be responsible for increase in rainfall in the southern part of China and drought in northern part of China,” the paper states. Over Delhi during pre-monsoon, the size of dust particles has been known to increase, “indicating an increased abundance of coarse particles due to dust storms.” This indicates that dust is as big a culprit as the much – maligned carbon soot.
An excuse for west to get at India, China?
While the west sees atmospheric brown clouds as a
major climate change factor in global warming, India sees the charge that its “traditional” biofuels are the primary reason for the toxic haze as an attempt to put the developing world on the back foot over climate change.
There was no official reaction to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) report on the brown cloud formation but senior sources in the ministry of science and technology rejected the claim that carbon soot generated by bio fuels burnt in India were a major contributor to global warming and that this was affecting the food yield in the region.
The Indian scientific community sees the brown cloud theory to be exaggerated as it feels the haze is pretty much a “normal” phenomenon in winters, and sometimes, in other non-monsoon months as well. The use of firewood, dung cakes and fossil fuels has not increased so significantly as to now pose any more of a climate change risk than has been the case till now. “It is a way of getting at India and China. We say that the developed world is primarily responsible for global warming so the west has latched on to the brown cloud formation to target us on traditional fuels. But these fuels are not the only reason why brown clouds are formed,” said an official familiar with the debate.
India has argued that brown clouds are not exclusive to India or China and are found in Africa, central Asian and South America as well.
Also, in the case of India, suspended particles are washed from the atmosphere during monsoons unlike CO2, which once released does not dissipate for years. Carbon soot combined with dust might have made the haze appear earlier but to argue that brown clouds were second only to CO2 in causing global warming was a skewed proposition.
Western research has tended to vigorously support the view that reduction of brown cloud formation would substantially delay the onset of “serious” climate change and that in specific regions the phenomenon can increase atmospheric heating by 50 per cent. There have been calls for India to “encourage” a shift from firewood and other bio-fuels to other energy sources, a move that is certain to be costly, besides disrupting age-old practices.
The haze was initially labelled Asian brown clouds and “Asian” was substituted by “atmospheric” after protests by countries like India. Since India has been at the forefront of the argument that it would not accept binding commitments on climate change and it was for the developed world to fund green technologies, the attack over the brown clouds was expected.
The Times of India (New Delhi), 17 Nov. 2008
With a worldwide recession advancing, strong action on global warming has been thrown into jeopardy. This matters, because in little more than a year, the world will sit down in Copenhagen to negotiate the follow-on treaty to the failed Kyoto Protocol. Yet, with people losing jobs and income, immediate economic help seems to matter more than temperature differentials 100 years from now. Many green pundits have, however, started saying that the financial crisis only makes the need for action on climate change greater. They urge America's president-elect Barack Obama to pursue a "green revolution" with big investments in renewable energy, arguing that this could create millions of new "green collar" jobs and open huge new markets.
The problem with the green revolution argument is that it doesn't trouble itself about efficiency. It is most often lauded for supplying new jobs. But billions of dollars in tax subsidies would create plenty of new jobs in almost any sector: the point is that many less capital-intensive sectors would create many more jobs for a given investment of taxpayers' money.
Similarly, green initiatives will open new markets only if other nations subsidise inefficient technologies bought abroad. Thus, the real game becomes which nations get to suck up other nations' tax-financed subsidies. Apart from the resulting global inefficiency, this also creates a whole new raft of industry players that will keep pushing inefficient legislation, simply because it fills their coffers.
A good illustration is Denmark, which early on provided huge subsidies for wind power, building thousands of inefficient turbines around the country from the 1980s onwards. A few years ago, however, the Danish Economic Council conducted a full evaluation of the wind turbine industry, taking into account not only its beneficial effects on jobs and production, but also the subsidies that it receives. The net effect for Denmark was found to be a small cost, not benefit.
Not surprisingly, the leading Danish wind producer is today urging strong action on climate change that would imply even more sales of wind turbines. The company sponsors the "Planet in Peril" show on CNN, which helps galvanise public pressure for action. The crucial point is that many green technologies are not cost-effective, at least not yet. If they were, we wouldn't need to subsidise them. The standard reply is that green technologies seem more expensive only because the price of fossil fuels does not reflect their climate costs. That makes some sense. Given that fossil fuels contribute to global warming, standard economic theory suggests we should tax them according to their cumulative negative effects.
But this would make little difference to the inefficiency of most green technologies. The most comprehensive economic meta-study shows that total future climate impacts justify a tax of 0.012 euro per liter of petrol ($0.06 per gallon in the US). This is dwarfed by the tax that many European countries already impose, and it is much less than in the European trading system.
Yet it is argued that much higher taxes and subsidies are the best way to increase research and development in new, cheaper renewable energy sources. This is untrue. During the massive investment associated with the Kyoto treaty, the participating countries' investment in R&D as a percentage of GDP has declined, not increased. It is rather obvious that if you invest massively in inefficient solar panels, most of your money will go to buy the physical panels, whereas only a very small part will go to R&D. If you want more R&D, you should spend your money directly on R&D. This could tackle global warming in the longer run.
Finally, it is often claimed that high CO2 taxes and subsidies for green technology will actually do good, and again Denmark is often taken as an example. After all, it is argued, Denmark has kept its CO2 emissions flat while enjoying 70 per cent economic growth since 1981. But could it have grown more if it had not restricted CO2 emissions? During the same period, U.S. emissions grew 29 per cent, but its GDP grew 39 per cent more than Denmark's, indicating a simple truth: CO2 cuts and subsidies don't necessarily mean no growth, but they probably do mean slower growth.
President-elect Obama is now facing countless people who claim that subsidies for renewable energy and CO2 taxes are great ways to tackle global warming and forge a new green economy. Unfortunately, this is almost entirely incorrect. Taxes and subsidies are always expensive, and will likely impede growth. Moreover, if we really want to tackle global warming, we shouldn't spend vast sums of money buying inefficient green technology — we should invest directly in R&D to make future green technology competitive.
Obama should seize the initiative and make the meeting in Copenhagen next year not about bloated subsidies for inefficient technologies, but about lean investments in future breakthroughs. That is the way to tackle global warming and support a genuinely vibrant economy.
The Economic Times (New Delhi), 25 Nov. 2008
In one of his first public policy statements as America’s president-elect, Barack Obama focused on climate change, and clearly stated both his priorities and the facts on which these priorities rest. Unfortunately, both are weak, or even wrong.
According to Obama “few challenges facing America and the world are more urgent than combating climate change.”
Such a statement is now commonplace for most political leaders around the world, even though it neglects to address the question of how much we can do to help America and the world through climate policies versus other policies.
Consider, for example, hurricanes in America. Clearly, a policy of reducing CO2 emissions would have had zero consequence on Katrina’s devastating impact on New Orleans, where such a disaster was long expected. Over the next half-century, even large reductions in CO2 emissions would have only a negligible impact. Instead, direct policies to address New Orleans’ vulnerabilities could have avoided the huge and unnecessary cost in human misery and economic loss. These should have included stricter building codes, smarter evacuation policies, and better preservation of wetlands (which could have reduced the ferociousness of the hurricane). Most importantly, a greater focus on upkeep and restoration of the levees could have spared the city entirely. Perhaps these types of preventive actions should be Obama’s priority.
Likewise, consider world hunger. Pleas for action on climate change reflect fears that global warming might undermine agricultural production, especially in the developing world. But global agricultural/economic models indicate that even under the most pessimistic assumptions, global warming would reduce agricultural production by just 1.4 per cent by the end of the century.
Moreover, by implementing the Kyoto Protocol at a cost of $180 billion annually would keep two million people from going hungry only by the end of the century. Yet by spending just $10 billion annually, the United Nations estimates that we could help 229 million hungry people today. Every time spending on climate policies saves one person from hunger in a hundred years, the same amount could have saved 5,000 people now. Arguably, this should be among Obama’s top priorities.
Obama wants to prioritise global warming policies: “The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear. Sea levels are rising. Coastlines are shrinking. We’ve seen record drought, spreading famine, and storms that are growing stronger with each passing hurricane season.” Yes, global warming is happening, and mankind is partly responsible, but these statements are — however eloquent — seriously wrong or misleading.
Sea levels are rising, but they have been rising at least since the early 1800s. In the era of satellite measurements, the rise has not accelerated (actually we’ve seen a sea-level fall over the past two years). The UN expects about a 30-centimeter sea-level rise over this century — about what we saw over the past 150 years.
In that period, many coastlines increased, most obviously in Holland, because rich countries can easily protect and even expand their territory. But even for oft-cited Bangladesh, scientists just this year showed that the country grows by 20 square kilometres each year, because river sedimentation win out over rising sea levels.
Obama’s claim about record droughts similarly fails even on a cursory level — the US has in all academic estimates been getting wetter over the century (with the 1930s “dust bowl” setting the drought high point). This is even true globally over the past half-century, as one of the most recent scientific studies of actual soil moisture shows: “there is an overall small wetting trend in global soil moisture.”
Furthermore, famine has rapidly declined over the past half century. The main deviation has been the past two years of record-high food prices, caused not by climate change but by the policies designed to combat it: the dash for ethanol, which put food into cars and thus upward pressure on food prices. The World Bank estimates that this policy has driven at least 30 million more people into hunger. To cite policy-driven famine as an argument for more of the same policy seems unreasonable.
Finally, it is simply wrong to say that storms are growing stronger every hurricane season. Even for the Atlantic hurricane basin, which we tend to hear about the most, the total hurricane energy (ACE) as measured by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has declined by two-thirds since the record was set in 2005. For the world, this trend has been more decisive: maximum ACE was reached in 1994, and has plummeted for the past three years, while hurricanes around the world have for the past year been about as inactive as at any time since records began being kept. Global warming should be tackled, but smartly through research and development of low-carbon alternatives. If we are to get our policies right, it is crucial that we get our facts right.
The Economic Times (New Delhi), 16 Dec. 2008
The Earth unfortunately is not a never- ending treasure trove of resources. The rate at which we are now consuming energy is a cause for concern. But starting December 12- World Energy Day - we as Indians can alter this. We need to make a difference and ensure that we make efficient use of the energy available to us.
As a growing economy and a large country, India has dual requirements of energy. We currently rank as the world’s eleventh biggest energy producer, accounting for about 2.4 per cent of the world’s total annual energy production. Subsequently, we are the world’s sixth largest energy consumer accounting for about 3.3 per cent of the world’s total annual energy consumption. With demand rising, India’s dependence on external sources for energy will rise, leading to growing emissions causing irreversible changes.
Natural resources are depleting and although India is the third-largest producer of hard coal after China and the US, India also imports around 1.4 million barrels of oil per day- 60 per cent of its total needs. This dependency is projected to grow to 85 per cent by 2010 and to over 90 per cent by 2020. India’s crude oil imports are projected to reach 5 million barrels per day in 2020, which is more than 60 per cent of current Saudi Arabian oil production. The demand may outstrip the supply one day unless we act fast.
The uses of these natural resources are varied. Electricity is major form of energy and on the power generation front nearly 62 per cent of power is generated using coal fired thermal power plants while 70 per cent of the coal produced every year in India has been used for thermal generation. Fossil fuels for long have been the initial sources of energy even in India. However, constant use of fossil fuels has led to large- scale problems. The greenhouse effect, caused by the emission of greenhouse gases as a result of burning up these fossil fuels, has long been documented as a major source of trouble for environmental safety.
Consumption can be classified into two major parts- industrial and domestic. The industrial sector in India is a major energy consumer accounting for nearly 50 per cent of energy produced. The Indian industry is a highly energy- intensive one and its energy-GDP elasticity is around 1.5 – far higher than the developed nations.
Indian industries have been regarded as a role model across the world when it comes to social responsibility. Energy saving is today the top in a list of social responsibilities of every individual. Energy saving measures also help in curtailing pollution that is one of the major factors contributing to Global Warming.
Every individual can help reduce pollution by simply changing the way they light their homes. LED is the latest entrant in Indian lighting market, which not only helps save energy up to 87 per cent compared to conventional lighting products, but is also pollution free. LED- based lights do not contain harmful gases or rays and can play a major role in maintaining environmental cleanliness.
LED-based lights can be used for various purposes including clean room, flame proof, street lights among others and are now freely available in India.
Let’s take a look at this case study to highlight how effective LED- based lights are when it come to energy and cost saving.
Consider Pune in Maharastra. Pune has approximately 1,50,000 street lights, most of which are 250 Watt sodium vapur lamps. At a special rate of Rs. 2.90/KW, electricity cost that the Pune Municipal Corporation is paying is approximately Rs. 11 lakh per day while the carbon emitted by these inefficient lights is nearly 161 tons. By using LED- based street lights, which consumes 45 Watts, the city corporation pays a maximum of Rs. 2 lakh per day for the same quality of lighting and saves Rs. 60 – 70 per point per month on maintenance cost as well. Additionally, the benefits include reduced carbon emission of approximately 130 tons per day. The value of carbon unit amounts to more than Rs. 2 lakh per day which means that the city corporation of Pune will be lighting up the city at virtually no cost. How this helps the residents of Pune is simple. The Rs. 11 lakh per day spent on electricity cost for streetlights at the moment can be used for development work without the need for levying additional taxes or duties.
The Economic Times (New Delhi), 12 Dec. 2008
Economic Pressures Put a Brake on Global Greening
Just as the world seemed poised to combat global warming more aggressively, the economic slump and plunging prices of coal and oil are upending plans to wean businesses and consumers from fossil fuel.
From Italy to China, the threat to jobs, profits and tax revenues posed by the financial crisis has cast doubt on commitments to cap emissions or phase out polluting factories.
President-elect Barack Obama and the European Union have vowed to stick to commitments to cap emissions of carbon dioxide and invest in new green technologies, arguing that government action could stimulate the economy and create new jobs in producing sustainable energy.
But the political will and the economic underpinnings for a much more assertive strategy appear shakier than they did even a few weeks ago.
“Yes things have changed,” said Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a telephone interview.
“European industry is saying we can’t deal with financial crisis and reduce emissions at the same time,” he said. “Heads of government have other things on their minds.”
The economic decline also could complicate the political calculus of limiting emissions in developing countries, especially China.
China overtook the United States as the largest producer of greenhouse gases in 2007. But the surge in heavy industry there that produced a sharp increase in its emissions already has given signs of a slowdown.
Some experts argue that China’s emissions - and the pressing need to limit them - may recede until economic conditions improve.
Mr. De Boer said he remained optimistic that major powers would keep their pledges to reduce emissions.
“I don’t think anyone will show the stupidity to focus on the short term and ignore the long-term issue because these decisions will be with us for 30 years,” he said.
Even so, there are signs of considerable rethinking of at least near-term commitments to invest in green technology and alternative energy.
Italy’s Environment Minister, Stefania Prestigiacomo, said last month that “profound changes” were needed in the European Union climate package because of the global economic crisis. Coal-based economies like Poland’s have similar worries.
Barbara Helfferich, the European Commission spokeswoman on the environment, said, “Investing in reducing emission is more difficult to do in times of economic downturn than when you have money to spend.”
The European Commission says it is planning to stay its course toward lower emissions - a 20 per cent reduction by 2020 - and in so doing hopes to have a “first mover advantage” in terms of job creation, renewable sources and energy innovation once the global economy rebounds.
“I know it sounds counterintuitive, but our
argument is that because there is an economic turndown, it is just the time to tackle the transition from a high-carbon to a low-carbon economy,” Ms. Helfferich said.
Yet the current economic slump could have serious long-term environmental consequences, because it may reduce investment in greener production technologies without fundamentally changing the longer-term emissions picture. With so many renewable energy projects and programs in their nascent stages, their success is easily undercut by lack of credit or financing.
Wind costs more than $2.5 billion per gigawatt to build, compared with $600 million for gas. Carbon permits and subsidies can narrow that gap, but the current low prices mean that it is cheaper to burn coal, even after paying penalties for the carbon dioxide emissions.
The United Nations says that 40 per cent of the world’s power generating capacity has to be replaced in the next 5 to 10 years. Six months ago, high oil prices, easy credit and political pressure led many governments to promote biofuels, wind farms and nuclear projects. But the logic of spending more on such plants has at least partly evaporated. “If because of the current economic scenario, you choose cheap and dirty, we’ll be in big trouble,” Mr. De Boer said.
The Asian Age (New Delhi), 20 Dec. 2008
Carbon Footprint – an Introduction
Debates on the appropriate use of carbon footprints are spreading through society like rings in water. The idea that is put forward is that a carbon footprint is what has been left behind as a result of an organisation’s activities. In a landmark paper published this year titled “A Definition of ‘Carbon Footprint’,” Thomas Wiedmann and Jan Minx state that while the term ‘carbon footprint’ originates in the language of ‘ecological footprint’, it is a measure of the exclusive total amount of carbon dioxide emissions that is directly and indirectly caused by an activity or is accumulated over the life stages of a product. The data which calculates the carbon footprint needs to be relevant, complete, consistent, transparent, and accurate.
On the basis of the level of control which an organisation has over the emissions, the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions can be classified into three main types, namely, the Direct or Scope I emissions (combustion of fuels; most common, also known as the primary carbon footprint), the Electricity or Scope II emissions (not directly controlled; contributes to 17 per cent of the global GHG emissions), and the Indirect emissions from products and services purchased or Scope III emissions (also known as secondary carbon footprint). Scope I and Scope II emissions must be reported while Scope III emission is optional. Also, when making a corporate-wide inventory, small emission-causing activities are discovered. Hence, producing a full carbon footprint covering all the three types of emissions can be quite a complex task.
Appropriate method
There are numerous approaches for the calculation of the carbon footprint of an organisation. The reasons for needing a carbon footprint will determine which approach is the most appropriate. There is a basic method (covers direct emissions and emissions from electricity); the process based life cycle assessments or the PALCA Method (bottom-up approach, only on-site, most first-order impacts); the Environmental Input-Output or the EIO Method (top-down approach, provides a picture of all economic activities); and, the Hybrid Method (combines the strength of both methods). Detailed calculations of carbon footprints are provided in the GHG Protocol’s Corporate Accounting and Reporting Standard (revised edition); the ISO 14064; and the PAS 2050 standard of the British Standards Institution (BSI).
The smaller the carbon footprint, the more environment-friendly is the organisation. Once we have accurately determined the current carbon footprint, we will need to identify the hotspots of energy consumption, optimise energy efficiency, and identify solutions to neutralise the CO2 emissions that cannot be reduced by any energy saving measures. That being said, relying entirely on one indicator can sometimes be misleading. One example could be biofuels, for which a low carbon footprint could give the impression of a truly eco-friendly product, despite its negative land use impacts, ultimately increasing the pressure on rainforests and other rich habitats.
A study by KPMG India, titled “Climate Change: Is India Inc. Prepared?” published this year states that the Indian businesses regard climate change as an important business issue.
Creating awareness
An encouraging 88 per cent of the respondents feel that it is important to evaluate their carbon footprint for making investment decisions. However there is low awareness as to why it is important and how it can affect business. The recently announced
National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC-2008) and the launch of India’s first carbon footprint calculator — CARBONyatra.com — are steps in the right direction.
India’s development agenda focusses on the need for rapid economic growth as an essential pre-condition to poverty eradication and improved standards of living. According to the NAPCC-2008, India aims to limit its per capita GHG emissions below that of developed countries — is this possible with the economy growing at an annual average growth rate of eight per cent? Only time will tell, but the country will definitely need to focus attention on adaptive capacity building, identify and start implementing adaptation measures, and follow a low carbon development pathway.
The Hindu (New Delhi), 9 Nov. 2008
Emissions Can Ward Off the Big Freeze
Scheduled shifts in Earth’s orbit should plunge the planet into an enduring Ice Age thousands of years from now but the event will probably be averted because of man-made greenhouse gases, scientists said on Wednesday.
They cautioned, though, that this news is not an argument in favour of global warming, which is driving imminent and potentially far-reaching damage to the climate system. Earth has experienced long periods of extreme cold over the billions of years of its history. The big freezes are interspersed with “interglacial” periods of relative warmth, of the kind we have experienced since the end of the last Ice Age, around 11,000 years ago.
These climate swings have natural causes, believed to be rooted particularly in changes in Earth’s orbit and axis that, while minute, have a powerful effect on how much solar heat falls on the planet.
Two researchers built a high-powered computer model to take a closer look at these intriguing phases of cooling and warmth. In addition to the planetary shifts, they also factored in levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), found in tiny bubbles in ice cores, that provide an indicator of temperature
spanning hundreds of thousands of years.
They found dramatic swings in climate, including changes when Earth flipped from one state to the other in a relatively short time, said co-author Thomas Crowley of the University of Edinburgh. These shifts, called “bifurcations,” happen in abrupt series, counter-intuitive to the idea that the planet cools or warms gradually.
“You had a big change a million years ago, then a second change around 650,000 years ago, when you had bigger glaciations, then 450,000 years ago, when you started to get more repeated glaciations,” Thomas said. “What’s also interesting is that the interglaciations also became warmer.”
According to the model, the next “bifurcation” would normally be due between 10,000 and 100,000 years from now. The chill would induce a long, stable period of glaciation in the mid-latitudes, smothering Europe, Asia and North America to about 45-50 degrees latitude with a thick sheet of ice.
However, there is now so much CO2 in the air, that this adds a heat-trapping greenhouse effect that will offset the cooling impacts of orbital shift, said Crowley.
The Times of India (New Delhi), 15 Nov. 2008
India to Draw World’s Carbon Print
Analysts have long maintained that US and China are the two main actors that must come together in order for a global deal in climate change to be reached. With US in recession, and China growing slower than expected, India may arguably emerge as the third required stakeholder in the talks. As a key player, what Indian requires from a global deal are additional financial flows for low carbon investments, and adaptation measures. In a post-crisis world, in which governments are increasingly strapped, financial flows that India requires will have to come from the international private sector.
On the other hand at private discussions among stakeholders on energy and clean energy issues at WEF India, what also emerged is the immense opportunity in the investment potential for clean energy technology and the role emerging Indian carbon exchanges can play to stimulate demand. Dominic Waughray, senior director at the Forum in Charge of Environmental Initiatives said “The business discussions on climate change at this year’s India summit were very interesting and very positive. The Indian investor and business community clearly sees the massive opportunity to deploy domestic finance and technologies to create ‘leap frog’ clean energy products and services for the population, including the rural poor. With its unique combination of large manufacturers, green tech start ups, venture capitalists, social entrepreneurs and strong rural financing networks, India could emerge as the Asian hub of innovation in the low carbon growth space. We look forward as a next step to bring Indian government representatives into this discussion.”
India is now the 4th largest wind power producer in the world. A recent report by Ernst and Young noted India as the 3rd most attractive country in the world for clean energy investments. Out of
the potential 430,000 MW of energy India needs by 2030, up to 50 per cent could be provided by solar power. Renewable energies are thus a huge market - and employment - opportunity for Indian companies, especially as a decentralised energy option in rural areas.
If Indian business and government stakeholders engage smartly in low carbon investment, technology and policy discussions, the market opportunities for India are huge. Furthermore, despite the recent financial crisis, most carbon related exchanges have outperformed more conventional commodity markets.
The Economic Times (New Delhi), 18 Nov. 2008
Does India’s corporate sector have an interest in a carbon tax, now? There are major issues of international equity around this contentious topic. Rich countries should indeed pay for action to deal with climate change in line with their contribution to the problem. But let’s focus on the narrower question of what is in India’s self-interest.
There are good reasons for early action to make carbon emissions expensive, around irreversibilities, capabilities and credibility.
First, investment in the capital stock—in power stations, factories, vehicles, buildings or forest management—has irreversible effects. With existing incentives, investment choices will be carbon-intensive. Now it is very, very likely that there will be a global deal in the next ten years that has a much higher, explicit or implicit, price of carbon. India risks being landed with a capital stock that is at best high cost at future prices, at worst obsolete. Retrofitting or premature replacement is costly.
Second, the capability to do new things is driven by practice. The more Indian industry explores low carbon-technologies, the more it will be competitive for a huge set of production opportunities at home and abroad. Conversely, if there is not real depth in new technologies, the benefits of future innovation will go to industries from other countries. In the UK, it is already reckoned that British industry may have missed the boat on getting to the frontier of coastal wind technologies. Parts of the Indian corporate sector are already moving heavily into green technologies, but this could be marginal to the whole economy in the absence of strong incentives.
Third, there is an issue of credibility over future policy change. A country’s capital stock shapes its structure of interests. This isn’t a developing country issue: look at the United States and Europe. High-carbon industries, that face high adjustment costs and lack low-carbon capabilities, will have a future interest in lobbying against change, when the economic costs of failure to adjust will be much higher. The sooner India starts acting, the easier the future political economy.
Isn’t it odd to be raising issues of the cost of carbon in the wake of the financial crisis? Let’s look at arguments against action.
A first argument is that you don’t want a higher tax when the economy is slowing down. This makes no sense. In the short run, the ministry of finance should make decisions over the size of the overall deficit on macroeconomic grounds. Other, more distorting, taxes can be reduced, or spending raised, to achieve a sound deficit target.
A second argument is that higher carbon taxes hurt the competitiveness of India’s productive sectors. This is also wrong. A carbon tax is a relative price that will lead to shifts in production choices, technologies and product mixes. But overall competitiveness will depend on economy-wide developments, in the real exchange rate, infrastructure, logistics, the pace of industrial innovation and so on.
A third argument, which is really interesting, is that if India moves on to a more carbon-saving path it will lose out on future entitlements on carbon emissions under a global deal. This is based on the reasonable current view that poorer countries should have no restrictions on carbon emissions until they hit a developmental threshold. This highlights a possibly huge flaw in the design specifics in current thinking. It would be better if international designs rewarded earlier action by India and other countries, rather than providing incentives for maximising carbon production until a graduation point is passed.
I suspect such a path would be a bad idea in any case. The consumer preferences of importing countries will increasingly penalise carbon-intensive production. There are already anecdotes of importing companies (even Walmart!) demanding low-carbon products. In another decade the information base for both consumer awareness and certification will be an order of magnitude greater than today. Moreover, it is not clear that holding out is a better negotiating position within a global deal than credible, early domestic action.
A final point. Why a carbon tax-effected via rationalising energy taxes and a whole range of other measures—rather than regulation, subsidies, or an internal cap and trade? These can all be made to be equivalent in a perfect world. At a global level there are indeed big advantages of a cap and trade system, since we care a lot about getting the quantity of emissions right, and cap and trade is more reliable, and much more feasible, than a global carbon tax. It also has the major advantage of providing a mechanism for transferring resources
to developing countries during a transition in which they benefit from carbon trading with no caps. But in a domestic Indian context, most alternatives would require a regulatory apparatus that is highly efficient and thoroughly immune from influence. That looks like a good case for price-based mechanisms.
(The author is at the Harvard Kennedy School, the Institute of Social and Economic Change, and the Centre for Policy Research).
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 20 Nov. 2008
European Carmakers Agree to Cut Emissions
European carmakers must cut global-warming gases from new vehicles by 18 per cent within the next six years, the EU agreed last week, after a long battle between environmentalists and an industry facing tough times.
“This deal represents a balance between the needs of the environment and the car industry across Europe, which is suffering massively at the moment,” British Conservative lawmaker Martin Callanan said.
But the compromise was attacked by environmentalists, who said it was tailored too neatly around big auto’s demands and undermined EU efforts to lead the world in fighting climate change.
Carbon dioxide emissions from new cars will be cut to 130 gm per km, with auto makers’ fleets phased into the new regime between 2012 and 2015.
The provisional deal in closed-door negotiations will need approval by all 27 European Union nations and the European Parliament before becoming law, but is not expected to change much. The European Commission, which originates EU laws, had envisaged the full emissions cuts by 2012, mindful of climate change and the droughts, violent storms and rising sea levels it is expected to bring.
But Germany fought hard for BMW and Mercedes, which will now be able to produce their biggest, luxury gas-guzzlers until 2014, protecting jobs and export earnings. A moderate system of fines means manufacturers may prefer to miss targets and pay up rather than throttle back on horsepower.
“The car industry has been driving negotiations all along and EU politicians have been
happy to sit in the passenger seat,” Greenpeace campaigner Franziska Achterberg said.
Rough deal
France and Germany had sketched out a rough deal in May, which Britain signed up to in October after winning special treatment for luxury brands Aston Martin and Jaguar. Europe’s other big car-making nation, Italy, joined the trio last month after winning concessions for Fiat and its Maserati and Ferrari sports cars.
Environmentalists had held the power during negotiations in the European Parliament, throwing out an earlier compromise they saw as too soft on automakers.
But the economic crisis added weight to manufacturers’ demands, and lawmakers accepted the phased-in deal after winning assurances that carmakers would have to meet more ambitious targets further down the road.
“This is a huge disappointment,” said British Liberal member Chris Davies. “Tough carbon curbs would have led to lower driving costs, but the consumer seems to have been largely forgotten.”
Emissions will have to be cut around 40 per cent to 95 gm per km by 2020, a goal expected to.boost sales of electric cars and hybrids. But Davies said such an ambitious goal would be difficult, given the watered-down mid-term cuts.
Last week’s deal sees tough fines of 95 euros ($119.80) per gm per car sold for automakers that miss their target by a long way, but those that overshoot by less than three gm face modest sanctions of between 5 and 25 euros.
“It’s a proper compromise,” said German Conservative Member Angelika Niebler. “That’s acceptable because of the difficult situation of industry now.”
The Financial Express (New Delhi), 8 Dec. 2008
Has the Kyoto Protocol Worked?
Agreed in 1997, the Kyoto Protocol aimed to cut emissions of greenhouse gases across the developed world by about 5 per cent compared with 1990. It came into force in 2005, following ratification by Russia, which means the deadline for the legally binding cuts to be made is 2008-12. It was based on the “common but differentiated responsibility” approach to global warming, with countries most able to make cuts asked to do so. Many countries were allowed to increase pollution, including all those in the developing world. Most controversially, Kyoto introduced mechanisms such as carbon trading to help countries meet their targets in “flexible” ways — often in other countries — rather than by making cuts at home.
Figures released by the U.N. last month suggest the world is on track to meet its Kyoto targets for greenhouse gases — carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, sulphur hexafluoride, hydrofluorocarbons and perfluorocarbons. Emissions by the 40 industrialised nations that agreed binding cuts in pollution are down 5 per cent on 1990 levels. But the drop has little to do with climate policies: the bulk of the decline is down to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent economic decline in eastern Europe in the 1990s. Without these so-called “economies in transition,” greenhouse gas emissions have grown by almost 10 per cent since 1990.
Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the U.N. climate secretariat, said the figures showed emissions were rising once again in eastern Europe. “The biggest recent increase in emissions of industrialised countries has come from economies in transition, which have seen a rise of 7.4 per cent in greenhouse gas emissions within the 2000 to 2006 time frame,” he said.
Among industrialised nations, 16 are on target to meet their Kyoto obligations, including France, the U.K., Greece and Hungary, the U.N. said. Some 20 countries are off-course, including Canada, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, New Zealand and Spain. Nations that miss their Kyoto target in 2012 will incur a penalty of an additional third added to whatever cut they agree under a new treaty in Copenhagen.
Has Kyoto worked? “In terms of emission reductions achieved, the answer would be no,”De Boer said. “A 5 per cent cut is a pretty small step on what will be a long and arduous journey. On the other hand, Kyoto has had great success in putting an architecture in place. Monitoring and verification systems, carbon markets, technology transfer and funds for adaptation have all been mobilised by Kyoto,” he said. “I think this is a fabulous architecture
that we can build on on the road to Copenhagen.”
There are seven key issues on the road to Copenhagen.
Global vision
The world has yet to formally agree a goal in the battle against global warming. This could be a maximum temperature rise, such as 2oC, or concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. More likely, it will be a vaguer ‘direction of travel’ such as the G8 pledge to halve global emissions by 2050.
Mitigation
The key issue - who will cut their carbon by how much and by when. To be meaningful, targets must be short-term, perhaps something like 25-40 per cent by 2020 for the developed world. Developing countries, such as China, could be allowed to increase pollution, as long as they reduce the rate of increase, and agree to take on proper reductions within 15 years or so.
Adaptation
How much rich countries will pay poorer ones to cope with floods and droughts. And how the developed world can make sure the promised money is paid.
Technology
How developing countries will access affordable clean technology to reduce emissions, such as carbon capture and solar power, developed by companies in industrialised countries.
Finance
How developed countries will provide funds for adaptation and mitigation in the developing world, and how those funds will be managed.
Forests
How developing countries with tropical forests can be paid to keep them intact — deforestation causes about a fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions.
Carbon trading and offsets
How systems such as the UN clean development mechanism and the European emissions trading scheme set up under Kyoto can be strengthened and expanded. — (© Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008).
The Hindu (New Delhi), 9 Dec. 2008
पर्यावरण की चिंता
पूरी दुनिया पर्यावरण-प्रदूषण के भय से त्रस्त है। यह चिंता नई नहीं है पहले भी थी। तब हमारे मुनियों ने इस विषय पर भी चिन्तन किया था, इसके समाधान भी पेश किए थे। उन्होंने पर्यावरण के हानिकारक प्रत्येक काम को आसुरी प्रवृति और हितकर को दैवी प्रवृत्ति माना है। हमारी अदूरदर्शिता के कारण इस पृथ्वी पर रहने वालों के सामने पर्यावरण प्रदूषण एक विकराल रुप धारण कर रहा है। कुदरत का ऐसा प्रावधान है कि वृक्ष- वनस्पतियां आदि पर्यावरण के लिए एक महत्वपूर्ण स्तंभ बनें। यह सब प्राकृतिक सम्पदाएं पर्यावरण के सजग प्रहरी हैं, जो एक आवश्यक भूमिका निभाते हैं। वृक्ष कार्बन-डाई ऑक्साइड आदि हानिकारक गैसों को शोषित कर लेते हैं और सब प्राणियों के लिए जीवनदायक प्राण-वायु (ऑक्सीजन) उपलब्ध कराते हैं। वृक्ष-वनस्पतियां सभी प्राणियों के प्राण हैं। हमारे सभी ब्राह्मण ग्रंथों, वेदों, भारतीय दर्शनशास्त्रों में कितने ही ऐसे प्रमाण हैं ‘प्राणों वै वनस्पति, वन-वनस्पतियों के सुख शांतिदायक और अनुकूल होने की कामना की गई है। वैसे भी भारतीय परम्परा में वटवृक्ष , आम्र, पीपल, तुलसी आदि का नाश सर्वथा निषेध माना गया है। हमारी पवित्र सरिताएं और सरोवर के तटों पर आस्था केन्द्र काशी, मथुरा, हरिद्वार आदि तीर्थ स्थापित हैं।
वृक्ष हर प्रकार से पृथ्वी के रक्षक हैं, जो मरुस्थल पर नियंत्रण करते हैं, नदियों की बाढ़ की रोकथाम व जलवायु को स्वच्छ रखते हैं, समय पर वर्षा लाने में सहायक हैं, धरती की उपजाऊशक्ति को बढाते हैं। वृक्ष हमारा दाता है जो हमें निरन्तर सुख ही देता रहता है। जनता व सरकार का दायित्व बनता है कि अधिक से अधिक वृक्ष लगाकर वातावरण को दूषित होने से बचाएं। ऐसा करके हम अपना ही नहीं, सर्वजन हितकारी कल्याण का काम करेंगे। हमें वृक्षों व वनों को अपने पुत्रों की भांति पालना व रक्षा करनी चाहिए, वृक्षों का निष्प्रयोजन काटना न हो और हो भी तो उतने या उससे दुगने वृक्ष अवश्य लगाएं। अगर समय रहते नहीं चेते तो दूषित वातावरण हमें और हमारी भावी पीढ़ी के विनाश का कारण बन सकता है।
हिन्दुस्तान (देहरादून),
18 Dec. 2008ग्लोबल वॉर्मिंग से महाशक्ति बन सकता है रुस
अमेरिकी खुफिया विभाग के पूर्वानुमानों के मुताबिक 2025 में ग्लोबल वॉर्मिंग का लाभ रुस को होगा। वह महाशक्ति बन सकता है। दूसरी ओर तुर्की और इंडोनेशिया जैसे मुसलिम देशों का प्रभाव दुनिया भर में बढ़ेगा।
अमेरिका की नेशनल इंटेलिजेंस काउंसिल की रिपोर्ट में इस संभावना को भी रेखांकित किया गया है कि अगले दो दशक में डालर का महत्व कम हो सकता है। रपट में आशंका जताई गई है कि किसी पूर्वी या मध्य यूरोपीय देश में संगठित अपराध फैल सकता है। अमेरिका नेताओं को उभरती समस्यों और चुनौतियों की पूरी जानकारी देने के लिए नेशनल इंटेलिजेंस काउंसिल नियमित रुप से इस तरह के वैश्विक रुझान प्रकाशित करता है। रपट के मुताबिक गर्म होते वायुमंडल से रुस के कृषि काल में इजाफा होगा। उत्तरी तेल क्षेत्रों तक इसकी पहुंच बना सकती है। इससे उसकी अर्थव्यवस्था मजबूत होगी। रिपोर्ट में कहा गया है कि ऊर्जा क्षेत्र में निवेश में पीछे रहने और वहां जारी अपराध व सरकारी भ्रष्टाचार से विश्व की एक बड़ी शक्ति के रुप में रुस के उदय पर बादल छा सकते हैं।
विश्ळेषकों ने आगाह किया है कि रुस जिस तरह के संगठित अपराध से जूझ रहा है उसी तरह का अपराध किसी पूर्वी या मध्य यूरोपीय देश में छा सकता है। रिपोर्ट में इस बात का पूर्वानुमान लगाया गया है कि अरब जगत और पश्चिम एशिया के बाहर स्थित मुसलिम देशों का भू-राजनीतिक उभार हो सकता है। बड़ी शक्ति बन कर उभरने वाले इन मुसलिम देशों में तुर्की और इंडोनेशिया का नाम हो सकता है, जो नई विश्व व्यवस्था में केंद्रीय भूमिका निभाएंगे।
रिपोर्ट में नई विश्व व्यवस्था में ईरान के इसी तरह के उभार के भी कयास लगाए गए हैं। इसके लिए ईरान को धार्मिक शासन की अपनी राह छोड़नी होगी। रिपोर्ट के मुताबिक तेल पर दुनिया की निर्भरता के दिन लद सकते हैं। कुछ ऐसा ही हाल अमेरिकी डालर का भी हो सकता है। डॉलर का महत्व बना रहेगा लेकिन बस इतना कि वह अन्य राष्ट्रीय मुद्राओं के बीच अगली कतार में होगा।
जनसत्ता (नई दिल्ली), 22 Nov. 2008
2008
अब तक का 10वां सबसे गर्म सालप्रकृति से मानवीय छेड़छाड़ का भयावह परिणाम अब निरंतर स्पष्ट से स्पष्टतर होता दिखने लगा है। पिछले 150 वर्षों के दौरान वर्ष 2008 का 10वां सबसे गर्म साल रहना भी इसी तथ्य को प्रतिध्वनित करता है।
संयुक्त राष्ट्र की वर्ल्ड मिटियोरजिकल आर्गनाइजेशन (यू.एन.डब्ल्यू.एम.ओ.) के मुताबिक
, वर्ष 1850 से, जबसे पर्यावरण से संबंधित रिकॉर्ड रखा जाना शुरू हुआ, मौजूदा साल अब तक का 10वां सबसे गरम वर्ष घोषित हो सकता है। हालांकि पिछले कुछ वर्षों के मुकाबले इस साल औसत वैश्विक तापमान में थोड़ी कमी दर्ज की गई है। यू.एन.डब्ल्यू.एम.ओ. का कहना है कि वर्ष 2008 में समुद्री तथा जमीन की सतह पर हवा का संयुक्त तापमान 0.31 डिग्री सेल्सियस रहा जो 1961-1990 के वार्षिक औसत तापमान से ज्यादा था।भारत
, पाकिस्तान और वियतनाम समेत दक्षिण एशिया में भारी बारिश से आई बाढ़ में सिर्फ भारत में ही 2,600 से ज्यादा लोगों की जानें गईं जबकि एक करोड़ से ज्यादा लोग बेघर हो गए। इसके अलावा दक्षिण अमेरिका के पश्चिमी कोलंबिया एवं दक्षिणी ब्राजील में सामान्य से ज्यादा बारिश होने से आई बाढ़ 20 लाख से ज्यादा लोगों के लिए मुसीबत की वजह बनी।इस साल दुनिया के अनेक हिस्सों में विनाशकारी बाढ़
, जबरदस्त सूखा, तूफानी बर्फबारी तथा लू व शीतलहर के थपेड़ों के रूप में प्रकृति का रौद्र रूप दिखा। म्यांमार में ‘नरगिस’ के रूप में सबसे भयावह चक्रवाती तूफान आया। इस प्राकृतिक आपदा में 78,000 लोग मारे गए जबकि हजारों मकान क्षतिग्रस्त हो गए। इसके साथ ही समूचे यूरोप में सामान्य से ज्यादा तापमान तथा यूरेशिया में तुर्की से चीन तक कड़ाके की ठंड से अफगानिस्तान एवं चीन में सैकड़ों लोग जान गवां बैठे। दक्षिणी आस्ट्रेलिया में मार्च के महीने में लोगों को प्रचंड गर्मी का सामना करना पड़ा। इस दौरान एडीलेड शहर अधिकतम 35 डिग्री सेल्सियस तापमान के बीच पहली बार लगातार 15 दिन तक लू में झुलसता रहा। दक्षिण-पूर्वी आस्ट्रेलिया में बारिश नहीं होने से काफी लंबे समय तक सूखा पड़ा। मौसम से संबंधित रिकॉर्ड रखने की शुरूआत के बाद पिछले साल पहली बार अमेरिका में एक के बाद एक चक्रवाती तूफान आए जबकि समुद्री तूफान ने क्यूबा को लगातार तीन बार झकझोरा। इस साल ओजोन की परत में छेद का आकार पिछले साल के मुकाबले 20 लाख वर्ग किलोमीटर और बढ़ गया। पिछले साल अंटार्कटिक में आ॓जोन की परत में छेद का आकार ढाई करोड़ वर्ग किलोमीटर था जो इस साल दो करोड़ 70 लाख वर्ग किमी हो गया है।वर्ष
2008 में कनाडाई आर्कटिक में हिमखंडों के एक चौथाई हिस्से का गायब हो जाना पर्यावरण से जुड़ी बहुत बड़ी घटना रही। करीब 70 मीटर मोटी बर्फ की चादर एक शताब्दी पहले करीब 9,000 वर्ग किमी क्षेत्र में फैली हुई थी जो अब घटकर महज 1,000 वर्ग किमी रह गया है।राष्ट्रीय सहारा (देहरादून), 19 Dec. 2008
