Sustainable and Secure Future

We are witnessing the first signs of the climate crisis. While the word ‘crisis’ should jolt us awake, here’s another statistic: 75% of 10,000 youngsters reported that they thought the future is ‘frightening’. These are the findings of a study, published by The Lancet Planetary Health, which included respondents from Australia, Brazil, Finland, France, India, Nigeria, Philippines, Portugal, the UK, and the USA. More than 50% of the respondents reported feeling sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty.

Year after year, the many days marked for environmental awareness push for concrete actions to protect our planet.

Rather than jumping on the ‘Go Green’ bandwagon and hastily considering the on-the-horizon (and sometimes even the in-the-pipeline) options, it would be simpler to start off with correcting the wrong we are doing—by giving up the habits that are bad for the environment. This would be quicker too, which is crucial given the time we have for arresting or limiting environmental damage and climate change.

Climate Change may feel like an insurmountable problem and our future may look bleak. But all is not lost. On World Environment Day 2022, CSTEP launched a new campaign — Climate On Our Minds. Because there’s Only One Earth.
Through this campaign, we hope to enable climate action triggered by informed conversations on what this crisis means.

The impacts of climate variability, climate change, and extreme events are visible globally and in India. The Global Climate Risk Index 2021 ranks India seventh, considering the extent to which India has been affected by the impacts of weather-related loss events (storms, floods, heatwaves, etc.). The index signals that the repercussions of escalating climate change are exacerbating and can no longer be ignored.

Low-cost air quality sensors are the talk of the town. By addressing cost issues and bringing in portability, these sensors are quickly becoming the game-changers in efforts toward better air quality. Low-cost sensors (LCS) enable dense monitoring of air pollution, allowing policymakers to target interventions at highly polluted areas, thereby improving air quality. But their large-scale use needs careful consideration, given the concerns around the accuracy and reliability of LCS data.

The Government of India, in 2015, had set an ambitious target of installing 100 GW of solar capacity by 2022. The target included 40 GW of rooftop solar (RTS) systems and 60 GW of ground-mounted utility-scale solar (GMS) systems.

Several parts of India reeled under a heatwave in April with temperatures soaring from 43 Degree Celsius to 46 Degree Celsius - the highest since 1901. The grim news is that in the decades to come, India is expected to suffer more frequent and intense heat waves as a result of climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and district-level climate projections made for India at the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy.

 

Meeting India’s short- and long-term climate commitments made at COP26 entails a complete economic transformation, which can have considerable developmental tradeoffs. Many long-term energy and climate models that project low-carbon pathways for the country consider the gross domestic product (GDP) to be exogenously driving growth in various sectors. However, low-carbon policies or technologies will also impact GDP, as well as other economic variables like employment and income.

Almost 10 per cent of the total GHG emissions in India come from its transport sector. Attaining the ‘net zero’ goal calls for strong sectoral interventions, therefore.

In the race for generating data to carry out scientific studies and publish reports, we tend to forget that end-users of such studies or reports are often the employees of state and Central departments. For them to understand the message from the report and the scientific process behind the conclusion, it is essential to make them a part of the studies right from the word ‘go’.