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Mint
6 days ago
- Climate
- Mint
The world has already breached a dangerous level of warming, and India isn't prepared
NEW DELHI : Climate Change & You is a fortnightly newsletter written by Bibek Bhattacharya and Sayantan Bera. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your inbox. Dear reader, As I was writing this newsletter, Mumbai was drowning in record rains. The monsoon set in 8 days early this year, and according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD), it is so early that it has already touched Mumbai. In fact, this year the monsoon came to Mumbai two weeks early, within 24 hours of its onset in Kerala. Mumbai certainly wasn't ready for it. In fact, by the morning of 26 May, one of the city's main stations in Colaba registered a record-breaking amount of rainfall—at 295mm—for the month of May. The previous record was set in 1918 – 107 years ago. We will soon know if climate change played a role in both the early onset of monsoon, as well as the rainfall in Mumbai. But what is already clear is that with rising atmospheric heat, monsoon rains will be more erratic and heavier as the years go by, simply because hotter air can hold more moisture, resulting in cloudbursts like the one in Mumbai on Sunday night. Speaking of climate anomalies, April 2025 was the second hottest April on record, after 2024. According to EU's climate monitoring service Copernicus, the global average temperature in April was 1.51 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial levels. This made April the 21st straight month that was 1.5 degrees Celsius hotter than pre-industrial times, prompting some scientists to wonder if the world has already crossed the safety limit of 1.5 degrees of warming on a permanent basis. In fact, a new report from the World Meteorological Organization states that, by 2030, the world might experience at least one year that is 2 degrees hotter. If this is true, then this spells very bad news for the planet, as we will see below. STATE OF THE CLIMATE India's unbearable heat is rising The biggest climate threat in India continues to be heat, and the heat risk is rising. According to a recent study by the New Delhi-based climate policy thinktank Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), 57% of India's districts are facing high to very high heat hazards. And 76% of India's population lives in these districts. The risk assessment study is based on 34 separate heat indicators from 734 districts across the country. It found that 417 districts are in the high risk zone, while another 201 faced moderate heat hazards. The top ten heat prone states and union territories include Delhi, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Goa and Uttar Pradesh. Also Read: Remembering the Climate Pope The report, titled How Extreme Heat Is Impacting India, highlighted two important dimensions of rising heat—an increase in very warm nights, and a rise in humid heat. Both of these factors amplify the effect of heat on the human body, and can lead to deadly overheating. According to the study, nearly 70% of the districts recorded an increase of over five extra warm nights per year between 2012 and 2022, as compared with 1982-2011. This is especially true of cities, where the heat island effect caused by highly built-up environments has been boosting warmer nights. For example, Mumbai recorded 15 additional 'very warm' summer nights in the past decade compared with the previous three decades. It is a similar situation for other cities like Jaipur and Chennai. With a 10% rise in relative humidity in north India, drier cities like New Delhi are seeing more humid heat, and high humidity plus heat is a deadly combination for the human body. THE NEWS IN BRIEF -In an incisive and well-researched article,LA Timesclimate reporter Sammy Roth lays out how Warren Buffet's investments for Berkshire have always skewed towards fossil fuels, helping drive planet-heating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. -All eyes are on Brazil, as the country gears up to host a pivotal global climate conference this November. In this interview with Hindustan Times, COP30 president designate André Aranha Correa do Lago lays out his priorities for the summit. -In this opinion piece, noted climate skeptic and contrarian Bjorn Lomberg questions if renewable energy really is cheaper than fossil fuels. CLIMATE CHANGE TRACKER Sea-level rise threatening India's coasts I started this newsletter by noting that the world has already experienced 21 consecutive months of 1.5 degrees Celsius of global heating. Over the past decade, the average heating was of 1.2 degrees, but it seems like we are steadily moving into a much hotter world, sooner than many had predicted. In fact, it is clear that the goal to keep warming to under 1.5 degrees by 2100 is already unreachable, with many climate scientists predicting a catastrophic rise of 2.5-3 degrees of heat this century. This will have serious consequences. According to a major climate science study published earlier in May, sea-level rise may become unstoppable once the world hits 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming permanently. The study, published in the journal Communications Earth & Environment, states that even at current levels of heating, the global sea-level is set to rise by 1cm a year by 2100. Given that we are on course to nearly 3 degrees of heating, this would be devastating for the Greenland and west Antarctic ice sheets, leading to their collapse and a sea level rise of 12m. To put that into perspective, about 230 million people around the world's coastal areas live 1m above the current sea level, while 1 billion people live within 10m above sea level. In India, at least 63 million people (6% of the total population) live within 10m of seacoasts, the second highest in the world after China. For India, this number is projected to grow to 216 million people (10.3% of the total population) by 2060. With sea-level rise a given, there's an urgent need to adapt to this new reality. Which leads us to the next section. KNOW YOUR JARGON Climate Migration With India facing multiple climate threats, the one major change that will be triggered by rising climate hazards is migration. Whether it is sea-level rise, or other impacts like water stress, low crop yields, ecosystem loss and droughts, more and more Indians—mostly the poorest—will be forced to become climate refugees in their own country. According to a 2020 report by Climate Action Network South Asia, about 14 million Indians were forced to migrate due to climate change the absence of drastic climate mitigation measures, the report forecasts over 45 million migrants by 2050. This is a reality that India urgently needs to plan for. Also Read: A deep dive into India's climate crisis Among the many measures that experts urge countries to make is to enhance resilience among vulnerable communities, ensure just transition for agriculture workers, provide universal access to social protection measures, guarantee decent work by creating job opportunities and have a plan for safe, orderly and dignified movement during forced migrations. This will require a combination of international finance access, and generating local finances by progressive taxation of fossil fuel companies, and even international cooperation with our neighbouring countries. India is badly lagging in all of these areas, though some initial measures have been taken. Last year, the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) and the International Organization for Migration (IOM) set up a three-year project to increase resilience measures for climate vulnerable communities in Odisha and Telangana. This programme offers alternatives to migration, though it is also mandated to provide information for safe migration. But there is no actual policy addressing migration, apart from a private member's bill on climate migrants' protection and rehabilitation from an Assam Congress MP, which has been gathering dust since 2022. PRIME NUMBER 6.7 In 2024, the world lost 6.7 million hectares of primary forests, according to new data from the University of Maryland's GLAD Lab. The data, hosted on the World Resources Institute's Global Forest Watch platform, shows that this is nearly twice as much forest loss as in 2023. To put it another way, in 2024, the world lost forests at the rate of 18 football fields every minute. The data also revealed a disturbing new trend—loss due to fires. In 2024, nearly half the forest loss was due to fires, a huge jump from previous years, when agriculture was the primary driver of these losses. These fires emitted 4.1 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, four times more than emissions from all air travel in 2023. The loss of forest cover is a major driver of climate change, as without humid primary forests, land on the planet loses its capacity to store carbon. Forests are the most effective carbon capture and storage tech we know of. Between 2002 and 2024, the world lost 83 million hectares of primary forests, or 8.1% of forest cover. According to the Global Forest Watch data, India has lost 348 kilohectares (1kha=1,000 hectares) of primary forests in 2002-2024, about 15% of the country's entire tree cover. BOOK OF THE MONTH Annihilation by Jeff Vandermeer The human urge to view nature as something that is passive is rather strong, which shows itself in the seemingly carefree way in which we plunder it for our gains. But as Jeff Vandermeer's award-winning weird fiction novel Annihilation shows, this couldn't be further from the truth. In reality, natural processes are gigantic and care not a whit for human claims of mastery. If we cannot adapt our ways to the laws of nature, we will be overwhelmed, subsumed and, well, annihilated. In the novel this process takes the form of a seemingly alien entity that creates a human free zone in south Florida, called Area X. As Area X expands, all human signs are obliterated, and people caught inside it are changed into inhuman beings, monstrous to us, but utterly harmonious with nature. The first of an acclaimed trilogy, Annihilation is a must-read for its imaginative and unsettling depiction of nature that doesn't care about human beings. So that's it for this edition of Climate Change & You, dear reader. Sayantan will be back in a fortnight with the next instalment. Also Read: When winter melts into summer
Mint
03-05-2025
- Politics
- Mint
Remembering Pope Francis's climate advocacy, Bill Aitken's nature writing, and the race to avoid runaway climate change
Climate Change & You is a fortnightly newsletter written by Bibek Bhattacharya and Sayantan Bera. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your inbox. Dear reader, With the death of Pope Francis on 21 April, we lost a powerful and persuasive force in the fight against climate change. It was probably to be expected that a Pope as progressive as him would draw clear connections between the plight of the poor and marginalized, and how this inequality only gets exacerbated by global warming. The 'Climate Pope', as he is hailed by scientists, officials and climate activists worldwide, had made environmental advocacy a central part of his Papacy. Over the years, he intervened time and again, reminding both rich corporations and nations of the debt that they owed to nature and to the poor. Two years after becoming Pope, in 2015, Francis published a now-famous document, the Laudato si': On Care for Our Common Home . In it, he called climate change 'a global problem with grave implications: environmental, social, economic, political, and for the distribution of goods." Speaking to The Guardian , Austen Ivereigh, a papal biographer, called the document Francis's 'signature teaching": 'Francis has made it not just safe to be Catholic and green; he's made it obligatory." Also Read | India's climate crisis: Early heatwaves, melting Himalayan glaciers, and a biodiversity collapse As planet-heating carbon emissions continued to rise despite warnings, Pope Francis took a more combative line, calling 'Ecocide" a sin in 2019, and writing in 2023: 'Despite all attempts to deny, conceal, gloss over, or relativize the issue, the signs of climate change are here and increasingly evident." In 2024, during a climate conference at the Vatican, he urged political leaders to think whether, '…we are working for a culture of life or for a culture of death."The Pope will be missed. My newsletter partner Sayantan wrote about India's early heatwaves in the previous edition , and I've written about how February was a record hot year for India. As expected, April was no different, with record early heat scorching north India. By mid-April, daytime temperatures in New Delhi had hit 40 degrees Celsius thrice, large parts of India and Pakistan were reeling from heatwaves. A recent analysis of the heatwaves by French extreme weather attribution group ClimaMeter has found that temperatures in New Delhi were 5 degrees higher than the seasonal average, and the overwhelming reason for that is climate change, with temperature anomalies in India and Pakistan reaching as much as +12 degrees Celsius at times. ClimaMeter's analysis essentially compares the heatwave conditions to temperature data from the 1950s and concludes that the heatwaves were primarily due to the effects of human-caused climate change. A small percentage of the conditions could be attributed to natural climate variability. -The state of coral reefs around the world are extremely precarious. This story is how a coral bleaching event in April, caused by marine heatwaves, affected 80% of corals around the world. -Environmental pollution and climate change touches every aspect of your life, even down to skincare. In this interview , Dr Annie Black, the international scientific director at luxury beauty brand Lancôme, says that both pollution and UV rays are damaging the skins of Indians. - This opinion piece for Mint makes a strong argument that if India has to get ahead of climate-fuelled health challenges, then it needs to build robust health-data infrastructure, strengthen inter-ministerial data sharing and enhance agency cooperation Nearly everyone around the world is worried about climate change and would like more intense climate action. And nearly everyone thinks that very few people want climate action from their governments. Many see this strange conundrum to be at the heart of the reason why governments around the world aren't trying as hard as possible to ramp up ambition. The message that people who want more climate action are actually the overwhelming majority is at the heart of a new media endeavour called ' the 89 Percent Project ". Helmed by the journalism collective Covering Climate Now (CCNow), between 21-28 April, participating newsrooms like The Guardian , Deutsche Welle , Rolling Stone , TIME and Scientific American published a series of articles aimed at policymakers and governments to sensitize them about the 'silent climate majority". Also Read | The alarming climate shifts taking place in India They made the case that there is actually overwhelming global support for the pivot away from fossil fuels while there is still time, and that governments shouldn't pretend like this consensus doesn't exist. There will be a second week of stories and advocacy in October, leading up to the COP30 UN climate summit in Brazil. Climate action is popular not just with common people, but also with business leaders. A recent global survey of 1,477 executives in firms across 15 mature and economies revealed that 97% support a move away from fossil fuels. The survey, commissioned by Beyond Fossil Fuels (a Europe-based civil society campaign), E3G (a climate think tank) and We Mean Business Coalition (a climate non-profit that works with global businesses), also found that 84% of Indian business leaders supported a shift to renewable energy (RE) by 2035. Geoengineering, or to be more precise solar geoengineering, is the ultimate pipe dream —that of unearthing global scale technological fixes to stop the planet from getting any hotter. These are ideas that are, in their present state, more to do with science fiction than science. Basically, geoengineering solutions are primarily about finding ways to prevent solar radiation (i.e. heat) from reaching the planet, by deflecting it. If enough heat doesn't reach the Earth, the logic goes, then it won't get trapped by greenhouse gases like CO2 and methane. And thus, the planet gets cooler. There are all sorts of proposals for this, including one from 1997 of putting giant mirrors in space. Geoengineering ideas include spraying the Earth's atmosphere with aerosol gas particles, or brightening high altitude clouds by spraying them with sea water. On 22 April, a UK government-funded programme announced that it will undertake small-scale outdoor geoengineering experiments to test the feasibility of the technology. The US administration under Joe Biden also flirted with geoengineering experiments . But, as scientists have consistently pointed out, you cannot fix the climate by tinkering with planetary systems. It's a matter of scale: first of all, we are decades away from any valid tech that can control heating or do effective carbon-capture-and-storage on a global scale. The money invested in such research would be better used to phase out fossil fuels instead. Secondly, even when possible, such experiments can cause more harm , like shifting rainfall patterns, and adversely affecting agriculture. Focusing on geoengineering is also a form of distraction , turning attention away from tackling the root cause of global warming—burning fossil fuels. Unless there's significant action within the next 5-10 years to drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the world is staring at a catastrophic warming of 3 degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century. I should make it clear that this is a distinct possibility. And if that happens, then global systems will start breaking down by the 2050s-2070s, as a spate of important new research has indicated. According to one from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries at the University of Exeter, the global economy would lose 50% or more of GDP between 2070 and 2090. Inaction can also lead to compounding effects, and the report warns that if the world heats up by 3 degrees Celsius by 2050, the result would be the death of billions. According to another study , published in the journal Environmental Research Letters , warns of a loss of 40% to global GDP if we stay at business-as-usual. The researchers conclude that while the economic costs of shifting away from fossil fuels would be high in the short term, the cost of inaction is cataclysmic. When the travel writer Bill Aitken passed at the age of 91 in his home in Mussoorie on 16 April, I was one of his many fans who mourned the gentle, witty and sharp man's loss. It seems somehow reductive to call a man of so many parts a mere travel writer, especially when you read his magnum opus— The Nanda Devi Affair . The book is no mere travelogue, but Aitken's meditation on his fascination and obsession with Nanda Devi, the 7,816m Himalayan peak that is also a goddess to the people of Uttarakhand. To read this joyful book is to soak in the verve with which Aitken chased down all of Nanda's secret places and hidden lores. It is also a powerful reminder that nature is never impersonal. The book may not have anything directly to do with climate change, but read it to awaken your environmental consciousness. You'll want to defend our beautiful world with your life then. That's it with this issue of Climate Change & You , dear reader. Sayantan will be back with the next instalment in a fortnight. Also Read | How Donald Trump's attack on US climate agencies affect India
