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Report Brings Chasm Between India’s Welfare Aspirations and Reality Into Focus

Report Brings Chasm Between India’s Welfare Aspirations and Reality Into Focus

Residents of a slum near Sarai Rohilla Railway line, in New Delhi, September 13, 2020. Photo: PTI/Atul Yadav.

Climate change is threatening your health like never before, no matter which part of the world you live in, according to the fifth edition of The Lancet Countdown.

This is an initiative to document the health effects of climate change, and enlists scientists of multiple disciplines from 35 academic institutions and UN agencies. The collaboration assesses governments’ actions on their commitments under the Paris Agreement, in which 197 countries have committed to limit global warming to well below 2º C, preferably to 1.5º C, by the 22nd century.

The report tracks 43 indicators that link health and climate change, and cover:

1. Climate change impacts, exposures and vulnerabilities,

2. Adaptation, planning and resilience for health,

3. Mitigation actions and their health benefits,

4. Economics and finance, and

5. Public and political engagement

According to the report, the 2020 indicators present the most worrying outlook reported since its inception.

“These effects are often unequal, disproportionately impacting populations who have contributed the least to the problem,” the report’s authors write. “This fact reveals a deeper question of justice, whereby climate change interacts with existing social and economic inequalities and exacerbates longstanding trends between and within the countries.”

Food insecurity

Public health researcher and doctor Sylvia Karpagam agreed with this assessment – especially vis-à-vis the Indian story. “Industries and automobiles are largely left uncontrolled, with no strict regulations for emissions enforced by the government,” she told The Wire Science.

“In the predominantly casteist and classist society of India, the worst polluters could be the elites and corporates, but the ‘solutions’ are always forced on the poorest in the society, despite this adversely affecting their livelihoods, economy and health.”

Climate change itself has many health implications, including direct ones like wildfires raging over tracts of land as large as small countries. Even the risk of exposure to wildfires has more than doubled since the early 2000s, with South Africa, Kenya and Lebanon being at highest risk. In 2018, the area of land affected by severe drought was twice as much as the historical baseline, and the volume of maize, wheat, soybean and rice crops being produced have been falling steadily.

Indirect effects include loss in crop yield due to floods and droughts, which in turn affects food and nutrition security. These effects are dearly felt in countries like India, where 60% of cultivated land is rain-fed as well as contributes 89% of India’s millets, 88% of pulses, 69% of oilseeds and 40% of rice.

“These areas are most vulnerable to increased climatic extremes accompanied by massive increases in unseasonal climatic events, particularly where the onset of the southwest monsoons, their withdrawal and the onset of the northeast monsoons and their withdrawal are annual markers for the seasonality of agriculture and livestock operations,” Sagari R. Ramdas, a veterinary scientist who also works with the Food Sovereignty Alliance, said.

She explained that the government’s encouragement to intensify agriculture and rear livestock was reducing diversity on the farm, and leaving the poorest and most marginal of farmers and landless workers who also own and rear livestock more vulnerable.

Ramdas also said the recent Farm Acts, which have provoked lakhs of farmers in India’s north to rise in protest, are anti-climate – “a disaster for food security and climate change” that “will bring more hunger”.

“With climate disasters occurring all the time, affecting the poorest citizens of our country, it’s sheer hara-kiri and criminal of the government to hand over our food and farming systems to corporations via these Farm Acts.”

Also read: As Farmers March to Delhi, Climate Change Fuels Their Larger Crisis

Implications for people

Labourers working at a brick kiln in Amritsar.
Labourers working at a brick kiln in Amritsar, April 2020. Photo: PTI

As for the farmers themselves: extreme heat-waves and cold-waves reduce labour productivity, especially in the developing world. Annual heat-related deaths among the elderly have risen by about 54% in the last two decades. In 2018, nearly 3 lakh people succumbed to extreme heat. According to the report, India is the second worst-hit country with 31,000 heat-related deaths.

Earlier this year, there were reports that heat-wave deaths are underreported in India and that the government doesn’t have adaptation strategies in place. The Wire Science also reported in 2018 that India’s definition of heat-waves may no longer be in keeping with how quickly the climate is changing.

High temperatures have also taken a toll on productivity, causing a record high loss of 302 billion potential work hours worldwide. India was the worst affected on this count, accounting for 39% of the loss. (These figures are underestimates that researchers arrived at assuming all agricultural and construction work is done in the shade or indoors.)

Next, infectious diseases like malaria and even COVID-19 spread more as deforestation and urbanisation increase together. Mosquito-borne diseases are influenced by climate change, since temperature influences the rate of development and reproduction of mosquitoes, and precipitation provides the habitats for their larvae and pupae. The climate is now 15% more suitable for dengue’s and nearly 150% more suitable for malaria’s transmission compared to the 1950s.

But malaria and dengue aren’t the only diseases around.

A recent study, published in Current Science, said that while India’s public healthcare system has had many successes with disease control, diseases outside the control verticals have been neglected.

“While disease surveillance has improved for childhood diarrhoea, there is no systematic surveillance for water-borne diseases in general. Similarly, there is much less data and poor preparedness for emerging zoonotic diseases outside of traditionally endemic regions,” the authors wrote.

Questions over NCAP

Air pollution is a particularly important go-between between climate change and health, and the report acknowledges this as well. In 2018, human activities released greenhouse gases equivalent to 52 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide, which subsequently were responsible for the deaths of 7 million people.

Although bad air is an international problem, some countries – especially India – are more affected than others. About half a million people here succumb to air pollution every year. Of them, nearly a fifth die because of burning coal – in houses, power plants and by factories.

The COVID-19 pandemic did temporarily bring down the concentrations of some pollutants in the lower atmosphere, including greenhouse gases. Daily carbon dioxide emissions were 17% lower in April 2020 relative to April 2019 – with a drop of up to 26% in some countries.

“Current estimates suggest that global emissions will fall by 8% in 2020 as a result of both the economic downturn and the restrictions to local and international travel,” the report estimates.

“COVID-19 has been the largest demonstration of our times that Indian cities too can have clean air and blue skies,” director of the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting And Research programme, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune, Gufran Beig said at a discussion in October.

“Through the creation of scientifically guided source emission databases, critical early warning systems and robust air quality management plans, Pune and other Indian cities can improve good air quality,” he added.

However, this optimism appears to be borne out only on paper.

In 2018, the Government of India launched the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) to tackle air pollution in 102 cities. The programme aims to reduce the concentration of PM2.5 and PM10 particles in ambient air by 20% by 2024, relative to 2017.

However, scientists from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Vienna, and the Council on Energy, Environment and Water, New Delhi, reported in March 2019 that 45% of the Indian population in 2030 would breathe dangerous levels of PM2.5 even if the country strictly adhered to NCAP.

And by 2050, it would further rise to about 56%. “Approximately 930 million people will be exposed to concentrations above [National Ambient Air Quality Standards] limits if no further action is taken,” the report read.

Also read: What Ella Kissi-Debrah’s Death Reminds Us About India’s Air Pollution Crisis

Unequal access

Two residential high-rises in Mumbai, the setting Sun visible between them. Photo: Balaji Srinivasan/Pexels

In another review published recently, atmospheric scientists from India and the US wrote that “74% of the action points were categorised as ‘institutional’, which used the language of ‘overseeing, planning, proposing, preparing, investigating, identifying, ensuring, strengthening, training, studying, and engaging’. These activities are often part of the capacity building activities and are not expected to yield any tangible benefits for air quality”.

But for the wicked magnitude of the crisis facing Earth’s humans, only half of the 101 countries the Countdown surveyed have developed national adaptation plans. And even as the world’s as well as India’s spending on health adaptation to climate change have increased, the latter is still only about Rs 59 per person. This figure indicates the unequal access to good quality healthcare in the country, as well as the number of ‘solutions’ that remain wanting.

Karpagam said “the Indian government should curb the use of automobiles, invest in public transport systems so people would cut down on private vehicles, have separate paths for cycles and pedestrians, reduce global tourism (especially commercial flying) and have efficient solid waste management.”

This said, India’s health adaptation allocation is similar to other Southeast Asian countries – but nearly eight-times lower than countries in the Americas.

According to Karpagam, India needs to move from the curative, corporatised, centralised model of healthcare to a more comprehensive model that focuses on prevention and management at the primary level. She reiterated the need for a holistic solution to the problem and said looking at climate change as a standalone phenomenon would cause “knee jerk decisions that could impact vulnerable communities in adverse and unacceptable ways”.

Joel P. Joseph is a science writer.

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