News Digest
February 21, 2024
Air pollution, first challenge for new govt in Delhi
After the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) historic win in Delhi, it will have to start working on its election manifesto of launching ‘Delhi Clean Air Mission’ to halve the city’s average AQI by 2030, reports Mint. The manifesto also assured reduction of PM2.5 and PM10 levels by 50 per cent besides deploying additional road sweeping and water sprinkling machines in the highly polluted areas. As the new government takes office, improving the capital city’s air quality, cleaning the Yamuna River, and tackling the problem of mountainous waste landfills will be top-of-the-mind. The big challenge for the new government is that many things have already been attempted. Earlier governments have closed coal power plants, stopped dirty fuels, scaled up industrial use of natural gas, put public transport and commercial fleets on natural gas, banned old vehicles, restricted truck entry, and tightened control on construction. Yet, clean air continues to elude India’s capital.
Rising heat: 2025 January hottest on record
The Copernicus Climate Change Service said last month was the warmest January on record, with surface air temperatures 1.75 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, reports The Guardian. La Niña is expected to be weak and the prevailing temperatures in parts of the equatorial Pacific Ocean suggested a slowing or stalling of the move towards the cooling phenomenon. Scientists say every fraction of a degree of warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius increases the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, heavy rainfall and droughts. According to CBS News, the surprising January heat record coincides with a new study by a climate science heavyweight, former top NASA scientist James Hansen, and others arguing that global warming is accelerating and the last 15 years have warmed at about twice the rate of the previous 40 years. “I’m confident that this higher rate will continue for at least several years,” said Hansen.
Global risk of flooding to rise exponentially by 2100
According to a new study published in Nature Communications titled ‘The Role of Climate and Population Change in Global Flood Exposure and Vulnerability’, by 2100, those exposed to a 1 percent annual risk flood event (100-year flood) will rise from 1.6 billion to 1.9 billion people. The study provides a comprehensive analysis of how climate change and population growth will shape flood risk by 2100, writes Carboncopy. This increase in exposure is primarily driven by population growth (76.8 percent), with climate change contributing 21.1 percent. By 2100, low-income regions will account for 63 percent of total global flood exposure. This means that the populations least equipped to handle floods — due to inadequate infrastructure, weak governance, and lack of financial resources — will face the highest risks.
Author Yoni Appelbaum decodes America’s mobility crisis
Bloomberg CityLab spoke with Yoni Appelbaum, the author of Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity about the lost joys of Moving Day, why personal mobility and American progress are intertwined, and how to build out of this crisis. His book tracks the rise and fall of America’s freedom of movement and shows how a growing reluctance to pull up stakes has been implicated in its current crisis of housing affordability. He cites Moving Day — this annual celebration of mobility — that happened on different days in different places. “All unwritten leases expired on the same day, and you could have half of a city pick up and move…There was a strong culture of mobility.” The major culprits in this saga are the zoning regulations and housing codes that rose up to limit residential flexibility.
‘Singles tax’ most expensive in New York City
In the city of New York, singles pay an average of $20,100 more per year to live alone, reports CNN, according to an analysis from real estate platforms StreetEasy and Zillow. They calculated the additional cost a person is paying to live solo in a one-bedroom apartment rather than sharing that space with a partner. Couples who live together in a one-bedroom apartment in New York City save a combined average of $40,200 per year on rent, the analysis showed. Other cities with expensive rent, like San Francisco, San Jose, California and Boston, also come with a hefty singles tax — but paying to live alone in New York costs the most. “New York City is abundant with young people looking to live alone. People want to live there, and because the demand is so high, that is a major reason for the discrepancy,” said Emily McDonald, Zillow’s rental trends expert.
Dublin decides to remove keyboxes left in public areas by landlords
Dublin, the capital of Ireland, will remove and destroy lockboxes being used in the public realm such as bike stands and street signage poles, reports The Guardian. The lockboxes have caused concerns over public health and safety in central tourist districts such as Temple Bar. “They can pose a trip hazard as they are normally fastened with a chain to either signage poles or bike stands,” the council said in a report. The boxes are a way for guests to pick up keys to their holiday homes without landlords having to hand them over in person. But for an increasing number of cities across Europe they have become a hated symbol of overtourism. “The units are left lying on the ground without any protection, resulting in public issues as they may become contaminated.” Dublin city council said that lockboxes should be wall-mounted and located beside the entry to a house or apartment.
February 7, 2024
No allocation for climate adaptation in Union Budget
After the Union Budget was presented on February 1, experts have criticised the lack of financial support in the climate adaptation sector that is critical to the lives and livelihoods of millions living in the vulnerable areas of the country, writes Down To Earth. “Climate adaptation is not an option—it is an imperative,” says Abinash Mohanty, global sector-head of climate change and sustainability of IPE-Global. “The world is facing unprecedented geopolitical pushback on the climate agenda and India should have ensured that its fiscal policies reflect this reality through an enhanced budgetary allocation.” The Union budget proposes to increase allocation to solar energy as well as in fossil fuel sectors, both coal and petroleum and natural gas. The environment, forest and climate change ministry received about Rs 3,412 crore, less than 2.5 percent allocation rise over the last budget figure of Rs 3,330 crore.
Mumbai civic budget ups fight against air pollution
Focusing on a three-pronged approach to tackle air pollution, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation has allocated ₹113.18 crore in its budget for the environment department, reports Hindustan Times. First, a five-year contract with the Automotive Research Association of India to conduct periodic emission inventories in the city will verify the source of emissions and quantity of pollutants. Secondly, the BMC is in the process of sealing a deal with IIT-Kanpur for the installation of 75 low-cost air-quality-measuring sensors, costing between Rs 3,00,000 and Rs 10,00,000 each, across the city. The BMC will set up a 72-hour air-quality forecasting system called AIRWISE by collaborating with the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune. Other measures to tackle air pollution have already been announced, including five new Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Systems (CAAQMS) stations, four mobile air-quality measuring vans, 100 dust-suction machines, converting wood/fossil fuel bakeries to cleaner fuel, and the Mumbai Air App.
Trump removes climate mentions from websites
Some researchers have found that their own studies, from ocean carbon cycles to the connectivity of cleaner electrical grids, have now vanished from federal government websites, reports The Guardian. Critics say the actions will stifle the public’s understanding of the climate crisis amid record-breaking temperatures and a wave of storms and wildfires that are being worsened by the burning of fossil fuels. “We should plan for the worst,” said Michael Mann, a climate scientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “The keys to the car have been given to the polluters and fossil fuel plutocrats and they intend to drive it off the climate cliff.” NASA’s key climate change website, which helps chart and explain the increase in the global temperature and planet-heating emissions, remains active but with a note that it is “going to look a little different in the coming months”. The new NASA portal has removed “climate” from its URL.
Record hot years in 2023, 2024 mean world holding onto heat
According to preliminary data from the UK-based research institute European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the temperature in January averaged 13.2 degrees Celsius (55.8F) — hottest January on record, with global average temperatures climbing 1.75 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. In a post detailing the new data, climate scientist Zeke Hausfather said he was surprised to see another all-time high, given expectations that La Niña would make 2025 cooler than a record-hot 2024, Bloomberg reports. “This means that January 2025 stands out as anomalous, even by the standards of the last two years,” he wrote. New research led by James Hansen, director of the climate program at Columbia University and the former NASA scientist who first brought the concept of climate change to the attention of Congress in the 1980s, suggests governments have underestimated how much warming is accelerating. That, in turn, is magnifying natural climate cycles and intensifying extreme weather events.
LA fires debris will contaminate the ocean
The smoke that has choked Los Angeles, the debris piled up along decimated streets, the charred and toxic remnants of thousands of destroyed homes, businesses, cars and electronics — nearly all of it, eventually, will come to rest in the ocean. The Los Angeles Times reports that there is no precedent for how an urban fire of this magnitude could change the ecosystem that countless species, including our own, rely on for food and sustenance. Unlike the smoke that emanates from rural wildfires, the charred material now entering the ocean is the stuff of “people’s homes: their cars, their batteries, their electronics,” said Rasmus Swalethorp, a biological oceanographer at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography. “It’s certainly going to contain a lot of things that we ideally don’t want to see in our oceans — and in our soils, for that matter, and our water streams, and certainly not on our dinner plates.”
Design choices of houses kept them fire-safe
Some houses with fire-resistant designs remained standing amid neighbourhoods of destruction from the raging wildfires in Pacific Palisades and Malibu in January, reports Bloomberg. A brand-new house in Pacific Palisades designed and built by architect Greg Chasen is one of them. And the house is simple: front-gabled without multiple roof lines, dormers or other pop-outs, which are vulnerable intersections in a fire. Still other elements are invisible but critical – the front of the house was built with heat-treated wood, shielded from flying sparks and embers by the extruding walls and roof line. Passive design features such as windows with triple glazing or vacuum insulation also helped with smoke. Along the side of the house there are no eaves or overhangs, which can form eddies or trap embers blown by high winds. The house doesn’t have any attic vents to allow sparks to get inside the roof, which is metal, with a fire-resistant underlayment.
How zinc mining in Peru is drying up water bodies
Antamina, one of the biggest zinc mines in the world, has been given the go-ahead by the Peruvian government to expand zinc extraction in the area, even though the Andean mountain ranges are classified as extremely vulnerable to the climate crisis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). More than half of Peru’s glaciers have melted over the past 50 years due to global heating, reports The Guardian. Meltwater from the glaciers is the main water source for the people of the Andes, but is already in short supply. Studies show that mining can exacerbate the climate crisis in glacial areas. “Water supplies are heavily affected already in the exploration stage. Drilling holes of 100-150 metres in the ground interrupts the natural courses of water that feed principal rivers,” says Karem Luque, a Peruvian biologist specialising in human and environmental health.
January 24, 2024
Hyderabad to get dedicated police station to save water bodies
Hyderabad will get a police station to look into illegal encroachments around lakes and tanks, reports The New Indian Express. The Hyderabad Disaster Relief and Asset Protection Agency (HYDRAA) intends to file criminal cases against anyone who encroaches upon full tank levels and buffer zones of water bodies, or parks or government lands, be it a local realtor or political leader. Sixty percent of the lakes and tanks in Hyderabad have already been encroached upon. “There are 185 lakes within Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation limits and 400 lakes within Outer Ring Road limits. Our main objective is to protect the water bodies from getting encroached and free them from the clutches of land sharks,” said HYDRAA Commissioner AV Ranganath. “If these encroachments are not stopped, the future of Hyderabad will be under a cloud. The reduction in the areas of water bodies is alarming, it is crucial to act swiftly to prevent further degradation,” he said.
Thick fog brings New Delhi to a crawl
Several areas in northern India including capital city New Delhi were covered in fog in mid-January with over 100 flights and 40 trains delayed, and road traffic affected, according to the German publication DW. The India Meteorological Department issued an orange alert, its second-highest warning level, and predicted dense to very dense fog in many areas while the visibility at Delhi airport was between zero to 100 meters (328 feet), the agency said. Temperatures as low as 7 degrees Celsius (44.6 degrees Fahrenheit) coupled with poor air quality also made the fog conditions worse. Fog is common in the low-lying Indo-Gangetic plains during winter. Delhi’s air pollution also showed a reading of 437 or “hazardous” according to live rankings by Swiss group IQAir. The city is the world’s most polluted, and air quality deteriorates more during winters. It was clouded in a dense smog in November that brought much of the city to a halt.
Trump, US new Prez, pulls out of Paris Agreement
At the White House on January 20 evening, the newly-minted 47th President of the United States, Donald Trump, signed an order to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, including a letter to the United Nations explaining the decision, reports BBC. The US will now join Iran, Yemen and Libya as the only countries to stand outside the agreement, which was signed 10 years ago in the French capital, to cut down emissions to address global warming and climate change. The US pull-out may be far more damaging to the global effort to limit emissions given its high emissions load. Trump called the Paris agreement a “ripoff” during a speech at the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC, following his swearing-in. It will be a year before the US is officially out of the pact. The White House also announced a “national energy emergency”, outlining a raft of changes that will reverse US climate regulations and boost oil and gas production.
One-third of the world's trees now in danger of extinction
According to the 2024 update of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List, over one-third of the world’s trees are now in danger of extinction due to global warming, deforestation and invasive species. The BBC reports that researchers across the globe, from Australia to the Amazon rainforest, are experimenting on forests in a bid to better understand the role trees play in keeping the Earth cool. Their findings could transform our understanding of how the forests of the future will respond to climate change. These findings help to reveal the important role that mature forests will play as carbon stores and natural climate solutions in the coming decades. The fact that microbes living in the canopies of these mature oaks also consume methane is an added bonus to mitigating the effects of human emissions. This process, first discovered in 2024, means that forests are even more important in the fight against climate change than scientists previously understood.
LA wildfire-affected look to New York for housing
With tens of thousands of Californians still under evacuation orders after the massive wildfires raging since early January, thousands of structures destroyed along with a lot of the infrastructure needed to supply them with basic utilities, and experts saying that, optimistically, rebuilding will take two to three years, it’s clear that thousands of people will need to find semi-permanent housing in the immediate future. Curbed reports that’s likely to prove difficult in Los Angeles (LA), where the sudden housing crunch has resulted in price gouging which, despite being illegal, is widespread. While many Angelenos are staying in, or at least close to, the city right now, some have taken the massive destruction as a sign that it’s time to move on — a reversal of the long-standing New Yorker dream of moving west. For some homeowners who are already bicoastal, New York is the obvious place to live during the yearslong process of rebuilding their LA homes.
Evacuation under scrutiny in California’s wildfires
Hundreds of thousands of Los Angeles residents have been displaced from their homes since a devastating series of wind-driven wildfires erupted on January 7. In Pacific Palisades, home to the largest of the ongoing blazes, the neighbourhood’s evacuation planning has come under scrutiny, reads a Bloomberg report. Many residents left their cars in the middle of Palisades Drive and Sunset Boulevard during the chaotic early phase of the disaster that firefighters were forced to use a bulldozer to clear a path through a tangle of abandoned vehicles. In the years since the devastation of the CampFire, California lawmakers passed legislation aimed at improving evacuation planning. Among them is a law requiring cities and counties to map evacuation routes as part of their general plans, but as the Redding Record Searchlight recently reported, a lack of detail in those maps has not proven helpful to evacuees of the latest fires.
50 percent GDP loss between 2070 and 2090: Report
Risk management experts from the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) said that climate risk assessments being used by financial institutions, politicians and civil servants to assess the economic effects of global heating were wrong, reports The Guardian. The global economy could face 50 percent loss in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) between 2070 and 2090 from the catastrophic shocks of climate change unless immediate action by political leaders is taken to decarbonise and restore nature, said a new report, named Planetary Solvency – finding our balance with nature. Published on January 16, the report uses math and statistics to analyse financial risk for businesses and governments, and criticises the dominant economic theory used by governments across the developed world. It states that political leaders ignored the expected severe effects of climate change such as tipping points, sea temperature rises, migration and conflict as a result of global heating.
January 10, 2024
Deadly California wildfires gut houses, kill five
Wildfires ravaged parts of Los Angeles in California, in the United States, on January 7, killing at least five people and gutting thousands of homes. Aljazeera reports that More than 130,000 residents in different neighbourhoods of Los Angeles city have been ordered to evacuate as the fires, which erupted on January 7, continue to rapidly spread, fuelled by high winds. Climate change has contributed to an increase in the frequency, season length and burned area of wildfires, according to a report by the US Environmental Protection Agency. So, dry conditions aided by Santa Ana winds – dry and hot winds common in the area – most likely caused the wildfires. The dry desert air moves from the interior of the region towards the coast and offshore. It contributes to wildfires because it significantly reduces humidity in the environment due to its dry nature. This causes vegetation to become very dehydrated and susceptible to fire.
Earthquake in Tibet kills 126, causes severe damage
At least 126 people were killed and 188 injured after a powerful earthquake struck the mountainous Tibet region on January 7, reports Aljazeera. China Earthquake Networks Center recorded a magnitude of 6.8 but the United States Geological Survey measured its magnitude as 7.1. Crumbled shop fronts could be seen in a video showing the aftermath in Lhatse, about 150 kilometres east of Shigatse city, with debris spilling onto the road. Shigatse is one of Tibet’s holiest cities and the seat of the Panchen Lama, one of the most important figures in Tibetan Buddhism. Powerful tremors were also felt in northern India’s Bihar state and Nepal’s capital, Kathmandu, 400 kilometres away. Chinese broadcaster CCTV says there have been 29 earthquakes with magnitudes of 3 or higher within 200 kilometres (124 miles) of the Shigatse quake epicentre in the past five years.
Stop-work notice at sites after Mumbai air quality dips
In the first few days of January 2025, the areas of Mumbai Central and Mazgaon in Mumbai recorded air quality index above 200 and the rest of the city was polluted. This prompted the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) to stop work on construction sites, stated a news report in Hindustan Times. The K East ward in Andheri East issued 10 show-cause notices to road contractors for non-adherence to air pollution guidelines. It also issued 462 stop-work notices to construction sites and infrastructure projects that failed to comply with the show cause notices. Seventy-one show-cause notices, meanwhile, have been revoked. It has issued 856 show-cause notices to various construction sites. Rajesh Tamhane, deputy municipal commissioner (environment) said, “We have issued notices to three categories—municipal projects, other projects and construction sites.”
India’s climate report to UN relies on ‘vague’ data
India’s fourth biennial update reports (BUR), submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change on December 30, lists its Greenhouse gas emissions in the year 2020, reports The Wire. During that year, the country emitted 2,959 mt of carbon dioxide equivalent (and 2,437 mt if Land Use-Land Use Change and Forestry is included). The main contributors to GHG emissions in 2020 were fossil fuels, methane emissions from livestock and increasing aluminium and cement production, the BUR stated. India’s State of Forest Reports have consistently reported an increase in tree and forest cover, and a corresponding increase in carbon stock, and thereby sequestration. However, scientists in India have also consistently raised concerns about these ISFRs which the BURs quote with concerns around the ISFR’s methodology.
‘There is no space at COP for the truth’
Elisa Morgera, the UN special rapporteur on climate change, in an exclusive interview with The Guardian, voiced her concerns about how and what information is shared within the UN climate negotiations was underscored at Cop29 in Baku, Azerbaijan. She said the annual UN climate summits and the consensus-based, state-driven process is dominated by powerful forces pushing false narratives and by tech fixes that divert attention from real, equitable solutions for the countries least responsible and most affected. “We can observe that some states are not acting in good faith in very clear ways, which is the basis of any international regime. There is widespread disregard for the rule of international law, and also a very clear pushback on the science, and shrinking of civil spaces at all levels. Basically, the truth is out of the conversation. That is the problem – there is no space at COP for the truth,” said Morgera.
Global heating disrupting Earth’s water cycle: Report
The 2024 Global Water Monitor Report, produced by an international team of researchers, has found that rising temperatures, caused by continued burning of fossil fuels, disrupt the water cycle in multiple ways, reports The Guardian. They found rainfall records are being broken with increasing regularity. Global heating can also increase drought by causing more evaporation from soil, as well as shifting rainfall patterns. “In 2024, Earth experienced its hottest year on record and water systems across the globe bore the brunt, wreaking havoc on the water cycle,” said the report’s leader, Prof Albert van Dijk. He said 2024 was a year of extremes but not an isolated occurrence. “It is part of a worsening trend of more intense floods, prolonged droughts, and record-breaking extremes.” The report warned of even greater dangers in 2025 as carbon emissions continued to rise .
Design safe spaces for children to roam freely
Children need an environment in which unhealthy risks from the street such as traffic violence, pollution and noise are minimised, while opportunities for play, independent movement, and social interactions are maximized, opines a Bloomberg article. Paseo Park, a 1.3-mile-long corridor in family-heavy Jackson Heights, Queens in New York, is finally getting a permanent open streets design to reduce car traffic after people experienced the joys of not having to text to make plans, pay for organised after-school activities, or battle with cars when learning to ride a bike. Widening sidewalks, closing streets for play on afternoons and weekends, adding speed humps and opening schoolyards after hours can provide the space. Neighbourhoods that mix housing with retail and offices have built-in amenities that make such spaces more conducive to child independence and whole-family convenience.