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Carbon, money and promises

December 11, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

Sea level rise in the Solomon Islands is nearly three times the global average and low lying island communities are facing threats to food security and freshwater resources. Image: Thomson Reuters Foundation / Catherine Wilson

By the time the 20th meeting of any group comes around, one would think, questions such as “where will the money come from” ought to have been sorted out. Not apparently when it comes to international negotiations on climate change. The meeting which has been running since 1 December 2014 (and which is to end on the 12th), has not only failed to find enough sources of money so that countries can deal with the effects of climate change, it has also seen some searching questions being asked about what climate finance and green funds are in the first place.

This should be troubling to the thousands who have gathered in Lime, the capital of Peru, to discuss (for the 20th year running), a coordinated international response to the effects and impacts of climate change. Such questions – which are fundamental in nature and inconveniently reveal the deep disagreements between countries and between finance professionals – should not have been raised at this stage of the UN climate change negotiation process.

But they have been, and the delegates and representatives and, it must be said, opportunists of all shades who gather at such meetings are caught in a cleft stick. On the one hand, there is the ‘progress’ claimed by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (the UNFCCC) that substantial and real progress has been made in finding assured sums of money so that ‘developing’ and ‘less developed’ countries particularly can be supported in their efforts to tackle the effects of climate change (more floods, worse droughts, new diseases).

Level of risk and potential for adaptation, from the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, 2014

Prakash Javadekar, Minister for Environment, said there is a need to ensure “an ambitious, comprehensive, equitable and balanced agreement in 2015 that takes into account the huge development needs, including access to financial resources and low carbon technological options for developing countries”. With such a declaration Javadekar has opened wide the door to interpretations of ‘comprehensive’, ‘equitable’, ‘balanced’ and ‘development needs’ in ways that very likely will add to the problem.

Nor does this help lighten the view, now apparently held by the western and ‘developed’ (that is, the EU, the OECD and in particular western Europe and north America) countries that India is resisting changes to the UNFCCC being attempted by them, such as reviews of what are called intended nationally determined contributions (INDCs) that will be declared by developing countries by June, 2015.

Other than disagreement in various tones and at different pitches, all countries have committed to sign a new climate agreement in Paris at the end of 2015, pledging climate action beyond 2020. So the UN has said, and if this is meant to show progress, in the usual roundabout UN manner, then the months between the Lima meeting and the Paris meeting will be spent by armies of administrators cooking up successfully consensual texts that reek of progress.

On the other hand, the propensity of governments and their associates to tweak definitions has been on embarrassing display. Consider Japan, and the news that emerged which showed that the country (which continues to be in denial about the effects of the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster) had counted US$ 1 billion for the construction of coal-fuelled power plants in Indonesia as part of its low carbon financing package. Yes, coal still provides some 40% of the world’s electricity supply and yes, coal is by far the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions. To get past the obvious contradiction, Tokyo’s officials at the Lima meeting argued the plants were more efficient and therefore greener than those that would have been built without their help.

Not as red-faced by such duplicity as they should have been, UN officials offered their own framing. “Climate finance aims at reducing emissions, and enhancing sinks of greenhouse gases and aims at reducing vulnerability of, and maintaining and increasing the resilience of, human and ecological systems to negative climate change impacts,” they wrote. Rather than contribute to the confusion, they should have come clean about the dismal performance of the green funding discussed in the three or four meetings before this one, during which a US$ 100 billion corpus was promised. The result so far? Less than US$ 10 billion in the bank. No wonder there’s so little bang for the climate buck.

Perhaps the UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, noted the anaemia for he asked countries to do more (in what direction was not clear) and at the same time avoided the question of how to resolve deep differences on the format for the pledges, which is a matter that seems to have engaged the attention of many of the negotiators. What ought to have engaged them instead is reducing the use of petroleum products, the use of resources with which far too many unnecessary trinkets are made and sold, and the use of climate negotiation jargon.

But there is too much inertia, and the negotiating circuit seems to serve itself first by quibbling about semantics that matter not one bit on the ground. Thus the European Union has insisted that countries’ pledges should only focus on carbon cuts; richer countries want to focus on new emissions targets, and so place the onus on developing countries whose emissions are growing fastest; ‘developing’ countries want to focus on pledges of aid. Some of this impinges upon what are called intended nationally determined contributions or INDCs.

Pertaining to this new concept, the latest from the climate negotiators’ fecund imagination, is the view held by some Indian groups (non-government and academic both) that India is neither supporting a so-called review of INDCs nor proposing an alternative. Bound with the new concept and the critiques of how it may be applied are other concepts – the principles of equity and common but differentiated responsibility. Such wrangling (to which official India is a party and to which the non-governmental organisations and academic collectives routinely contribute) is useless, for the answers are simplicity embodied: we must use less fossil fuel, less per head and less as a country, progressively every year; we must, as households and villages and city wards, pay much greater attention to the primary materials used to make the things we need and buy, and one surefire way of doing so is by educating adults about being responsible for climate change; we must limit, halt and reverse the trends of family and community consumption, for waste goes unremarked and so does greed.

– Rahul Goswami

Chop suey climate calculations

November 14, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

The China-USA ‘deal’ has shockingly ignored the central message of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, whose final synthesis has just been released. The evaluation made in this fifth report is not fundamentally different from the fourth (in 2007) but the confidence levels of the warnings issued is greater. Areas of uncertainty are becoming clearer and the concern of the contributing scientists is more obvious than ever before. They have used the phrase “virtually certain” (more than 99% probability) frighteningly often to describe likelihood of phenomena which affect our ecology and our habitats.

Special bulletin of the India Climate Watch on the China-USA climate ‘deal’. [pdf, 91kb]

The staged euphoria over this ‘deal’ does not obscure its non-binding nature. According to commentary from the People’s Republic, 2030 would be set as the peak year for its soaring greenhouse gas emissions, while the USA said it would cut emissions by more than a quarter from 2005 levels by 2025.

Data from the International Energy Agency show that for the USA, total final oil products consumption in 2012 was 717 million tons of oil equivalent (mtoe; in 2007 the quantity was 829 mtoe) while the totals for all energy sources were 1,432 mtoe in 2012 which was a reduction from 1,572 mtoe in 2007).

In China, total final oil products consumption in 2012 was 421 mtoe (in 2007 it was 308 mtoe) while the use of coal continued to rise – 558 mtoe in 2012 whereas it was 480 mtoe in 2007. In China the totals for all energy sources was 1,703 mtoe in 2012 which is 28% above what it was (1,326 mtoe) five years earlier.

This special bulletin of the India Climate Watch explains the trade and manufacturing, geo-strategic ambitions and power jockeying, these are the objectives behind the so-called ‘deal’ between China and USA on ‘cutting’ carbon emissions and pollution. This special bulletin urges the government of India to take moral leadership of the inter-governmental process towards lower emissions and the phasing out of fossil fuels.

The IPCC’s India voice?

November 4, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

The three working groups of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report have occupied, for months on end, 837 of what the IPCC method calls ‘authors’. Most are scientists, with considerable experience in the areas of atmospheric, cryospheric, oceanographic or bio-geochemical sciences, but they are also social scientists and economists, administrators and statisticians.

Insofar as the ‘inter-governmental’ aspect of the IPCC is concerned, they have been drawn from a number of countries, and have usually classified themselves by country of residence and work (though some are classified by institution too, especially when that institution is directly or indirectly a United Nations institute). All have contributed – as coordinating lead author, lead author, review editor, or for a technical summary – to the many voluminous chapters that have taken shape as the Fifth Assessment Report.

Amongst this corps is India’s contribution to the effort, with 33 authors. This is not a small group, for there are 43 from China and 31 from Japan (these groups exclude those of Indian or Asian origin who are authors but who have identified themselves under other countries and institutions). Compared with the contingents from western Europe, the USA and the OECD countries (as a bloc), Asia may be seen to be under-represented (and Africa very much more so) in the IPCC evidence examining and report writing process but that is a separate matter.

What is germane to us is: has the IPCC process and method an Indian outlook that will be of as much utility at home as it has been to the inter-governmental effort? A short answer will be ‘no’ to the first query (because it is about science, evidence and international consensus and not about national priorities) and ‘don’t know’ to the second. There is no reason why a ‘don’t know’ should persist, as the Fifth Assessment process comes to a close, for the size of India’s population and economy, and the likely effects climate change has and is forecast to have on our 35 states and union territories ought to have turned climate change into common currency wherever planning is carried out and implemented.

But that is not so, despite 33 Indian authors having contributed to the IPCC Fifth Assessment. They represent a far greater number who are, in one or more ways, concerned with the impacts of climate change in India and with our responses to those changes. What has seemed to have stood in the way of an Indian and a Bharatiya view of climate change is the predilection by academicians (particularly from those used to working in inter-governmental and UN circles) to propagate at home the language of international climate negotiation rather than direct statements and questions that have to do with conditions on the ground in Madhya Maharashtra or Assam or Jharkhand.

Consider one amongst the several quotes lent to our media following the release of the Fifth Assessment Synthesis Report: “The IPCC synthesis report suggests a way of thinking about climate change that is deeply relevant to India. There is a complex two way relationship between sustainable development and climate change: climate policies should support not undermine sustainable development; but limiting the effects of climate change is necessary to achieve sustainable development. The report clearly states there are limits to adaptation. For India the message is that while adaptation is critical, keeping the pressure on for global mitigation is also key.”

Unfortunately for any administrator (such as a district collector or a watershed mapper or the superintendent of a regional referral hospital) such a statement says very little. It neither draws out any interest in further understanding the effects of climate change in the districts and towns of Bharat, nor does it help provide a personal context to what is unquestionably a reporting process of vital importance to us all.

Part of the problem is the UN/inter-governmental language of negotiation that has become the norm when speaking about (or writing about, for several of these 33 contribute articles to the media regularly) climate change. As busy people, they may expect the media to interpret into popular idiom, simplify and amplify, and otherwise lend local colour to their prose. If so, they are plain wrong, for the responsibility to do so is theirs, not the media’s.

Is there a demand for explanation that is true to context? There is practically none, and that is why this group (the 33 Indian contributors to the Fifth Assessment report) must be called upon to translate the IPCC method for local administrations. This is important as there are several worlds which do not intersect. That of the IPCC and the sophisticated cohort of institutions which have contributed to the Fifth Assessment report on the one hand, whereas everyday workaday life in Bharat’s 7,935 towns, cities and metropolises proceeds for many tens of millions with or without the magisterial pronouncements of the IPCC’s working groups. There will always be a gulf between these worlds, but there must also be bridges, and currently there are far too few.

Who can be called upon? Here is the current roll call. There are: Krishna Mirle Achutarao, Indian Institute of Technology; Pramod Aggarwal, CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture, and Food Security; Govindasamy Bala, Indian Institute of Science; Suruchi Bhadwal, The Energy and Resources Institute; Abha Chhabra, Indian Space Research Organisation; Pradeep Kumar Dadhich, Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu India Pvt. Ltd.; Purnamita Dasgupta, Institute of Economic Growth, University of Delhi Enclave; Navroz Dubash, Centre for Policy Research; Varun Dutt, Indian Institute of Technology; Amit Garg, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; Prashant Goswami, CSIR Centre for Mathematical Modelling and Computer Simulation; Anil Kumar Gupta, Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology; Shreekant Gupta, University of Delhi; Sujata Gupta, Asian Development Bank (ADB); and Krishna Kumar Kanikicharla, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.

Furthermore, there are: Arun Kansal, TERI University; Surender Kumar, University of Delhi; Ritu Mathur, The Energy & Resources Institute (TERI); Harini Nagendra, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE); Kirit S Parikh, Integrated Research and Action for Development (IRADe); Jyoti Parikh, Integrated Research and Action for Development (IRADe); Himanshu Pathak, Indian Agricultural Research Institute; Anand Patwardhan, Indian Institute of Technology-Bombay; Rengaswamy Ramesh, Physical Research Laboratory; Nijavalli H. Ravindranath, Indian Institute of Science; Aromar Revi, Indian Institute for Human Settlements; Joyashree Roy, Jadavpur University; Ambuj Sagar, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi; S. K. Satheesh, Indian Institute of Science; Priyadarshi R. Shukla, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad; Eswaran Somanathan, Indian Statistical Institute, Delhi; Geetam Tiwari, Indian Institute of Technology; and Alakkat Unnikrishnan, National Institute of Oceanography. Who amongst these will stand up in the talukas and in the melee of our class II towns for Bharat?

– Rahul Goswami

Climate measures that matter

October 8, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

India has been saying during the last several international negotiations about climate change that our country, like other ‘developing’ countries, has a right to development. What this means is India has officially said our country will continue to burn coal and petroleum products in quantities that contribute to India emitting 1.954 million tons of CO2 a year (this figure is for 2012).

The ‘developed’ world (mostly countries in western Europe and North America) point to this large quantity and demand that India (and China, which emits very much more) do something to halt this rise and to decrease it. India’s response has been – recognise what you have done from the time of the Industrial Revolution and then we’ll resume talking.

This is unlikely to result in any constructive recognition of all that is linked. A country’s total emissions is one part of the ‘development’ picture and others are at least as important. There are also tons of CO2 emitted per capita (India has often said that its per capita emissions are far below those of the West). And there is per capita consumption of electricity (which is still mainly generated by burning coal).

That is why, when we look at the relationship between these three measures for a country, and between countries for any one of these three measures, we see connections that are otherwise missed due to a focus on a single measure. Our diagram, ‘Climate Measures that Matter’, helps explain these connections. It can be used as an aide to understanding better India’s position at climate negotiations, and provides much-needed context to the arguments about a country’s total emissions and its per capita emissions. [See the statement by Minster for Environment Prakash Javadekar, at the United Nations Climate Summit 2014.]

This diagram is an aide to understanding better India’s position at climate negotiations. It provides much-needed context to the arguments about a country’s total emissions and its per capita emissions.

The country and energy data used in this diagram is for the latest year which is 2012. The source for the data is the International Energy Agency’s ‘Key World Energy Statistics 2014’ . This selection of countries compares countries of South Asia, East Asia, the larger economies of the OECD, the BRICS, other European countries, and countries of the Middle East. For each of the three measures, the size of the circles are relative to each other.

[The full size image is available here (png. 266kb). This diagram is distributed under a creative commons licence (2014) by the India Climate Portal. Reproduce only with full attribution.]

One could argue that the relationship between three measures for any country shows its responsibilities towards curbing the use of fossil fuels both nationally and individually, and towards capping electricity use. For example, per capita electricity use in a number of the countries shown in the diagram is seven or eight times more, and even ten times more and above, than India’s use.

Our South Asian neighbours – Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka – have by all three measures relatively small global impacts. The size of our population and the depth of our industry and economy however has made India the third largest emitter of CO2 (after China and the USA). But if India seeks some sort of ‘parity’ in electricity use – or if India sees the low per capita CO2 emissions as a ‘development’ gap – our total contribution to CO2 emissions will only rise faster, hurting the environment that we share with our neighbours.

The diagram helps display some of the most glaring and conspicuous differences between countries’ impacts on the atmosphere and ecosphere. These differences can be taken to mean fuel use and consumption must be halted and stringently curbed, whether or not the Kyoto Protocol and a successor treaty exist. That would be the way of acting responsibly for a country. [See the text of the Joint Statement issued at the 18th BASIC Ministerial Meeting on Climate Change in August 2014.]

These differences can also mean that the ‘developed’ countries recognise – as we and many ‘developing’ and ‘less developed’ countries have been reminding them repeatedly – that the way their economies and societies have functioned has caused much of the problem in the first place, and they must stop shunting the onus of responsibility onto us.

Finally, these differences should also show why being small is not being ‘poor’ and ‘less developed’. Households and families that use few kilowatts instead of many, burn few litres of fuel instead of many, are very much more responsible and environmentally balanced than others. It is the small circles in this diagram that ought to be the inspiration.

Climate Measures that Matter by India Climate Portal / Rahul Goswami is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

A report card on monsoon 2014

October 1, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

From the first week of June 2014 until the middle of September 2014, there have been floods and conditions equivalent to drought in many districts, and for India the tale of monsoon 2014 comes from a reading of individual districts, not from a national ‘average’ or a ‘cumulative’. [This article was published by the newspaper DNA.]

Despite the advances made by our agencies in weather forecasting and climate monitoring, the science of meteorology still remains to be effectively distilled so that it can be used by citizens and, wherever possible, expanded and given context by ground-based observation and recording. One sector in which this does take place – albeit at a level still far below its potential – is agriculture. The reason is clear: our crop staples (the cereals, pulses, vegetables and fruit) have their individual calendars for preparation, sowing, tending and harvesting.

This line chart tells some of the tale. It shows that for the first six weeks of monsoon 2014, most districts recorded rain below their ‘normals’ for those weeks. The lines are percentile lines; they tell us what percent of districts recorded how much rainfall in a monsoon week relative to their normals for that week. This chart does not show how much rain – it shows distance away from a weekly normal for districts.
The left scale is a percentage – higher percentages indicate how far above normal districts recorded their rainfall, negative numbers show us how far below normal their rainfall was. The dates (the bottom scale) are for weeks ending on that date for which normals and departures from normal were recorded. The P_01 to P_09 lines are the percentiles (10th to 90th) of all districts in every week.

And so we have an agricultural meteorology system that faithfully and reliably informs ‘kisans’ and cultivators in 641 districts what to expect from the weather for the next week. Thanks to mobile phones, weather alerts and crop advisories are distributed in all our major languages to a portion of the farming households working on 138 million farm holdings, (of which 117 million are small). But this is still only a portion, and is far from adequate in distributing the results of the work of our earth scientists and field staff.

Moreover, every other sector of development requires such raw data and location-specific analysis: the Department of Rural Development, the National Rural Health Mission, the Nirmal Bharat Abhiyan (for drinking water and sanitation), the food-based programmes (like the mid-day meals) for which the availability of ingredients and their supply is the essence of their work, the Central Water Commission and the Central Ground Water Board, whose work it is to determine the water flows and balances in river sub-basins and watersheds (there are 3,257), and districts administrations (which administer 232,855 panchayats) and municipal councils alike which must implement relief measures when drought sets in or must ration supply when there are shortages. This is but a small list of agencies whose work is directly affected by the Indian summer monsoon and its activity where they work.

A dense network of weather stations (more of these are being automated every month, but every taluka still does not have one) is complemented by dedicated satellites which provides continuous coverage of the sub-continent, the northern Asian land mass, the surrounding oceans southwards until beyond the Tropic of Capricorn.

The typical IMD map of ‘normal’ rainfall measured by the meteorological sub-divisions. The detailed weekly tables give us a very different picture

Methods to simply and accurately funnel this stream of real-time data and imagery are available, mostly at no cost, in order to aid local administrations, farmers and cultivators, and all citizens. It is this availability and relative simplicity of use (block-level weather forecasts for 72 hours are now available as local language apps on smartphones) that must be encouraged by the official agencies – for they simply do not have the persons to do so at the scale and detail required.

Consider the setting in early July 2014. India’s summer monsoon was already late, and where it was late but active it was weak (as shown by the chart). The indications from the central earth science agencies (including the India Meteorological Department), from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, from the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting were that it would be end-June before the summer monsoon system settles over central India and the western Gangetic plains. This did not happen for another two weeks, until six of the usual 16 monsoon weeks had passed.

When in mid-July more rainfall was recorded in the districts, even then, as the chart shows, only 50% of the districts reached their ‘normals’ for that week only. Thereafter, the volatility of rainfall set in and while for those in our towns and cities there was relief from the searing summer temperatures the rains did not assure sowing conditions for farmers and cultivators, nor did it add, in July, to the stores of water in major and minor reservoirs.

That is why the IMD’s outdated and stodgy public outreach practice must be overhauled, completely. The bland map (see example) of sub-divisions is of little use when what we want to know pertains to tehsil and town. The Met Department’s rain adequacy categories must be replaced too by measures that are geared towards aiding alerts and advisories – ‘normal’ is rainfall up to +19% above a given period’s average and also down to -19% from that same average, a range that can make or break the efforts of a horticulturist.

This table illustrates the trend of weekly rainfall in 40 districts. These districts are selected as being home to the largest rural populations, two from the 20 major states (by population). The numbers by week and district describe how far from a ‘normal’ the recorded rainfall for that week was.
Several overall observations stand out. Districts with weeks coloured light rose dominate, for these show those that received much less rain than they should have. Districts with a shade of deeper blue are the next most frequent category, and those received excess rain. Taken together, this tells us that extremes – very much less or more – were common for this group of districts in India with large rural populations.
We can see the prolonged dry spells for districts in Haryana and Punjab; likewise the absence of rain for the first six monsoon weeks in Gujarat and Maharashtra; are examples of wide swings around weekly ‘normal’ in Giridih (Jharkhand), Muzaffarpur (Bihar), Haridwar (Uttarakhand), Mandi (Himachal Pradesh), Viluppuram (Tamil Nadu), and Mahbubnagar (Andhra Pradesh). The weeks ending 20 August in Bihar and the weeks ending September 3 and 10 in Jammu and Kashmir immediately stand out – the Kosi had breached its banks in Bihar and the Chenab submerged Srinagar and Jammu.

Likewise, excess is +20% and more, deficient is -20% to -59% and scanty is -60% to -99%. To illustrate how misleading these categories can be, the difference between an excess of +21% and +41% can be the difference between water enough to puddle rice fields and a river breaking its banks to ruin those fields. [Get a full resolution image of the table here, 1.85 MB.]

The yawning gap between the technical competence of India’s climate monitoring systems, and they ways in which they are used, must be bridged and this is best done through public participation and citizen initiative. The politics of monsoon and of water will continue, but must not be allowed to define how our systems are used. Nor must they detract from our long history of weather observation, which dates back at least to the ‘Vrhat Sanhita’ of Varahamihira.

It has only signalled policy confusion for central and state governments to have not declared districts and talukas as affected by drought – which they should have by late July 2014 – while at the same time quietly announcing to administrations, as the Ministry of Agriculture did, that “to deal with challenges posed by delayed and aberrant monsoon and in the wake of shortfall in sowing of major crops during kharif 2014, the government has initiated interventions”. These being a diesel subsidy for what is called ‘protective irrigation’ of crops, raising the ceiling on the seed subsidy, rolling out a drought mitigating programme for horticulture, boosting fodder cultivation through the flagship Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana.

The new government has stated time and again its desire to improve and strengthen governance. This must come to include a concerted drive to democratise the use of public domain information, including our monsoon and water, in order that we residents of 4,041 statutory towns (large cities included) and 3,894 census towns can judge for ourselves the relationships between the food we buy, they rain we receive, our individual use of about 70 litres of water a day, and the fluctuation of these trends from one monsoon to another. The moral of monsoon 2014 is that we must reclaim local measures for local use.

Rahul Goswami

Climate change is not the only villain

September 11, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

A woman weeps at the site of her home, devastated by floods in Kuppar village near Jammu, in Jammu and Kashmir, India. Photo: Thomson Reuters Foundation / Ashutosh Sharma

About 200 kilometres separates Srinagar, in the valley of Kashmir in India, from the wide and flat northern plains of Pakistan’s Punjab province, the land between Gujranwala and Sialkot. The river that links these two regions, on either side of the border between two countries, is the Jhelum and its many mountain-fed tributaries. From early September, rains that are torrential in volume and frequency for the region steadily fed the streams, swelled the rivers and then rushed through the settlements and towns of northern Pakistan and India.

On both sides of the Pakistan-India border the scene is depressingly similar. The toll of the dead will not be known until the waters drain, and even then will be estimates, as they always are. Until two days ago, 220 or 230 was the number of lives reported lost in both countries. The number of lives disrupted, displaced and reduced to misery is far greater – more than 100,000 have been rescued by the Indian Army in the state of Jammu and Kashmir. In Pakistan too it has been its army that has performed extraordinary feats of rescue and provided relief when every other administrative mechanism failed, but as the waters continued to gather in volume and speed, the September floods are already estimated to have affected more than a million in Pakistan.

A couple wades through a flooded road after heavy rains in Lahore, Pakistan, on 4 September 2014. Photo: Reuters / Mohsin Raza

There has been mourning and resignation, for lives lost and for homes destroyed, but there is also anger in both Pakistan’s Punjab and India’s Jammu and Kashmir. Economic need and the search for livelihoods has brought migrants into urban settlements, while older and more established households have sought to better their standards of living. Overlooked every single year, despite at least one emergency caused by natural phenomena, has been implementing the regulations needed for fast-growing settlements in flood-prone regions. Both countries have national disaster management authorities, and yet the complaint most commonly heard by those escaping floodwaters and by those seeking relief is: where was the warning and where was the help when we needed it?

The very recent history in India (the catastrophic rain and landslides in Uttarakhand in 2013) and in Pakistan (the record flooding of 2010) of natural disasters appears not to have led to the institutionalisation of a culture that is willing to learn from past misfortune. In both countries, media has reported scores of survivors praising swift and selfless action by the armed forces and at the same time condemning inaction by local and provincial authorities.

Climate change and its impacts has become a catch-all villain for the record floods and the devastation they have caused (and continue to). But amongst the complex menu of reasons for the failure of systems and responses, several others stand out in bolder relief. The encroachment by galloping urbanisation of river catchment areas, unregistered and illegal construction (both residential and commercial) along river banks and the blind conversion of wetlands into agricultural lands has, in both countries, turned historically familiar floods into fearsome deathtraps.

When the waters ebb and families can reunite, both Pakistan and India must together confront the real reasons behind the destruction and toll wrought by the floods of September 2014.

India’s giant megawatt trap

September 10, 2014 by Climate portal editor 1 Comment

A panel of charts that show India’s energy consumption, imports, and dependence on fossil fuel.

Electricity as fundamental right and energy convenience as the basis of ‘development’ in Bharat and in India. If this is what Piyush Goyal means when he says his government is “is committed to ensure affordable 24×7 power” then it will come as yet another commitment that supports energy provision and consumption as the basis for determining the well-being of Bharat-vaasis and Indians (the UPA’s Bharat Nirman was the predecessor). But the Minister of State (Independent Charge) for Power, Coal and New and Renewable Energy cannot, using such a promise, ignore the very serious questions about the kind of ‘development’ being pursued by the NDA-BJP government and its environmental and social ramifications.

Goyal has said, via press conferences and meetings with the media, that the NDA government is committed to ensuring affordable power at all times (’24 x 7′ is the expression he used, which must be banished from use as being a violent idea – like nature our lives follow cycles of work and rest and ’24 x 7′ violently destroys that cycle). Goyal has promised, pending the taking of a series of steps his ministry has outlined, that such a round the clock provision of electric power will be extended to “all homes, industrial and commercial establishments” and that there will be “adequate power for farms within five years”.

The summary of India’s power generation capacity, by type and by region. Source for data: Central Electricity Authority

Some of the very serious questions we raise immediately pertain to what Goyal – with the help of senior ministry officials and advisers – has said. The NDA-BJP government will spend Rs 75,600 crore to (1) supply electricity through separate feeders for agricultural and rural domestic consumption, said Goyal, which will be used to provide round the clock power to rural households; and (2) on an “integrated power development initiative” which involves strengthening sub-transmission and distribution systems in urban areas. This is part of the “transformative change” the ministry has assured us is for the better. Goyal and his officials see as a sign of positive transformation that coal-based electricity generation from June to August 2014 grew by nearly 21 per cent (compared with the same months in 2013), that coal production is 9% higher in August 2014 compared with August 2013, and that Coal India (the largest coal producer company in the world which digs out 8 of every 10 tons of coal mined in India) is going to buy 250 more goods rakes (they will cost Rs 5,000 crore) so that more coal can be moved to our coal-burning power plants.

We must question the profligacy that the Goyal team is advancing in the name of round the clock, reliable and affordable electricity to all. To do so is akin to electoral promises that are populist in nature – and which appeal to the desire in rural and urban residents alike for better living conditions – and which are entirely blind to the environmental, health, financial and behavioural aspects attached to going ahead with such actions. In less than a fortnight, prime minister Narendra Modi (accompanied by a few others) will attend the United Nations Climate Summit 2014. Whether or not this summit, like many before it, forces governments to stop talking and instead act at home on tackling anthropogenic climate change is not the point. What is of concern to us is what India’s representatives will say about their commitment to reduce the cumulative impact of India’s ‘development’, with climate change being a part of that commitment.

At the UN Climate Summit 2014, it will be heard (in as many languages as there are translators available for them) that energy demand is growing along with expanding global wealth (but the UN will not say how unequally that extra wealth has been distributed). There will be grave references made to growing populations with a large number still without the round the clock electricity that Goyal has promised. Many speakers (eminent experts, as the UN system calls them) will be mobilised to remind the gathering that a shift toward renewable sources of energy (such as solar, wind and geothermal) is needed, that greater energy efficiency in appliances, buildings, lighting and vehicles are needed, and that this is so because it is essential to use the world’s resources sustainably, to diversify economies and successfully address the challenge of climate changes. It will sound suitably solemn and uplifting at the UN headquarters in New York, but the story at home in Bharat and India is solemn and deeply worrisome.

Where India’s coal-burning power plants are. Map courtesy Global Energy Observatory.

Some of the tale is of very short-term inconvenience, such as when Mumbai went without electricity for a few hours on 02 September. The business and financial media reported that “back-up generators at banks and brokerages ensured that financial business was largely unaffected” and then circulated the familiar complain that India does not generate enough electricity to meet rapidly rising demand, that a severe shortage of coal (half our 150-odd coal burning plants are reported as having no more than a week’s supply of coal) has raised fears of more widespread blackouts.

Dire tweets from a leading industrialist, Anand Mahindra, were also reported: “Dark office in Mumbai. Lights out in the whole area. The coal crisis is beginning to literally show its dark side. A threat to the India story.” This senior member of the clutch of companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange ‘A’ List underlining a threat to the ‘India story’ led the business and financial media to quickly exert psychological duress on the NDA-BJP – “any grid collapse would cast doubt on the crisis management skills of the new government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi”.

Electricity as fundamental right and energy convenience is moreover essential in the view of Indian industry to reaching the 8% per year GDP growth threshold, which this section appears to consider the single goal of the Republic of India. Hence where energy and the generation and provision of electricity is concerned, Goyal and his team have listed eight steps their ministry will undertake: (1) to rationalise coal supplies (by which is meant, as far as I can make out, move coal fewer kilometres to nearer power plants instead of distant ones); (2) create a statutory coal regulator; (3) civil nuclear cooperation agreement (Australia mentioned for uranium); (4) surveillance at major coal mines to control coal theft; (5) hydro-electric power generation in Jammu and Kashmir (“fast track” they say); (6) environmental clearances (“government will speed up environment and forest clearances to projects”); (7) bring more generation capacity at gas-based power online; (8) clear the solar ultra mega power plant at Sambhar near Jaipur, Rajasthan (the area is a site for migratory birds and an ecological refuge).

Had we an environment regulatory system and a project appraisal and clearances mechanism that protected environment, biodiversity, natural resources and our natural heritage, points 3, 5, 6 and 8 could under no circumstance have appeared on the Ministry of Power list. But the NDA-BJP government has in its first three months taken swift steps to eases clearances for industrial and infrastructure projects. Goyal’s colleague in the cabinet, Prakash Javadekar (minister of state for environment, forests and climate change), has worked to get the MoEF&CC to loosen the norms for expansion of coal mining projects producing up to 8 million tonnes of coal a year, and to adopt a ‘cluster approach’ in clearing smaller mines in the coal-rich belts of India. The environment ministry is also – as the Rajya Sabha was told – “streamlining environmental clearance process by delegating more powers to the State level Environment Impact Assessment Authorities (SEIAAs) for granting” such clearances, and neither house of Parliament has inquired critically as to whether the states so favoured have in place the evaluating expertise and capacities of sufficient authority and independence to not clear those projects which will harm environment, biodiversity, natural resources and our natural heritage.

Poor ambient air quality in our cities is hazardous to health, and emissions from coal-burning power plants are an important contributor to urban air pollution. This chart of a New Delhi region is courtesy Asia Air Pollution Real-time Air Quality Index (AQI).

While industry and a growing urban middle class expect ‘development’ and convenience, represented mainly by uninterruptible kilowatts, and exert a disproportionate amount of pressure on the state to fulfil these desires, there is a short list of steps very different from Goyal’s which must be recognised by the NDA-BJP government and state governments. This is:

(1) There is 172,986 MW of thermal power capacity (149,178 coal, 22,608 gas and 1,200 diesel), 40,798 MW of hydro-electric, 31,692 MW of renewables and 4,780 MW of nuclear, for a total of 250,257 MW. That’s on paper, whereas the actual power generation every average day (in 2014, according to the Central Electricity Authority, which is the apex power sector planning body) has been around 135,000 MW. From every power plant to every grid and to every distribution network, the aggregate transmission and commercial losses are estimated to be 26%. Judging from the trend of 2000 onwards, India’s coal consumption would have been 710 million tons in 2013 – almost twice the consumption in 2000 (359 mt) and more than three times the consumption in 1990 (224 mt).

To have allowed 26% of the generated electricity in 2013 to be ‘lost’ amounts to wasting the coal that was burned to generate it, and this is a gigantic sum, an amount equal to the 189 mt that India consumed in 1986. Secretary Pradeep Kumar Sinha, Additional Secretaries R N Choubey and Devendra Chaudhry, Joint Secretaries Mukesh Jain, B N Sharma, Pradeep Kumar, Satish Kumar and Jyoti Arora, and Economic Adviser Raj Pal must practice thrift and saving instead of entertaining industry’s demands for more power plants.

(2) India has for the last year consumed crude oil at the rate of about 3.5 million barrels a day and of this astounding amount 2.5 million barrels are imported. For 2013-14 (until 31 March) India’s appetite for crude oil cost US$ 143 billion (which represented 32% of India’s total imports for the financial year, according to the Ministry of Commerce). The standard oil barrel contains 159 litres of crude oil and, according to the Society of Petroleum Engineers, a barrel of crude oil represents about 1,700 kWh of electricity. Judging from the power consumption trend from 2000, our per capita average annual electricity consumption in 2014 will be 750-760 kWh, which is about 62 or 63 units a month.

A simple schematic for a 1,000 MW coal-burning power plant that shows the inputs and pollutants. Diagram courtesy Indian Power Sector.Com

Thus a single barrel of imported (or domestically produced) crude oil contains energy enough to supply two persons for a year, at current annual averages. Such a comparison between fuels is useful to illustrate what the country’s automobile addiction costs in terms of what it takes to furnish households with electricity. About 47% of the oil is used (after refining and being turned into various petroleum products) for transport, supporting an automobile industry that has placed 17.56 million cars, 2.01 million taxis, 3.9 million jeeps, 4.24 million light motor vehicles, 1.29 million buses, 7.37 million goods carriers, 9.42 million other vehicles (tractors, three-wheelers and so on), and 115.41 million two-wheelers, on our roads to congest our towns and cities into paralysis.

The oil import bill is Rs 872,300 crore, a number that defies the citizen’s attempts to size it (it is more than ten times the wages paid through MGNREGA (about Rs 78,106 crore) for the last three years for which 235.5 million people were provided wage employment). Goyal and his officials are therefore better advised to pay attention (together with cabinet colleague Nitin Gadkari, the minister of road transport and highways) to the 119,209 state transport buses in Bharat and India in which we travelled (economically and fairly reliably, round the clock too) some 552 million passenger kilometres.

(3) This NDA-BJP government in its first three months has blundered just as much as its predecessor government did on matters that concern every citizen: the environment, energy, the provisioning of agriculture and food, and human development. At every turn Goyal’s cabinet colleagues, and in particular Arun Jaitley, minister of finance and defence, have chanted out the tiresome refrain that India will grow, must grow, must build, must consume, must produce and so on. Their obduracy in the face of evidence to the opposite – evidence that has been available in Bharat and internationally from the time they were students, certainly – is just as tiresome. Gathering ever more citizens into the club of the urban middle class will only lead to a financial and technological trap from which there is no escape.

Coal India’s share price for the last two years.

One example amongst many illustrates why, quite starkly. Since 2004, the sale of room air-conditioners has grown at about 15% per year, and the industry reported sales of over 3.5 million air-conditioners in 2013. Concerned by the demand for electricity from homes and offices fitted, over the last three years, with new air-conditioners, the Bureau of Energy Efficiency (a statutory body under the Ministry of Power) set out to estimate what effect millions of new air-conditioners would have on peak electricity demand. The answer was provided by an ‘expert group on low carbon strategies for inclusive growth’ for the Planning Commission and independent analysis conducted by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (of the USA). This study found that peak electricity demand would rise by 75,000 MW to reach 150,000 MW by 2030. That is, in 15 years the peak electricity demand alone will be 60% of today’s total power generation capacity in India!

There is no financial fix and there is no technological fix for such a trend. There is no further excuse for the NDA-BJP government and for ministers like Goyal, Jaitley, Javadekar, Gadkari (and prime minister Modi) to continue to ignore the obvious. Goyal and Jaitley both need an immediate refresher in revisiting the reasons why the marginal cost curve of any action they have announced in the last three months will rise steeply. That rise will be due to a combination of activities, and the natural consequences, which will ruinously amplify the impacts of a changing climate. Bharat cannot continue to shirk the duty – of government and of citizen – of caring first for our ‘prakruti’ (what the west has recently begun to call ecological services) and instead pursuing the ‘maya’ of continuous growth.

– Rahul Goswami

Flood waters batter North India, Pakistan

September 7, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

Women and children being transported in a boat through a flooded road to a safer place during incessant rains in Srinagar. Photo: The Hindu

Four days of very heavy rain has affected districts in northern India and north-eastern Pakistan, causing damage and deaths, and leading to continuing misery in Pakistan. In Jammu and Kashmir, the death toll is 160 while in Pakistan it is 170.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in Jammu on Sunday to personally review the situation in the flood-hit state after over 160 people lost their lives in the worst floods to affect Jammu and Kashmir in 60 years.

Accumulated rainfall from 2-5 September for the north India and north-eastern Pakistan regions.

Floods and landslides, due to very heavy rains, affected parts of Jammu and Kashmir while in Pakistan very heavy rains continue, causing floods in parts of Punjab and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority announced that “Very High to Exceptionally High Flood Level” is likely to continue in the Chenab and Jhelum along with their associated streams for the next two days.

On 4 September a bus, filled to capacity with 52 members of a wedding group, was on its way to Lam, around 120 km from Jammu city, when it was hit by surging waters of the Gambhir river. Only three people survived the accident.

The state capital of Srinagar also braced for major floods with the Jhelum, Kashmir’s main river, flowing more than 2.13 metres (seven feet) above the danger mark. Vast swathes of Srinagar remain inundated. The 300-km-long Jammu-Srinagar national highway also closed for traffic after two landslides in the Ramban district left hundreds of vehicles stranded. South Kashmir’s Anantnag and Kulgam districts are among the worst hit, with at least 50 villages under water.

A flooded ward in Srinagar. Photo: Waseem Andrabi / Hindustan Times

The Indian Army has evacuated 11,000 people to safety by deploying 100 columns of troops in flood-hit areas of the state. About 2,000 people have been provided food and temporary shelter in Jammu and Kashmir. A total of 100 Army columns (each column is 75-100 troops), 13 teams of Army engineers are working in the flood-affected regions of the state. The Army’s ‘Mission Sahayata’ is rescuing people trapped in flooded villages, isolated houses and multi-storied buildings in the inundated areas all over Kashmir, with tented shelter being provided to those who have lost their homes to the floodwaters.

Torrential monsoon rains have again wreaked havoc in Pakistan’s largest province Punjab and in Pakistan-administered Kashmir since 4 September. A Pakistan Meteorological Department report given to the Indus River Commission – which looks after Indus, Jhelum and Chenab rivers – said on September 5 that around 0.9 million cusecs (cubic feet per second, equal to over 25,000 cumecs, or cubic metres per second) of additional water was flowing down the Himalayan rivers, according to Ghulam Rasul, Chief Meteorological Officer. Rasul said the floods would have a devastating impact in Kashmir, Punjab and Sindh due to lack of preparations and absence of water management strategies.

Map of the flood-affected areas from the from European Commission Humanitarian Aid department.

However, Sindh and Punjab are expected to face severe flooding in the coming days, the Pakistan Meteorological Department warned on Sunday. A press release issued by the Meteorological Department said that water levels in the Indus River at Sukkur and Guddu Barrage are constantly increasing, and consequently, there will be severe floods on September 13 and 14 in both provinces.

Ahmad Kamal, a spokesman for Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority, said at least 69 people have died in the eastern Punjab province since Thursday. He said another 48 people died in the Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and 11 died in northern Gilgit Baltistan province.

Dry tale of ten rain weeks

August 23, 2014 by Climate portal editor Leave a Comment

What a monsoon season is can no longer be judged by the over-simplified sums that assure the country about departures from an ‘average’ and the potential of ‘catching up’ as a season progresses. Since the 2009 drought, the awareness of farmers’ cooperatives and groups about the meteorological products and data available with the only provider of such measurements has grown. What has not grown is the willingness of government agencies on the one hand, and the consuming public on the other, to make similar investments in pursuing such clarity.

The area chart with its jagged stripes is the simplest indicator of the gap between the central government’s sanguine response to a very serious monsoon deficit, and the conditions that our districts have recorded since the first week of June 2014. The chart, based on the Indian Meteorological Department’s weekly district recordings of rainfall, plots 641 of these readings over ten weeks.

Our modified monsoon measure shows the overall trend, and made the case early for state and district level relief.

It is immediately clear that the green stripe (for ‘normal’) has at no point been significantly larger than any one of the other three important stripes, coloured deep red (for ‘scanty’), peach (for ‘deficient’) and blue (for ‘excess’).

In the seventh week of monsoon 2014 (17 to 23 July 2014) the number of districts that recorded normal rainfall for that week was 126, and that is the maximum number that have reported normal rainfall for a week. The next highest number of districts reporting normal for a week is 92, which was for the preceding week (10 to 16 July 2014).

More serious is the district-level reporting for the following three weeks – ending 30 July, 06 August and 13 August – which show the number of districts that reported normal rain for each week was less than 20% of the number of districts that reported deficient, scanty or excess rainfall. It was during this period that central government ministries and agencies did not publicly disclose the widespread monsoon deficiency and which did not act, by alerting the consuming public, to the short and medium term consequences of the monsoon crisis.

The modified monsoon measure (which has been advocated as a method to prime local administrations towards early recognition of the need for relief and remedial action in drought and drought-like conditions) displays to greater effect the glaring imbalance between ‘normals’ and their absence in the districts. In every one of the ten weeks, the light red bar (the ‘deficient 2’ measure, for rainfall of 21% less and lower) dominates.

Otherwise it is the dark blue bar (the ‘excess 2’ measure, for rainfall of 21% more and above) which is next most prominent. This is the clearest signal from a close reading of the district rainfall reportage that volatility in rainfall quantities is the feature most visible throughout monsoon 2014.

The IMD’s running table of the distict rainfall departures confirms this trend for monsoon 2014. In many of the 36 meteorological sub-divisions, weeks of scanty and deficient rainfall are broken by normal or excess rainfall, only to return to scanty and deficient. Taking the districts of Odisha and of western Madhya Pradesh as examples, this volatility can be seen at a glance, and is in concurrence with the overall trends that the modified monsoon measure has been indicating for the last two months.

How ADB cooks the climate pot

August 21, 2014 by Climate portal editor 1 Comment

The Asian Development Bank has, amongst the world’s multilateral development banks, been a bit of a latecomer to the area of climate financing with the help of modelling. Its senior peers – the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development – have been at it for a while, with the World Bank being rather in its own league if one was to judge by the tonnage of reports it has printed. The ADB probably holds its own on the matter against the Inter-American Development Bank and the African Development Bank, but this latest effort, I think, pushes it ahead of the last two.

Not for any reason that would gladden a farmer or a municipal worker, for that is not the audience intended for ‘Assessing the costs of climate change and adaptation in South Asia’ (Asian Development Bank, 2014), which was released to the Asian world a few days ago. But the volume should immensely help the modelling crews from a dozen and more international agencies that specialise in this arcane craft. Providing the scientific basis around which a multilateral lending bank can plan its climate financing strategies will help the craft find a future. Rather less sunny is the outlook for states and districts, cities and panchayats, who may find an over-zealous administrator or two quoting blithely from such a report while in search of elusive ‘mitigation’.

The reassuring shapes of indecipherable models

In my view, this volume is useless. It is so because it is based on a variety of modelling computations which have their origin in the methods used for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (that was released in 2007). The permanent problem with all such ‘earth science’ modelling approaches is that it uses global data sets which must be ‘downscaled’ to local regions. No matter how sophisticated they are claimed to be by their inventors and sponsors, such models can only work with regular and large sets of well-scrubbed data that have been collected the same way over a long period of time and recorded reliably. This may serve a ‘global’ model (which is irrelevant to us in the districts) but in almost every single case of ‘downscaling’, a scaling down may make a smattering of sense if there is some comparable data relating to the region for which the scaling is taking place. And this correlation, I can assure you, is not possible 99 times out of 100.

But that doesn’t bother the ADB, because it is a bank, it must find a way for Asian countries to agree to taking loans that help them mitigate the effects of rampaging climate change, as this report tries to convince us about. Which is why the ADB has said its unimpeachable analysis is based on “a three-step modeling approach” and this is “(i) regional climate modeling (ii) physical impact assessment, and (iii) economic assessment”, the last aspect being what they’re betting the thermometer on.

The numbers that have emerged from the ADB’s computable general equilibrium model must be satisfyingly enormous to the bank’s thematic project directors and country directors. For the scenario modellers have provided the ammunition for the bank to say: “The region requires funding with the magnitude of 1.3% of GDP on average per annum between 2010 and 2050 under the business-as-usual-1 scenario. The cost could rise to up to 2.3% (upper range) of GDP per annum taking into account climate uncertainties. To avoid climate change impact under the business-as-usual-2 scenario, adaptation cost of around $73 billion per annum on the average is required between now and 2050.”

I could not, in this needlessly dense and poorly written volume, find a mention of which rice strains have been measured for their yields in the example given for India, when the ADB report makes some dire forecasts about how yields will be lowered or will plunge under several forecast conditions. Perhaps they were buried in some footnote I have overlooked, but considering that the International Rice Research Institute (one of the more dangerous CGIAR monster institutes) has in its genebank more than 40,000 varieties from India, and considering that rice conservationist Debal Deb cultivates 920 varieties himself, the ADB (and its modelling troupe) talking about rice ‘yield’ means nothing without telling us which variety in which region. And that sort of negligence naturally leads me to ask what sort of thermometers they consulted while assembling these models.

– Rahul Goswami