NEWS UPDATE #95
The Maharashtra government has sent out a resolution that declares drought in 29,000 villages, most of them in Marathwada and Vidarbha, adding that wherever any official reference is made to a “drought-like situation”, it should be treated as “drought”. The government was responding to petitions in the Bombay High Court on the state’s water crisis.
Maharashtra declares drought in 29,000 villages
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The Maharashtra government has sent out a resolution that declares drought in 29,000 villages, most of them in Marathwada and Vidarbha. The state government’s corrigendum from Wednesday says wherever any official reference is made to a “drought-like situation”, it should be treated as “drought”, PTI reported. The government was responding to a series of petitions in the Bombay High Court on the state’s water crisis. In its affidavit, the state claimed it was implementing its drought-relief schemes, especially in the Marathwada and Vidarbha regions, which are in dire condition. (Also see: StoryMap: See How India’s Poor Are Reeling Under the Heat)
Centre can’t shirk responsibility while dealing with drought: Supreme Court
The Indian Express
RULING THAT “the buck will eventually stop with the Government of India”, the Supreme Court Wednesday directed the Centre to consider drought as a disaster and constitute a national response force along with a consolidated fund within six months to deal with drought situations. A bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and N V Ramana also issued directives for updating the drought management manual – published in 2009 — after taking into account rainfall deficit, timely declaration of drought and other factors like dry land farming, water harvesting, drip irrigation etc. (Also read: SC judgement has failed to address the immediate drought crisis: Devinder Sharma)
Drought: Centre showers funds on Swachh Bharat, starves drinking water
Nihar Gokhale, Catch News
When the central government revealed to the Supreme Court on 19 April that at least 33 crore Indians are reeling under drought, it added that it is helpless because states are supposed to deal with drought. That’s far from true. Not only does the government have a scheme for promoting rural drinking water, it has also been starving it of funds ever since coming to office. Since 2015, the National Rural Drinking Water Programme (NRDWP) has survived on just a fraction of the money it used to get. The fall began, in fact, in 2014, when the NDA government changed its focus from drinking water to sanitation i.e. Swachh Bharat Abhiyan. (Also read: Water levels have dipped to 19% in the country’s major reservoirs)
Declare water emergency in country: farmers’body
The Hindu
Peasants’ organisation All India Kisan Mazdoor Sabha (AIKMS) demanded Central government to declare state of water emergency in the country, review implementation of water conservation and take up immediate long term measures to ensure adequate supply of water to all. Through a statement, central executive committee of AIKMS declared that they would take up nationwide campaign to create public awareness against provision of large quantity of water to units of large corporate houses while allowing farmers and the downtrodden to suffer in severe water crisis. According to AIKMS without adequate provision of water rural economy cannot progress.
Electricity consumption to touch 4 trillion units by 2030
Business Today
India’s electricity consumption will increase four times from about 1.1 trillion units to 4 trillion units by 2030.
“Despite massive roll-out of energy efficient schemes, we still see a possible 10 per cent jump in the electricity growth annually for the next 15 or 16 years,” Coal and Power Minister Piyush Goyal said while delivering keynote address at a conference on ‘The Future of Electricity’ in New Delhi on Tuesday. “Indian Electricity sector, to my mind, is possibly the biggest business opportunity the world has to offer today. So India is a bright spot offering a huge trajectory of growth in the electricity consumption going forward,” he added. (Also read: Piyush Goyal: “I Am Confident That By 2019, We Will Be Saving $27 Billion Annually“)
India seeks to shut 12% of power capacity in anti-pollution move
Live Mint
India plans to shut aging coal-fired power plants with a combined capacity of 37 gigawatts to cut emissions and reduce the use of fuel and water. The plants are more than 25 years old and have turned uneconomical, said S.D. Dubey, chairman of the Central Electricity Authority, the planning wing of the power ministry. They will be replaced by super-critical units, which are more efficient, at the same sites, he said, without giving a timeline. “Our first concern is emissions,” Dubey said in New Delhi. “We also want plants to be more efficient in use of resources.”
Indians’ average wealth soared 400% in last decade
The Hindu
The average wealth of an Indian surged by 400 per cent in 2005-15 while that of a European citizen declined by 5 per cent during the period, according to a report by New World Wealth. The report said that in emerging markets such as India, China and Vietnam, average wealth had gone up by over 400 per cent during the ten-year period. The average wealth of a person in Australia has increased by over 100 per cent and in Canada by over 50 per cent in the same period.
Supreme Court no to sale of diesel cars of over 2-litre engines in Delhi
Financial Express
In what may almost spell doom for automobile players who manufacture diesel-run sports utility vehicle and cars with an engine capacity of more than 2000 cc, the Supreme Court on Tuesday indicated that it will ban their sale in the national capital as an interim measure for three to four months to check pollution.
Farm distress: Monsoon isn’t the only spoiler
Harish Damodaran, The Indian Express
It is generally held that the woes of Indian farmers today have had largely to do with extreme weather events… From this also follows the hope that a good monsoon this time — as predicted by the Met Department and most global weather agencies — would help turn things around… What this optimistic view overlooks, though, is an equally important factor behind farmer woes in the last two years. That has to do with the crash in global commodity prices, whose immediate impact has been on the country’s agricultural exports.
Jaitley’s $13-Bn For Water Plan That’s Failed 66 Million Farmers
Abhishek Waghmare, IndiaSpend
Jaitley intends to spend the Rs 86,500 crore on the Accelerated Irrigation Benefits Programme (AIBP)—quadrupling annual spending—rolled out in 1997 to fast-track existing and new irrigation projects with funding boosts to states. As much as Rs 72,000 crore ($10.5 billion) was spent over 20 years since 1997 on the AIBP, according to Water Resources Ministry data. The Central Water Commission reports a spending of Rs 53,000 crore till 2015. Our analysis of the AIBP reveals multiple failures, something that its architect, Yoginder K Alagh, recently acknowledged.
Congress to move amendments to Compensatory Afforestation Bill
Nihar Gokhale, Catch News
The Congress is moving amendments to a key environmental legislation that was passed by the Lok Sabha on 3 May. Former environment minister Jairam Ramesh has proposed changes to the Compensatory Afforestation Fund Bill, 2015, and submitted them to the Rajya Sabha on 10 May. When industrial projects need to take over forests, they are legally bound to pay a sum of money equal to the monetary value of the forest plus the cost of planting at least the same number of trees as compensation. This is as per the Forest (Conservation) Act, 1980. Already, Rs 42,000 crore has been accumulated in such payments, but the money have remained unspent in the absence of a legal mechanism for the same. The bill creates this mechanism. The amendments being moved ensure that tribals and other forest residents have a say in such afforestation projects. (Also read: Is the environment ministry strong-arming the ministry of tribal affairs on forest rights?)
Satnam, author of Jangalnama, found dead
The Indian Express
ALMOST A decade before Arundhati Roy’s ‘Walking with The Comrades’, Satnam’s two-month sojourn in the ‘red corridor’ in 2001 led him to write Jangalnama, the book he would become best known for. A travelogue through ‘Maoist’ Bastar, it was published in Punjabi in 2004. An English translation came out in 2010. On Thursday morning, he was found dead at his home in Patiala. The police are treating it as a case of suicide. Satnam is survived by his wife and daughter. He was reportedly suffering from depression for the past few months.
Researchers identify leading monsoon indicators
Darryl D’Monte, India Climate Dialogue
A team of researchers led by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany has identified two regions – the Eastern Ghats and North Pakistan – which they say serve as “tipping elements” in more accurately predicting the arrival and departure of the southwest monsoon. Unlike current forecasting methods that rely on analysis of rainfall, theirs uses air temperatures and relative humidity, which are well represented both in theoretical models and observations. The proposed method, the researchers say, can predict monsoon onset two weeks earlier and the withdrawal as many as 1.5 months earlier than prevailing methods.
Climate change linked to rise in kidney ailments
Ekatha Ann John, The Times of India
A group of doctors has come together to reestablish an inconvenient truth: The world could be witnessing its first human epidemic directly linked to global warming. And India is one of the hotspots. Researchers have identified parts of the country with suspected sites of heat stress-associated nephropathy – a condition caused by dehydration and heat – and they include Andhra Pradesh, TN, Odisha, Goa and Maharashtra. Chennai-based nephrologist Dr Georgi Abraham, part of the research team, said global warming was not even in the picture when they started the study, the results of which Clinical Journal of American Society of Nephrology has published.
Dangerous New Normal as 400 ppm Carbon Baseline Expected Within Days
Common Dreams
The planet is hurtling towards a disturbing milestone as researchers predict that the southern hemisphere “within days” will reach a new atmospheric baseline of 400 parts per million (ppm) of carbon, signifying that humanity has entered a new phase in our climate impact. “Once it’s over [400 ppm], it won’t go back,” Paul Fraser, a retired fellow with Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), told the Sydney Morning Herald on Tuesday. “It could be within 10 days.”
2016: Is The El Nino Showing Us Where The Edge Of The Climate Cliff Is?
Roger Boyd, Humanity’s Test
The big question is whether or not the Earth system is being pushed to the point where the natural sources of carbon emissions (e.g. permafrost melting, peat bog and forest fires) will significantly increase and/or carbon sinks (e.g. ocean uptake of carbon dioxide, forested areas) will degrade. If the differences between the El Nino events of 2016 and 2015 are bigger than the differences between 1998 and 1997, then there may be a cause for concern.
Air pollution rising at an ‘alarming rate’ in world’s cities
The Guardian
Outdoor air pollution has grown 8% globally in the past five years, with billions of people around the world now exposed to dangerous air, according to new data from more than 3,000 cities compiled by the World Health Organisation (WHO). While all regions are affected, fast-growing cities in the Middle East, south-east Asia and the western Pacific are the most impacted with many showing pollution levels at five to 10 times above WHO recommended levels.(Also read: Four out of five most polluted cities in the world now in India)
First scientific evidence that sea-level rise has claimed five whole islands in the Pacific
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Recently, at least five reef islands in the remote Solomon Islands have been lost completely to sea-level rise and coastal erosion, and a further six islands have been severely eroded. These islands lost to the sea range in size from one to five hectares. They supported dense tropical vegetation that was at least 300 years old. Nuatambu Island, home to 25 families, has lost more than half of its habitable area, with 11 houses washed into the sea since 2011. This is the first scientific evidence, published in Environmental Research Letters, that confirms the numerous anecdotal accounts from across the Pacific of the dramatic impacts of climate change on coastlines and people.
Save the Starfish: Deoxygenated ‘Dead Zones’ Threatening Marine Life
Common Dreams
Using models and maps, researchers at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, were able to quantify and differentiate between large-scale changes in oxygen in the oceans due to both natural variability and climate change. They confirmed deoxygenated “dead zones”—which leave marine creatures struggling to breathe—caused by climate change already exist in the southern Indian Ocean and parts of the eastern tropical Pacific and Atlantic basins, and determined that more widespread detection of deoxygenation caused by climate change would be possible between 2030 and 2040.
Germany had so much renewable energy on Sunday that it had to pay people to use electricity
Quartz
On Sunday, May 8, Germany hit a new high in renewable energy generation. Thanks to a sunny and windy day, at one point around 1pm the country’s solar, wind, hydro and biomass plants were supplying about 55 GW of the 63 GW being consumed, or 87%. Power prices actually went negative for several hours, meaning commercial customers were being paid to consume electricity. (Also read: Germany About To Make Big Changes To Its Renewables Policy)
Will Climate Change Make the Middle East Uninhabitable and Trigger a Mass Exodus?
Juan Cole, Truthdig
Researchers at Germany’s Max Planck Institute and their scientific partners have found that even with just a 3.6 degree average rise in global temperatures, parts of the Middle East could become too hot to live in. Warming won’t be even around the world. Some places will warm more and faster than others. The Middle East is such a place. Summer temperatures are expected to increase twice as fast as the world average. The even worse news is that despite the Paris COP21 agreement, the world is very very unlikely to limit warming to 3.6 degrees F. (2 degrees C.). (Also read: UAE wants to build a ‘rainmaking mountain’ – are we ok with that?)
These 9 Charts Explain The Global Economic Slowdown (And Why Central Banks Can’t Fix It)
John Mauldin, MauldinEconomics.com
GDP growth has only two basic components: growth in productivity and growth in the workforce size. That’s it. There are two and only two ways you can grow an economy: increase the (working-age) population or productivity. There is no magic fairy dust you can sprinkle on an economy to make it grow. To increase GDP you have to actually produce more. That’s why it’s called gross domestic product. Productivity growth, unfortunately, is slowing down in much of the developed world and there’s no reason to think the trend will change soon. These disconcerting charts show the continuing decline in productivity and major shifts in demographics that are worsening the situation.