Climate Change

Best of Opinion: Global growth headline numbers mask vulnerabilities

From the IMF's global growth forecast and Navi Pillay's Nobel Peace Prize to India's climate needs, rising healthcare costs and the debate over welfare, today's opinions examine multiple challenges

The inadequacy of climate action

With the 1.5°C threshold expected to be breached within years, India must pay greater attention to adaptation and resilience

Greater flexibility needed to bridge differences at COP31: Bhupender Yadav

Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on Thursday called for greater flexibility, pragmatism, and mutual respect among member countries to bridge remaining differences and secure ambitious and balanced outcomes at this year's UN climate conference, also called COP31. COP31 is scheduled to be held in November in Turkiye's Antalya. He made the remarks while addressing a plenary discussion in Fiji, part of the pre-COP31 meetings co-hosted by Australia, Fiji, and Tuvalu. Pre-COP is a preparatory meeting held a few weeks before the conference. Yadav also stated that India expects COP31 to chart a definitive way forward to enhance engagement, technical cooperation and targeted support for building capabilities. India stands ready for open and transparent dialogue to resolve these issues in the run-up to COP31 to ensure "a balanced, equitable, and historic outcome" for the global community, particularly the most vulnerable, according to the minister. He further emphasised that clim

Swiss glaciers lose 5.5% of ice volume in 2026, second-highest on record

Glaciers in Switzerland the home to the most in the Alps lost 5.5 per cent of their ice volume this year, the second-biggest percentage drop on record due to heat waves and low winter snowfall, experts report. "Alpine glaciers have no chance of surviving in the long term under such conditions," the GLAMOS Swiss glacier monitoring service and Swiss Academy of Sciences said in a statement released Thursday. The trend has worsened in recent years: Over the past five years alone, the volume of ice in Switzerland has declined by nearly a fifth, the experts say. The report testifies to the latest concerns that global warming is wreaking havoc on Europe, the world's fastest-warming continent. "The warming that we are experiencing now can be attributed 100 per cent to anthropogenic climate change. It's as simple as that," said Matthias Huss, who heads GLAMOS. "Without human emissions or fossil fuels, we wouldn't have any warming at the moment." This year's ice volume loss continues ...

India's carbon paradox: Big emitter but small per-capita footprint

India's GHG emissions have grown at a compound annual rate of 3.6 per cent since 1990, more than twice the global rate of 1.5 per cent

El Niño threatens rabi crops, may affect foodgrain output: Agri Secy

Minister Chouhan says teams to visit Maharashtra & Karnataka soon to assess the drought impact

El Nino may turn 'very strong' by late 2026, raising risks for India: IRI

The El Nino weather pattern is strengthening and is likely to become "very strong" in late 2026 and early 2027, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University said, raising concerns over elevated climate risk for India. In its latest ENSO forecast, published on September 21, the IRI said the Nino 3.4 index, a key gauge of Pacific Ocean temperatures, reached +3.0 degrees Celsius in mid-September. All 22 models it surveyed, 13 dynamical and nine statistical, forecast "very strong" El Nino conditions through the 2026-27 winter. The IRI put the probability of El Nino at 100 per cent through February 2027, falling to 61 per cent by mid-2027. It said the event could rank among the strongest on record. The institute also expects the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) to become strongly positive from September through December 2026 before returning toward neutral conditions in early 2027. A positive IOD often occurs alongside El Nino, though the two can ..

Super El Nino report: Co-author explains '451K excess deaths' estimate

The University of Chicago's Energy Policy Institute's report that claimed that the 'super El Nino' might cause around 15,800 additional heat-related deaths in India over the next six months, was measured using two components, seasonal temperature forecasts, and temperature-mortality relationships, a co-author of the study said. Emily Grover-Kopec, a co-author, told PTI that temperature-mortality relationships were assessed using "one of the most commonly referenced seasonal forecasts" from the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF SEAS5). The recently published report claimed that the climate phenomenon could push global land temperatures 1.2 degrees Celsius above normal in the coming months, resembling the higher temperatures that climate change is projected to deliver in the next 20 years. "When considering a wide suite of seasonal forecasts that are available, the ECMWF SEAS sits in the middle in terms of the projected temperature anomalies, so this presents a

The importance of 'blue-green' infrastructure

As the tragedy in Nepal reminds us, water and forests cannot be taken for granted. This book offers policymakers a practical guide to building resilience against extreme weather

Climate risks may widen India's milk demand-supply gap, says CII paper

Milk production growth has slowed to 3.5-3.7 per cent, while climate risks could raise procurement costs, squeeze margins and affect value-added dairy products

India's heat risk rises as El Nino threatens 450,000 lives globally: Report

The developing climate pattern could intensify heat stress worldwide, adding pressure on health systems and vulnerable communities

COP31: Can the Antalya summit bridge the global climate finance divide?

The question of finance tends to drive a wedge between the wealthy Global North and the developing world at climate summits. Will November's Antalya summit be any different?

What the Himalayas need

Protecting the Himalayan ecosystem is crucial for the 2047 goals, and it's time India adopted an integrated approach to safeguarding its fragile ecology

Himalayan glaciers melting 65% faster, 80% volume at risk by 2100: Study

The study done by global consultancy Systemiq said that about one-third of Himalayan glacier mass loss is linked to South Asian black carbon

The cost of rising sea

Where coastal land is sinking at the same time as oceans are rising, the effective increase in relative sea level is considerably greater

Climate change takes back seat as US Democrats focus on Trump, costs

Climate change has been the backdrop to Charles Hughes' entire life, from kindergarten lessons about disappearing habitats to wildfire smoke billowing through the air he breathed while growing up in Colorado. But now that he's a college student in Massachusetts, he said global warming is rarely a top issue. "Honestly, it doesn't come up as much," said Hughes, who chairs the state's chapter of the College Democrats. What a difference six years makes -------------------------------------- During President Donald Trump's first term and especially during the Democratic primaries to determine who would run against him in 2020, Democrats spoke constantly about climate change. They used it to rally young voters such as Hughes, fuelling protests and sweeping demands to remake the economy with proposals like the Green New Deal. But there has been a national shift in the conversation that is sharp enough for some researchers to coin the term "climate hushing" to describe it. The Searchlight

CJI Surya Kant flags unequal burden of global shift to clean energy

CJI Kant said the global shift towards clean energy must account for the differing circumstances of countries and ensure that the burden of transition is distributed fairly

Climate change may be making El Nino events stronger, suggests study

A new study suggests that El Ninos - the natural climatic chaos agent that pops up periodically and spikes global temperatures - are getting stronger because of human-caused climate change. El Ninos are more than 36% stronger than they were before the industrial age began in the mid 1800s, with a 16% jump in just the last 40 years showing that the increase is accelerating, according to a study in Thursday's journal Science. The findings come as a strong El Nino that formed a couple months ago is forecast to be the biggest on record in coming months. El Ninos, which are a temporary warming of parts of the equatorial Pacific, warp weather worldwide and increase extreme events, including heat waves, floods in some places and droughts in others. They can cost trillions in damage. "That's important because strong El Ninos have much stronger impacts on climate hazards and extremes worldwide. When we set out to answer the question of why this might be happening, we set our data up against

RMSI's new tool to offer localised climate risk intelligence to enterprises

RMSI is a tech company delivering advanced solutions in geospatial intelligence, AI, and smart automation to help enterprises address complex challenges such as climate change and disaster management

Best of BS Opinion: Limits of 'Economic D-Day' lie at China's gates

Today's Best of BS Opinion examines US sanctions on Iran, H1N1 risks, aviation regulation, hard-to-abate sector transition plans and India's software product journey.