Page 55 - Climate Change

India's fight against climate change will unite the whole world: Om Birla

India's fight against climate change will unite the entire world, Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla told a Danish parliamentary delegation on Tuesday. Birla also said he is hopeful that the proposed "P20" summit in the near future would see purposeful dialogue on the relevance of parliamentary governance and democratic values and serve to benefit the entire world. Members of the Danish Parliamentary Committee for European Affairs, led by its chairman Niels Fleming Hansen, called on the speaker at the Parliament House. Interacting with the members of the delegation, Birla laid emphasis on regular parliamentary exchanges between India and Denmark. He suggested that a regular process of dialogue should be developed between the two countries to ensure that both the parliaments can learn from each other and share best practices. According to a statement issued by the Lok Sabha Secretariat, Birla referred to the Green Strategic Partnership between India and Denmark signed in September 2020, not

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Protection of ecosystems can help reduce climate change: Bhupender Yadav

Yadav said climate change, desertification and biodiversity loss are deeply interlinked and pose existential challenges to humanity

Global goal of reaching net zero requires descaling of emissions: Minister

Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav on Saturday said the global goal of reaching net zero by 2050 requires enhanced descaling of emissions by developed countries

India asks rich nations to intensity emission cuts at G7 ministers' meeting

Meeting the global target of achieving net zero emissions by 2050 will require developed nations to scale up their emission reduction efforts, India said at the G7 Ministers Meeting on Climate Energy and Environment in Japan's Sapporo on Saturday. This will create opportunities for developing nations like India to address the needs of its people, which will also build resilience against the adverse impacts of climate change, environmental degradation, and pollution, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav said at the plenary session of the G7 minister's meeting. He also emphasised that developing countries require access to adequate means of implementation, finance, and technology to effectively combat climate change and address environmental challenges. "The global goal of reaching net zero by 2050 needs enhanced emission descaling by developed nations. This will provide space for countries like India to achieve the development required for its people, which will provide necessa

PM Modi calls for mass movement in global fight against climate change

Prime Minister Narendra Modi has said that an idea becomes a mass movement when it moves from "discussion tables to dinner tables" as he called for people's participation and collective efforts in combating climate change. He also told a gathering of world leaders via video link on Friday that when people become conscious that simple acts in their daily lives are powerful, there will be a very positive impact on the environment. "People across the world hear a lot about climate change. Many of them feel a lot of anxiety because they do not know what they can do about it. They are constantly made to feel that only governments or global institutions have a role. If they learn that they can also contribute, their anxiety will turn into action," Modi said while addressing the World Bank-organised "Making it Personal: How behavioral change can tackle climate change" conference. Modi hailed the World Bank for organising the event on impact of behavioural change on climate change, saying .

Climate change hitting us from various different angles: Nirmala Sitharaman

The Finance Minister said: "You need to have more people talking about it, more influential people talking about it"

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PM Modi calls for people's participation in fight against climate change

Prime Minister Narendra Modi said an idea becomes a mass movement when it moves from "discussion tables to dinner tables" as he called for people's participation and collective efforts in the fight against climate change. He also told a gathering of world leaders on Friday that when people become conscious that simple acts in their daily lives are powerful, there will be a very positive impact on the environment. "People across the world hear a lot about climate change. Many of them feel a lot of anxiety because they do not know what they can do about it. They are constantly made to feel that only governments or global institutions have a role. If they learn that they can also contribute, their anxiety will turn into action," Modi said while addressing the World Bank-organised "Making it Personal: How behavioral change can tackle climate change" conference. Citing "Mission Life", which was launched by him and the UN secretary general last year October, Modi said the programme is abo

Why climate change makes GDP unsuitable for measuring economic churn

GDP does not capture issues like welfare, inequality and human development. Nor does GDP capture the damage to the environment caused by economic activity, writes T N Ninan

Human-caused climate change resulting into increased flash droughts: Study

'Flash droughts', or droughts that start and develop rapidly, have become more frequent due to human-caused climate change and the trend is predicted to accelerate in a warmer future, according to a new research. An international team of researchers, including those from the University of Southampton, UK, said that flash droughts are fast becoming the 'new normal' for droughts, making forecasting and preparing for their impact more difficult. Their research is published in the journal Science. Flash droughts, caused by low precipitation and high evapotranspiration and leading to quick depletion of soil of water, can develop into severe droughts within a few weeks. While they start quickly, the droughts can last for months, damaging vegetation and ecosystems, and triggering heat waves and wildfires. The researchers wanted to understand if there had been a transition from conventional 'slow' droughts to flash droughts and also how the trend would develop under different carbon emiss

Climate change threatens survival of tigers in Sunderbans: Conservationists

Climate change is increasing the intensity of forest fires, reducing vegetation and degrading natural habitats, forcing the wildlife to move out and come into conflict with humans, conservationists said on Friday. In its latest all-India tiger estimation report, released recently by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) highlighted the "silent and surmounting" threats of climate change-related impacts on habitats and the loss of the quality of forests over time. It added that climate change threatens the survival of tigers in the Sunderbans and is one of the major challenges facing the wildlife in the Western Ghats. While the big cat population in the Sunderbans is steady, it has come down substantially in the Western Ghats where 824 tigers were recorded in 2022 against 981 in 2018. Mohammad Sajid Sultan, the NTCA's assistant inspector general of forests, said the wildlife is being affected by climate change with new pests and diseases ...

Superheated storms increasingly affect people's health, say experts

"Seafood can be poisoned by silt and wastewater runoff into the sea; flooded housing can become contaminated and moldy; and the mental health impacts of storms are often hidden and underestimated"

Consensus on definition of global challenges essential for MDB: Sitharaman

The discussion focused on the impact of global development challenges like climate change, pandemics, fragility and conflict on development progress and reforms at the World Bank

India's need for fossil fuel encouraging heatwaves that will cripple it

India's emissions are already on the brink of overtaking those from the European Union. By 2030, they'll account for more pollution than Europe and Japan put together

Residual emissions to be tackled to meet net-zero goal in 2050: Study

Calling for strategies to tackle residual emissions, scientists said they would need to be balanced by carbon dioxide removal techniques to meet net-zero goals, meaning that greenhouse gases (GHG) entering the atmosphere are offset by those being removed. Residual emissions are those that remain after efforts to eliminate GHG emissions have been implemented. For example, agriculture and shipping industries are likely to continue releasing GHG in the atmosphere, even with concerted efforts towards eliminating emissions. "Our plans are not adequate to meet the goal of limiting the earth's temperature increase to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050," said lead researcher Holly Jean Buck, assistant professor of environment and sustainability, University of Buffalo, New York, US. Buck and her international team argued for a better understanding of residual emissions in their paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change. They said that according to long-term strategies of ..

North India major groundwater depletion hotspot with 95% of country's loss

North India accounts for 95 per cent of the country's groundwater depletion, according to a study which found that rainfall increase in the future will be insufficient to fully recover the already depleted resources. The researchers at Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IIT-GN) also found that groundwater depletion in India will continue until excessive pumping is limited, leading to water sustainability issues in the future. Nonrenewable (unsustainable) pumping has the dominant influence on groundwater storage, causing the water table to drop, they said. "Limiting tube well depth and including extraction costs is beneficial to prevent overexploitation of deep aquifers," said Vimal Mishra, Professor, Civil Engineering and Earth Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar. "Limiting global mean temperature rise within 2 degrees Celsius can benefit groundwater storage in North India," Mishra told PTI. The study, published recently in the journal One Earth, analysed data from the Central ...

Coal use climbs worldwide despite promises to slash it, says report

The burning of coal for electricity, cement, steel and other uses went up in 2022 despite global promises to phase down the fuel that's the biggest source of planet-warming gases in the atmosphere, a report Wednesday found. The coal fleet grew by 19.5 gigawatts last year, enough to light up around 15 million homes, with nearly all newly commissioned coal projects in China, according to a report by Global Energy Monitor, an organisation that tracks a variety of energy projects around the globe. That 1 per cent increase comes at a time when the world needs to retire its coal fleet four and a half times faster to meet climate goals, the report said. In 2021, countries around the world promised to phase down the use of coal to help achieve the goal to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit). The more new coal projects come online, the steeper the cuts and commitments need to be in the future, said Flora Champenois, the report's lead author and the project manager for GEM's

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What higher oil prices mean for the fight against climate change

In the past year, soaring energy prices and Russia's invasion of Ukraine have been accelerants and a curse for the transition away from dirty fuels