What is Climate Emergency And Why India Needs To Be More Concerned?

It is still on our mind when 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg appealed to world leaders about the grave need to stop the effects of climate change, “You all come to us young people for hope. How dare you?“. At the 2019 Climate Action Summit at the UN last year, she also said, “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words, and yet, I’m one of the lucky ones. People are suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.”

Nature and life on Earth are threatened by climate emergency. The impact of climate change is being felt around the world, irrespective of whose fault it is. UN and climate experts have called for the declaration of climate emergency worldwide.  

What Is A Climate Emergency?

As defined by Oxford Dictionary, climate emergency is “a situation in which urgent action is required to reduce or halt climate change and avoid potentially irreversible environmental damage resulting from it.”  

Liz Mamo writes about climate change, “There is no single definition of a climate emergency, but the very use of the word “emergency” indicates a clear sense of urgency and a call to action. Many places were prompted to declare emergencies after feeling the effects of climate change: intensified storms, higher temperatures, droughts, and natural disasters in their area. Often led by local councils, politicians or civil society movements, the actions of these entities, cities and even whole countries are driven by what they feel is the urgency of the situation. We still have a window of opportunity within which to reduce our carbon emissions and protect our future, but if we leave it any longer, we will be out of time.“

Further, journalist Colm Gorey explains that in declaring a climate emergency, a government admits that global warming exists and that the measures taken up to this point are not enough to limit the changes brought by it. The decision stresses the need for the government and administration to devise measures that try and stop human-caused global warming.

The terminology was first used by The Guardian in May 2019 as they insisted that “‘climate change’ sounds rather passive and gentle when what scientists are talking about is a catastrophe for humanity.”

As of November 4, 2019, 1,180 jurisdictions and local governments in 23 countries have declared a climate emergency.

Facts About The Climate Emergency

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to provide an objective source of scientific information on climate change. It describes the science of climate change as follows:

1. Climate change is real and is caused by human activities.
2. The global temperatures on Earth are largely affected by the level of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere.
3. The global temperature has been rising steadily since the time of the Industrial Revolution.
4. The carbon dioxide (CO2), the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, is largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels.

The organization has also given the report on the effects of climate change:

1. There has been a 1.1-degree increase in global temperature, which has resulted in natural calamities like heat waves, droughts, flooding, winter storms, hurricanes, and wildfires. This increase in temperature in 2019 against the pre-industrial temperature has been reported by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
2. The year 2019 also witnessed exceptional global heat waves, retreating ice and record sea levels due to the greenhouse gases produced by human activities.
3. The global average temperature during the five-year period, from 2015–2019, and ten-year period from 2010–2019 were the highest as recorded by WMO. Also the year 2019 was noted as the hottest year.
4. In 2018, the total annual global greenhouse gas emissions reached its highest levels.

What Do We Need To Do To Limit Global Warming And Act On Climate Change? 

The same report also discussions actions that can be taken against this climate emergency:

1. It’s high time we reduce emissions by 7.6% every year from 2020 to 2030 to prevent warming beyond 1.5 degree Celsius. If countries had acted on this ten years ago and accepted the scientific solutions, then today the governments would have needed to reduce emissions by only 3.3% each year.
2. The Paris Agreement’s pledges of 2015 are insufficient to meet the target in 2030 to cut the greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, governments are expected to review and increase these pledges as a key objective this year to meet the target effectively. So, it will be become the most important event of the 2020, and will happen at the climate change conference known at COP26 in Glasgow, UK in November 2020.
3. If countries cannot agree on the pledges to meet the target in another five years, the emissions reduction necessary will leap to a near-impossible level of 15.5% every year, which will lead to a serious environmental threat.
4. The countries must take rapid action to increase their commitments to shift onto a path of decarbonization, setting targets for net zero carbon. There is also a need to accelerate production of energy from renewable sources and reduce fossil fuel dependency.

It’s also important to mention that the Climate Change Act of Scotland includes an emissions target, set for the year 2050, for a reduction of at least 80% from the baseline year, 1990.

Why India Needs To Be More Concerned?

The climate emergency is a global issue. In the Indian context, N.H. Ravindranath and J.A. Sathaye quoted the The Third Assessment Report (IPCC-2001) in their work “Climate change and developing countries” to explain that vulnerability to climate change is a function of exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity. India is the third largest developing country, with a mountain range as the geological formation in the north and a 7500-kilometre-long coast line covering the south. Nearly 700 million people living in rural areas directly depend upon climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, forests, and fisheries as well as natural resources such as water for their subsistence and livelihoods. Further, the adaptive capacity of dry land farmers, forest dwellers, fisher folk, and nomadic shepherds is very low.

The Ministry of Environment and Forests of the Government of India also stated in their report that climate change is likely to impact all the natural ecosystems as well as socioeconomic systems.

On a positive note, Nivedita Khandekar writes on Eco Watch that India is taking climate emergency seriously after decades of concentrating on economic development and insisting that global warming was mainly a problem for the more industrially-developed countries to solve. More than 40 organizations—including major industrial corporations such as Tata, Godrej, Mahindra and Wipro through their various philanthropic organizations, plus academic think tanks, business schools, aid agencies, and the government’s scientific advisers—have come together to co-operate on climate solutions. The umbrella organization, called the India Climate Collaborative (ICC), also includes international institutions such as Bloomberg Philanthropies and the MacArthur Foundation.

There is also an initiative called The International Solar Alliance (ISA) which is an alliance of 121 countries initiated by India. Most of them are sunshine countries, which lie either completely or partly between the Tropic of Cancer and the Tropic of Capricorn. The primary objective of the alliance is to work for efficient exploitation of solar energy to reduce dependence on fossil fuels. This initiative was first proposed by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in a speech in November 2015 at Wembley Stadium, in which he referred to sunshine countries as Suryaputra (“Sons of the Sun”).

Beside this, according to a report published in The Economic Times on January 7,  2020, following were the primary concerns about the effects of climate change in India:

1. 1. The report said that India, the nation which has 1.3 million populations, is facing a serious threat of climate change in the form of devastating floods, dire water shortages and baking temperatures, etc.  which would lead to widespread suffering.
   2. Last year was recorded as the hottest year for the nation are casualties of this extreme weather condition were more than 1500 people.
   3. The southern city of Chennai ran out from water and declared “Day Zero” last year.
   4. The last decade was recorded as the hottest decade since 1991 and the temperature was approximately 0.36 degrees Celsius above the average.
   5. Many people lost their life due to natural calamities. As per the report, 850 people were killed by heavy rain and flooding; 350 in summer due to temperature of up to 51 degree Celsius); lightening and storms claimed another 380 lives.
   6. The last decade also witnessed the five warmest years. Eleven of the 15 warmest years were also recorded during the past 15 years.
   7. The report also mentioned that eight cyclones from over the north Indian Ocean hit the nation last year.
   8. The impact of global warming on India is clearly seen, as the report says that each of the last four decades has been hotter than the preceding one.

India Should Put Immediate Concern On Climate Emergency.  

Paroma Soni writes that of all the G-20 nations, India is hailed as the one that has come close to meeting its 2015 Paris Agreement goals. It is spending nearly ₹2,000 crores on its ambitious solar energy plan. With this, the government seems to be keeping up with its pledge of generating 40% of power from renewable sources.  In fact, the present government led by NDA also renamed the Ministry of Environment and Forests as the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change.

At the same time, in India, the climate emergency movement hasn’t gained as much momentum as in the western countries. While it is true that India’s net carbon emissions are significantly lower given the population size, but India’s environmental policies and acts are not up to the marks to make the climate emergency movement in a large wave. India needs some major steps and policies on climate emergency, and also needs to build understanding about the issue amongst the people because only laws and policies cannot solve this crisis.  

However, India’s political system is not designed to hold candidates and parties accountable for climate issues because it is not an electoral priority. The recent manifestos released by the major two political parties, the BJP and Congress included fleeting segments on climate change, but in no way were they nearly as comprehensive as their foreign counterparts or even the rest of the manifesto. A few smaller Indian parties have made environmental policy central to their campaigns, such as the Uttarakhand Parivartan Party (UKPP) or the Indian Peoples Green Party (IPGP). This proves how dangerously unsupported such initiatives are, but also shows how political structures which influence public opinion need to be urgently challenged.  

Debashish Sarma, a postgraduate student in Geography from Tezpur, Assam, in a email exchange, put it simply: our climate is like a history book where it’s complied with all the weather conditions of more than 20 years, but day by day, due to human deeds the weather is changing and we are not taking seriously. Our each and every act is related to nature. Climate emergency is not a joke, created in a short span of time, it’s borne out of a long ignorance about the negative impact of our interference in the natural systems.

“The whole chain of the natural system is being disturbed by humans from long days back from the industrial revolution, or even more recently. In today’s world all development is done at the cost of nature. And if we talk about India it’s a developing country where the people in power are in the hunger to make it economically well sound, and also to achieve the high tech facilities, nature or environment always have to sacrifice. Our nature has given us the resources to utilize for only our basic needs not make us lazier than our past generation, we are getting dumb, lazy, and search for shortcut of everything. And when seeking so nature has to sacrifice,” he also added.  

At the end, I would just like to say that Global Warming will affect every individual in every country. It’s the duty of every human and every government to take steps to stop the climate crisis. Unfortunately, India is still slow to act.