Editorial: Economy & environment are not a binary
The news that extreme heat events shaved off a massive USD159 billion worth loss of incomes and 167 billion potential labour hours in India in 2021 should set off alarm bells across governments – central and states – and the industry. The Climate Transparency Report, which put definitive figures to issues that only occasionally occupy the attention of those in power, also stated that the income loss was a staggering 5.4 percent of the country’ Gross Domestic Product and extreme events such as cyclones and floods damaged crops across 36 million hectares causing farmers a loss of USD 3.75 billion between 2016 and 2021. The worrying part is its forecast: At the minimum rise of 1.5 degrees C in global temperature, the annual damage from cyclones-floods will rise by 49% and labour productivity will decline by 5%.
It is not that the widespread damaging impact of extreme weather events has not been quantified in the country, but this report is arguably the strongest warning that India must not only brace itself for extreme events, but also honestly and comprehensively prepare to mitigate their impact. Of course, India is not the only country affected but its peculiar nature – widely differing geographical layout and climatic conditions, large population, high densities in cities, ageing infrastructure – makes it most vulnerable to the havoc such events cause.
The anguish is that India remains unprepared or under-prepared at all levels – local, state and national; governments, industry and agriculture – to combat the impact of climate change despite the decades it had in hand. Through the 1980s and thereafter, as talk of climate change and its impact through extreme weather events gathered momentum, governments and industry bigwigs dismissed the impending phenomenon as either too alarmist to be true or a conspiracy theory to roil the developing nation. Attention to global warming and environmental issues was seen as an unnecessary disruption in India’s forward socio-economic march. The economy and environment were posited as a binary with the country firmly on the side of expanding the economy.
The last few years have shown that to continue seeing them as a binary is not only foolish in the extreme but unrealistic too. The report and its forecast should be made compulsory reading for the ministers and bureaucrats who have, in the last few years, blindly ignored environmental norms to greenlight mega projects across the country. How this squares up with LiFE (Lifestyle For Environment), a global mass movement to inspire individual and collective action to protect the environment, which Prime Minister Narendra Modi and UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres unveiled is anybody’s guess. Lowering the temperature of our air-conditioners is a step in the right direction but it will take pivoting by industry and government to address climate change in a substantive way. For a start, discard the binary.
Truss exit should prompt a trust vote
When Elizabeth Truss resigned as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom on Thursday, she became not only the head of the government with the shortest tenure – 45 days – but also a meme motivation that will far outlast her all-too-brief tenure. Her tumultuous tenure saw an ill-advised economic plan which sent the financial markets into a chaos and exposed factions in the Conservative Party which had elected her over Rishi Sunak only six weeks back. Her tenure rather her hasty exit threw the entire country into turmoil of the sort it had not seen in decades.
Truss was the third Conservative Prime Minister in as many years – a signal of the chaos and churn in the Tories. The party has signalled that it will choose her replacement by the end of the next week, widely seen as a super-quick move for a party that took months to elect Truss after Boris Johnson’s exit earlier this year. Sunak, of Indian origin, is seen as the favourite to get his party’s mandate. Should he succeed, he will be the first non-white Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. If he or whoever the Tories elect as their next leader to steer the country, also among the largest of the world's economies, out of the mess manage to put their head down and get the job done, the storm would have passed.
However, it may be worthwhile to treat the Truss exit as the sign that the Tories have squandered the mandate they got and for the country to seek a new trust vote – go into an election and get a fresh mandate. The world cannot afford the chaos and uncertainty in the UK any more.
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