Echoing Thoughts: Is this the kind of planet we want to leave behind?

Latest UN study says we have 12 years to prevent the world from an environmental catastrophe

11 months ago, Om, my nephew was born. Almost every morning since then, I spend at least a good ten minutes staring at his pictures & videos, where he innocently tries to explore his surroundings and learn more about the little world around him. The past 11 months have swooshed by and I can’t get enough of him and the rate at which he’s growing. But the past couple of days have been disconcerting. A few days ago, I woke up in the morning to read an article about the latest UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change) report. Since then, I can’t stop beating myself about the sort of planet you and I, together, are leaving behind for Om and his other friends. I cannot stop obsessing about the impending danger this brings to everyone and everything we love. I cannot seem to wrap my head around the scale of this problem. So, this post is my attempt to understanding what this means for India.

IPCC report & its takeaways

Intergovernmental Panel on climate Change, a UN committee says the Paris Climate agreement, made in 2015 – to reduce greenhouse emissions, maintaining the global warming from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is simply not enough. It says, we would require a 40-50% of reductions in emissions by 2030. This may seem impossible, but the report leaves us with hope. It talks at length about ways in which we can cap this situation through use of technology.

India: The biggest loser

Social cost of carbon (SCC) is a policy tool which is being used to attach a monetary value to the societal damages caused by the emission of every ton of carbon. It captures the loss of productivity due to extreme heat, loss of agricultural produce and other outcomes which impact the lives of people negatively. Though an imperfect tool, it helps us in gauging the costs and benefits and the way we need to adopt to fight climate change.

Research shows that India loses the most in the world due to climate change – up to $86 for every ton of carbon emission. This means that India loses $210 billion annually at current emission rates. US is behind, losing $48 per ton. With so much to lose, we cannot sit on our hands waiting for the disaster to strike. Another interesting find is that, how climate change results in negative social cost of carbon for countries like Russia, i.e they gain as the world gets hotter. Some countries pay a higher economic cost than the rest. But one ton of carbon emission contributes equally to climate change regardless of where it comes from. Thus, as countries come together to set regulations to check the damages caused, they should all be equally responsible to share the load, without just focusing on the SCC of their own.

Collective conscience: The only way to make the world a better place to live

India emits 6% of the global greenhouse gases and will bear almost 20% of the global economic burden because of climate change. Most wealthy countries are almost balanced in terms of the high SCC and its greenhouse gas emissions. This sort of injustice can only be resolved by ensuring India does its best in cutting its carbon footprint through many ways which have been elaborately discussed by scientists in the past (also beyond the scope of this article). It’s also time we sit up and start pushing our neighbours and other wealthy countries to bring down their emissions, which is what Paris climate agreement attempts to do. Though some of the wealthy nations have very little incentive to do so economically, morally, all the countries owe this to our future generations.

It is immoral to leave a place worse off than the one we grew up in. It is nearly impossible for ordinary people like us to envisage the sort of changes a 2 degree increase in climate can do, because we take so much for granted. We are so used to the status quo, we are ignorant and in denial about the impact it can make to our lives, in less than 15 years! Though we all talk about how hot the world is getting, there is nearly nothing we are doing on a day-to-day basis to change our practices. This is exactly what scares me. If we do not change our lifestyles and adopt the idea of being environmentally more conscious, how do we even hope this problem to get any smaller? I hope to see a day where everyone around us lead their everyday lives trying to make their surrounding a cleaner, healthier place to live in. Till then, I guess this will continue to trouble me.