What’s with the Climate?

A series of writings that review the National Action Plan on Climate Change.

The country’s most important policy document that will determine how it deals with climate change is here. The National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) released by Prime Minister Mr. Manmohan Singh a little over two weeks ago is a historic document as it purports to address a challenge that is grappling humanity.

In a series of posts over the next few weeks, I will attempt an in-depth step by step analysis of the NAPCC, covering all its contents: principles and approach, each of the eight missions individually, their implementation, as well as areas that are conspicuously absent from the policy.

In my first entry, I will talk about the history of the plan, its scope & implications and how it was was received in the country and internationally. I will be publishing this over the weekend and will continually update this post with links to subsequent parts.

This entry was also made on Orange Hues blog.

This entry was originally made on Reporting on a Revolution on April 16, 2008

From my Geology News Feed a link to a pretty cool application for assessing the impact of sea level rise on coastal areas. The application written by Alex Tingle of Firetree.net uses NASA elevation data and the Google Maps API to create dynamic maps of flooding. I played around a little with Mumbai. It’s tempting to run a disaster scenario. Just choose a sea-level rise of 10-15 meters and watch the city go under water. But the results are not very surprising and not too realistic either. This massive a rise in sea level is at the extreme end of the climate change and sea level rise scenarios possible if the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheet completely melts. May happen but unlikely for the next couple of centuries.

 I wanted to find out whether the elevation data underlying the application was fine enough to depict subtle variations in topography and the effect of a small change in sea-level. I used just a 1 meter rise in sea-level. The resulting map impressed. The flooded areas were restricted to the low-lying mudflats and mangroves along the Panvel, Thane, Mahim, Gorai and Vasai Creeks. The rest of the city was unaffected, which is to be expected since the land surface of Mumbai is hilly in places or has been raised by several meters during land reclamation projects. Climate scientists give scenario based range of values for sea-level rise this century and a sea-level rise of 1 meter by the end of the century is a distinct possibility. This would mean large areas of Mumbai and surrounds will be at risk. Image below shows Mumbai and its suburbs and exurbs. Pink areas are the built up concrete jungle, lighter green is land vegetation, blue is water and dark green-brown areas are tidal mudflats and mangroves.

Mumbai City and Environs

A 1 meter sea-level rise will affect these mudflats the most. Yet at places I have marked with arrows near the Panvel and Thane Creeks, pink is intruding upon the dark-green, which means construction is eating up those low-lying areas. All these new constructions are raised a few meters above the original surface and that may protect them against a future sea-level rise. But there are other factors at play and these were demonstrated with terrifying clarity during the flooding by the Mithi river of Bandra-Kurla complex and adjoining low lying areas on July 26-27 2005. As shown by arrows near the Mahim Creek area which trace the Mithi river, mudflats and mangroves were built upon and the river channel reduced to a narrow drain. Since no natural holding areas for the water such as mangroves were left, a combination of high rainfall and high tide led to water level rising up several meters and inundating buildings and even the airport.

But we never seem to understand and learn from history. The same mistakes are being repeated at Panvel and Thane Creeks. When I was growing up, one of the great pleasures of driving to Mumbai from Pune was the gorgeous landscape after Panvel, all those unspoiled tidal channels, creeks and mudflats and mangroves until you crossed the Vasai Bridge. Today that area is an ugly sight. Mud-flats and natural drainages are being filled up and we may soon have constructions coming right up to the banks of the main Panvel tidal channel. The events of July 26 2005 showed how even at present sea-level, bad urban planning can led to severe flooding. The consequences of just one meter rise in sea level can be difficult to predict and may be more damaging than anticipated if you start thinking of its effects on tides and coastal erosion. And add to that are monsoons and storms which may become more powerful as oceans warm up over the century leading to water pileups and storm surges several meters high locally. I really don’t know if the new constructions are being built with future sea-level rise in mind but every time I drive past Panvel all I see is more constructions on those mud-flats. There is no doubt that we are putting the people who will live adjacent to these creeks and channels at a very high risk of flooding and storm damage.

IYSoCC 2008 (Hyderabad, India)

Even as we all hold our breaths awaiting the release of the national strategy on climate change adaptation and mitigation which has been delayed time and again, the Indian youth are mobilizing once again to turn up the pressure. Rumors abound around this national strategic plan which is being formulated without input from civil society (granted there are noted environmentalists on the PM’s council who are working to draft the policy). The Indian Youth Climate Network in conjunction with the Friendship Foundation, Global Citizens for Sustainable Development and the Nature & Biological Sciences Society are organizing a national level summit where 200 youth and young professionals from across the nation will gather to set India’s agenda on climate change, debate the post-2012 scenario and evaluate the national strategy which will hopefully be released by then (the Summit is scheduled for early August).

For more information, please email: iyscc08@globalcitizens.org.in

Or visit: http://iycn.in/summit/iysocc

Applications are now available (Deadline July 26th, 2008):

IYSoCC Application Form

Agents of Change Application for first ever Indian Youth Delegation to the UN Climate Change Conference in Poland (COP14), also now available (Deadline July 31st, 2008):

COP 14 Application

The Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has just unveiled the long-awaited National Action Plan on Climate Change. I’ve split the first 5 sections from the long document that summarise the policy and put it up on my server. You can download it here [10 pages, 2 MB].

The five sections contain: Overview, Principles, Approach, Way Forward: Eight National Missions and Implementation of Missions: Institutional Arrangements.

The complete policy including section #6: Technical Document, which is over 40 page long, is available on PMO website (a large 16 MB PDF with 52 pages).

I haven’t studied it yet but my first impression is that although the initiatives listed are welcome, but…

• without any firm commitment towards a target of emission reductions,

• without setting up any time-frame to achieve those reductions and
• without a commitment to phase out new energy generation from fossil fuels and their subsidies…

it is unlikely to make a significant short term or long-term impact into India’s fast growing carbon emissions.

A longer, more detailed analysis including an official response from my organisation (CSM) will follow in coming days.

UPDATE 3-Jul: ‘Climate Challenge India’ coalition formed by CSM just released an interim assessment (PDF).

I just attended the Delhi Youth Summit on Climate organised by the enterprising folks at Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) who put this event together in three weeks!

I made a presentation on Countering the Challenge: Youth and the role of media in social and political transformation in which I talked about the challenge from climate change (its severity, scale and the speed of changes needed), causes of this challenge and how we should counter it.

What I hoped to achieve through the presentation is instill a sense of urgency about the problem and show a path towards solutions. I proposed that a widespread and comprehensive media campaign targeted both at the society and the leadership can bring about the required changes in our attitudes and policies so that we can begin to tackle this problem.

The underlying argument is that personal lifestyle changes although important will not bring about the change needed and that it can be meaningfully addressed only through policy changes. I also argue that technology is not holding us back, rather it’s lack of social awareness (about severity, scale and speed) and lack of political will. I’ve tried to show how we can change this with the help of media.

The presentation contains some video clips so it’s quite large. There are two ways to download.

Download presentation & videos separately and add videos to it later.
Presentation (876 kb zipped)
Videos (32 mb zipped). Also on YouTube.

Get entire presentation including the videos.
Available here (36.4 mb zipped).
This method is not recommended but still provided for those who don’t have time and have the bandwidth.

It’s a little crude in its present state (I put it together the night before presenting it). But the message is important and I hope it gets through. I will continue to work on it to refine and make it more compelling. Will update this post as and when I do.

You are free to use this in any way you wish (as long as you don’t call it your own!). If you use the material without changing the intended message, please attribute the source and provide links (you’ll find them on the last page). If you want any help in presenting it, feel free to email

You may be surprised to learn how inefficient that shiny new car is that you drive to work everyday. Thankfully, there’s a solution in sight.

I think a lot about cars and urban transport. I honestly believe that cars are unsustainable for a large number of reasons and that we must give them up in favor of walking, using the bicycle, two wheelers and public transport. In my personal life, I’ve taken the first step towards that by placing a moratorium on single and dual passenger car travel - will only take out the car when there are three or more people traveling (more on that later).

One of the reasons cars are unsustainable is their horrible inefficiency. I’ve mentioned this before but here’s what Amory Lovins of Rocky Mountain Institute has to say:

I’ve been thinking in background for 20 years about the physics of cars and why are they so inefficient that you know, your car’s using a 100 times its weight in ancient plants everyday and yet only 0.3% of that energy ends up moving the driver. This didn’t seem very good.

Of all the fuel energy you put into the car, 87% (seven eighths of it) never gets to the wheel. It’s lost first in the engine, driveline, idling and accessories.

Of the 1/8^th of fuel energy that does reach the wheels, half of that either heats the air that the car pushes aside or heats the tires and roads. Only the last 6% of the fuel energy actually accelerates the car and then heats the brakes when you stop.

- Amory Lovins in Car of the Future

Not everyone is as inspired to give up their cars — most people actually love theirs — so we must live with them for some time. The only alternative then is to produce more efficient cars. But the auto industry has refused to budge so far, you say. Soooo… you get the independent auto makers to produce efficient cars. But how do you do that? It’s not as simple as producing water bottles, you know. Well, give them an incentive. Announce a $10 million prize for a car that is over 3 times as efficient and sells in large numbers.

This is precisely what Auto X-Prize is all about.

I’ve been following Auto X-Prize development for almost two years. I think it’s a great initiative though I feel they should have aimed higher — 300 MPG instead of 100 (today’s cars average about 29 MPG in US). We need to make a big leap to make up for the inefficiencies of the past century. Nevertheless, it’s an exciting venture and I can’t wait to find out who among the 64 contenders wins the X-Prize and what it does to the industry.  Read More…

Two recent articles in Hindustan Times challenging human induced climate change raise questions about credibility of its reporting and integrity of its correspondent. It also raises a question for serious environmentalists on how to respond to such reports.

Two days ago ( Apr 1, 2008 ) Hindustan Times carried an article titled Climate change not as big a problem: report. Lest anyone should think it as an April Fool’s joke, it was a completely serious piece based on real events. Today ( Apr 3, 2008 ), the same correspondent published a report titled: ‘Sun too causes global warming.’

Both articles are highly misleading, contain factual inaccuracies and at the very least deliberately hide widely known facts that counter its argument to paint a biased picture. In the following paragraphs, I will attempt to highlight the key issues raised by each of the stories.

Climate change not as big a problem: report [1]
by Chetan Chauhan | Page 14, HT New Delhi, Apr 1, 2008 | 353 words

Opening excerpt:

An international civil society report has debunked the claims of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, saying there is no evidence available to show loss of human life directly due to climate change.

The report of the Civil Society Coalition on Climate Change [CSCCC], to be released in India on Tuesday, says there is no evidence to suggest climate change has caused an increase in diseases.

Highly Misleading

By pitting CSCCC [2] directly against IPCC [3], the article creates the impression that both organisations are of similar stature. Nothing could be further from the truth. IPCC is a Noble prize winning United Nations body made up of hundreds of scientists and governmental representatives while CSCCC is merely a coalition of so-called global “think tanks” - corporate lobbyists funded by big oil corporations, the likes of ExxonMobil, to further their interests.

The HT article makes no mention of the background of CSCCC - who comprises the coalition and how are they funded. Unlike IPCC, which was formed two decades ago, CSCCC was only organised a little more than an year back [4] by International Policy Network (IPN) which is a well known recipient of Exxon funding. IPN has received $390,000 from Exxon [5]. Several other members of the coalition have also been a beneficiary.

Paul Reiter, the expert cited in the article, for example, sits on the “Scientific and Economic Advisory Council” [6] of an organization called the “Annapolis Centre.” What is Annapolis Centre? It’s a US based “think tank” [7] that has pocketed $793,575 from ExxonMobil and has been very active in playing down the human contribution to global warming.

Reiter doesn’t have anything too substantiative in his research papers [8] published in scientific peer reviewed journals to back his claims of lack of relationship between disease and climate change. It’s unclear how many other claims of CSCCC report are backed by research in peer reviewed journals.

Yet, here’s a newspaper that reaches out to a country of one billion, publishing unsubstantiated “research” of corporate lobbyists that have a direct financial interest in sensationalising their so-called findings; and pits them against a neutral, highly conservative group of scientists and government representatives whose work is completely based on pure scientific research published in peer-reviewed journals.

‘Sun too causes global warming’ [9]
by Chetan Chauhan | Page 17, HT New Delhi, Apr 3, 2008 | 327 words

Opening excerpt:

FRESH RESEARCH by Danish Space Research Centre can possibly give a new twist to the controversy whether Green House Gas emissions is the major contributor for global warming. The Center’s research based on climate date [sic] of 150 years shows that varying activity of the Sun is the most systematic contributor to natural climate variations. Read More…

A recent talk by Donald Brown at IPCC exposes the moral and ethical bankruptcy of the developed world and poses important questions for all policy makers grappling with how to respond to climate change. Video and transcript of his talk follows

Transcript of Don Brown’s talk on Moral and Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change
I’ve tried to retain the original emphasis of the talk below, though not always successfully. Words I could not make out are left as blanks.

What are the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change?

Vice President Gore in his movie^[1], I’d assume most of you saw the movie, says three times that climate change is a moral issue. And he makes this emphasis but he doesn’t explain. What does it mean to say that climate change is a moral and ethical issue?

What does entail by that? I’m here to convince you that there’s a lot more to the assertion that climate change is a moral and ethical issue and how important it is. How desperately important it is. That we encourage others to have this conversation about moral and ethical dimensions of climate change.

One of the reasons why this is so urgent, not only it is the steepest of the cuts we need that is so urgent but a lot of the moral and ethical issues are actually hidden in scientific and economic arguments about climate change. We need to educate others what the moral and ethical issues are.

It’s not just one moral and ethical issue. It’s many different moral and ethical issues. I work at Penn State, we’ve created a program called… a collaborative program on the ethical dimensions of climate change. We’re working with 17 ethics institutes around the world on this and if this weren’t such a very very very very scary problem, it’d actually also be an exciting problem because it’s gonna force us to think through multi levels of institutions - how we make international law. It’s going to bring every…climate change in my view is going to force us to rethink moral norms, ___ norms and international norms.

Let me dig into what we believe the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change are. There are many of them. We’ve identified eight major issues. What we’re trying to do and what we encourage others to do is to not talk about morality or ethics in the abstract but to pay really a close attention to the international debate about climate change.

We are following the debate, teasing out at the moral and ethical issues and then doing rigorous ethical critiques of those issues. There’s a paper, a White paper on the Ethical Dimensions of Climate Change^[2]. Looks like I didn’t bring enough of this. This is the first start. You’ll see it’s a fairly rigorous attempt to dig deeply into the moral and ethical dimensions of climate change. Let me just identify what we think are the most pressing moral and ethical issues of our time about climate change at this moment in history. These are gonna change as this debate unfolds and we attempt to try to follow it.

The first issue is, how much warming should we tolerate. Another way of stating this issue is what is the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases that this world should identify as a target. There is no more obvious moral and ethical issue than this issue. It will literally determine who lives and who dies. Whether ___ survives, whether ___ islands survive. The issue of atmospheric targets, we must see it simply not as a scientific issue but as the most profound kind of moral and ethical issue. Issue#1.

Issue#2. The world is emitting 7 billion tons of carbon. We’re headed to 20 billion tons of carbon in this century under one of the IPCC scenarios. We’ve got to reduce the 7 to 2.5 billion tons in next thirty years. The moral issue is, how do we allocate who gets to use those two and a half billion tons of carbon. How do we allocate? Does United States get to use more per capita than China or India? There could be no more obvious moral and ethical issue than who gets the right to use the atmosphere as a sink. And it’s hardly on our lips. Read More…

In case you’re wondering about the flood of new entries here, most of those are posts I made on Orange Hues blog over the last year. I was asked to copy some them here (so I have) and to cross-post any new ones in the future (so I will).

I’ve been blogging for about five years, though not always on climate change. I started out writing about usability and user experience design and then it evolved into writing on innovation, big businesses, design, and strategy. My recent entries have mostly been on climate change.

The transition happened a little over two years ago when I saw a documentary that left me shocked for days, even weeks. Not the Al Gore movie, this was before that. An Inconvenient Truth would seem like sugar candy to anyone who watches BBC’s Global Dimming, a much more grim documentary that gives us a glimpse into the doomsday scenario of expected warming over the coming decades.

The film made me realise the extent of this problem. Since then, I’ve gained a deeper understanding of the science involved; of emerging renewable energy technologies from various parts of the world that can help address this; the political, social & economic aspects, which are much graver; and of geo-engineering solutions that are being proposed by some scientists.

I hope you find the posts useful. Would love to know your thoughts on them. Feel free to leave a comment even if you disagree with something, or to get in touch.

A couple of months back, a group of us converged in Bangalore for a youth workshop on Intergenerational Partnerships for Climate Change Mitigation. It was our own workshop where we had tried to discuss how youth could forge partnerships for climate change mitigation as a basis for achieving sustainable development. The location was Visthar, a beautiful youth training center to the north of Bangalore, with a campus bearing a striking resemblance to a natural forest! There were only about twenty participants, mostly youth, but representing many different vocations – there were students, engineers, scientists, activists, artists, teachers and even bankers! The discussions we had were no less stimulating and productive than expected from a much larger and more ably qualified group either. Most importantly, the workshop brought us together and enabled us to derive motivation from each other!

A range of presentations displayed the commendable initiatives that youth across the country were involved in, and clearly reflected the amount of groundwork that was being undertaken. What was particularly evident was the myriad ways in which climate change affected communities and people alike. A college student from Hyderabad presented her case study on the prevalence of asthma, and meticulously related a rapid increase in the incidence of this common respiratory ailment to climate change as projected by the IPCC findings. Another group from Patna presented a moving report on how freshwater discharge into the Ganga river would be subjected to extreme variations because of climate change, how water mismanagement was compounding this situation and how this would profoundly impact the lives of the people of Bihar. Anugraha John from Bangalore spoke of his experiences with his youth environmental program, the China-India forum and of his vision for the Asian Citizens Alliance, an intergenerational gathering of committed change makers from across Asia that he envisioned. Kartikeya Singh of the Indian Youth Climate Network (IYCN) also described his experiences with the international climate change movement, and of the purpose and vision of the Indian Youth Climate Network.

We also had the opportunity to hear from eminent specialists – Mr. Shree Padre, the Magasaysay award winner and an established authority on rainwater harvesting, eloquently described how surface water was being wasted and spilled, and how climate change would cause an enormous decrease in rainfall and available surface water. Prof. Bhavani Shankar, retired Chief Civil Engineer of Karnataka shared with us the technological side of climate change and its impacts on water availability, and of the need for reviewing river water command area management to incorporate reduced in flows as an adaptation measure. We even managed a field trip to a CDM financed sustainable biogas cooking stoves project near Bagepalli, an hour’s drive north of Bangalore. The visit was highly informative, and we witnessed how economic benefits from market based climate change mitigation can bring sustainable growth to communities, although the inherent irony of those least responsible having to cut down on emissions wasn’t lost on us!

From the presentations and the ensuing discussions, it was evident to us that youth were not only clearly capable of positive action, but were also raring to go! What was needed was a convergence of ideas, not just people. Realistic, achievable and innovative ideas that could help effectively mitigate climate change forever, and help percolate sustainable benefits to our countrymen. We departed from Visthar after two days spent in the rare company of like minded people sharing concerns and outlooks, with a firmer resolve to redouble our efforts towards creating a sustainable planet.