Sustainability Insider

India's top oil and gas producer ONGC will invest ₹1 lakh crore by 2030 on energy transition projects as it targets net zero...

​What's predictably worse, perhaps, is that an astronomical portion of these natural disasters attacked the underprivileged. About 90% of the tragic deaths were reported from developing countries, choking out disproportionately high costs compared to their economies. For example, about one-fifth of the disasters in Small Island Developing States squeezed out losses equivalent to 5% of their respective Gross Domestic Products (GDP).

Globally, freshwater lakes and reservoirs store 87 per cent of the planet's water, making them a valuable resource for both human and Earth ecosystems. Unlike rivers, lakes are not well monitored, and yet they still provide water for a large part of humanity — even more than that supplied by rivers.

Despite seeming wild and untouched, the Arctic, being rich in mineral resources, has been home to many industrial facilities such as oilfields, mines and military bases since the end of the 19th century. Unfortunately, this was far from the time when the world cared about conservation and sustainability, and being not as strictly checked, these corporations buried all their toxic waste under the permafrost.

To say the warming planet will have severe implications on human health is a terrifying understatement, especially after acknowledging the disproportionate manner in which the behemoth bullies the underprivileged. Below, we elaborate on the four dire ways in which climate change could threaten human life around the world, along with the impact they could have on India.

For context, this temporary exceedance over pre-industrial levels statistic stood at a timid 10% just two years back, between 2017 and 2021 — around the time Greta Thunberg helped blow the topic into mainstream focus. When 196 parties at the UN Climate Change Conference first adopted the Paris Agreement in 2015, it was basically nil.

To slash plastic pollution by 80 per cent globally by 2040, the report suggests first eliminating problematic and unnecessary plastics to reduce the size of the problem. Subsequently, the report calls for three market shifts -- reuse, recycle, and reorient and diversify products.

The tar-ball menace on beaches peaked in 2011, with the state government directing the Indian Coast Guard to crackdown on ships dumping their ballast off Goa, but it had not yielded the anticipated results.

Conventional detection methods testing each and every citizen for individual testing is a highly costly endeavour, both in terms of funds and time. Wastewater surveillance, on the other hand, is extremely cost effective as it involves the analysis of population data collectively through a few wastewater samples. Thus, it is quick and much less cumbersome than conventional techniques.

Workers with lower socioeconomic status have poorer health outcomes and higher premature mortality than those with higher socioeconomic position but a similar occupation. However, the socioeconomic inequality may vary considerably by occupation groups

The study has indicated that in the coming years, Cladocopium (the genus that the five studied flexible algae species belong to) might bring a complete overhaul to the algae status quo. According to the author, these species may come to dominate coral communities as Earth's oceans warm and more sensitive symbionts die out.

Nearly 22 per cent or 8,267 sq.km of the total forest area in Himachal Pradesh is fire-prone. A majority of the fires were reported from the pine forests since during summer the trees shed needles that are highly inflammable due to the rich content of turpentine oil. OIL would test the feasibility of producing CBG from the pine needle in its centre in Bengaluru.

The first-ever foundation model for analysing geospatial data will help to estimate climate-related risks to crops, buildings, and other infrastructure, valuing and monitoring forests for carbon-offset programmes, and also to developing predictive models to help enterprises create strategies to mitigate and adapt to climate change.

During the cleaning process, the plastic items are washed with water several times to rid them of any impurities. However, when scientists examined the water sources that supplied the water for washing, they found significant amounts of microplastics in all of them, amounting to an estimated 30 lakh kilograms per year!

Incidents of depression, anxiety and insomnia have increased due to the upheavals that people were experiencing including loss of livelihood and breaking of social bonds. While COVID-19 has affected daily life and health on an immediate level, climate change has been silently damaging the planet with adverse impacts that are not immediately apparent.

The usage of non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs in veterinary medicine, such as diclofenac, aceclofenac, ketoprofen, nimesulide, etc., has caused a 97% drop in the number of vultures. The Environment, Forest, and Climate Change Minister had publicly indicated that the vulture population had dropped sharply over the course of more than three decades, from 40 million to just 19,000.

The session explored a range of topics, including the current state of cooling technology and its impact on energy consumption and emissions, emerging technologies and trends in sustainable cooling, design strategies for minimizing cooling needs in buildings, and case studies.

Throughout the year, hazardous climate and weather-related events drove new population displacement and worsened conditions for many of the 95 million people already living in displacement at the beginning of the year, according to the report.

In addition to the government and companies, there is increased interest from banks, NBFCs, venture capitalists and PE funds in green finance opportunities!

With the temperatures soaring, the fear of EVs and batteries catching fires have come back to haunt people's minds. There were several EVs fire and blast incidents last summer, leading to deaths and strict government probes.

Twenty-five airports in the country are using 100 per cent green energy while another 121 airports will be made carbon neutral by 2025, Union Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia said on Thursday.

Severe heat wave impacts threaten almost all of Delhi, a region no stranger to excruciating 40°C+ mercury readings. Furthermore, even Delhi's updated state action plans for climate change fail to account for these conditions, meaning we could be looking at an immense burden on human health in the coming years.

Many companies, such as Microsoft, are moving towards such carbon capture technologies to minimise their impact and neutralise emissions. Keeping in mind the fragile state of the environment and the excruciatingly minuscule frame available to make lasting change, how we leverage CDR within the next few years will undoubtedly dictate the future chapters of our battle against climate change.

State-owned power giant NTPC's arm NTPC Green Energy Ltd (NGEL) is planning to raise funds through an initial public offering this fiscal, according to a source. NGEL is a fully-owned subsidiary of NTPC.

Currently, that is, April 4-5, the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure is hosting the fifth edition of the International Conference on Disaster Resilient Infrastructure in New Delhi. This event aims to bring "solutions integrating resilience in infrastructure to ensure access, delivery and continuity of essential services to people and communities".