Context

The sixth edition of the Global Environment Outlook from the UN Environment Programme has come as another stark warning: the world is unsustainably extracting resources and producing unmanageable quantities of waste.

Relationship between economic growth and environment degradation

• The linear model of economic growth depends on the extraction of ever-higher quantities of materials, leading to chemicals flowing into air, water and land.

• This causes ill-health and premature mortality, and affects the quality of life, particularly for those unable to insulate themselves from these effects.

Suggestions for India

• The UN report, GEO-6, on the theme “Healthy Planet, Healthy People,” has some sharp pointers for India.

• It notes that East and South Asia have the highest number of deaths due to air pollution; by one estimate, it killed about 1.24 million in India in 2017.

•  As India’s population grows, it must worry that agricultural yields are coming under stress due to increase in average temperature and erratic monsoons.

•  The implications of these forecasts for food security and health are all too evident, more so for the 148 million people living in severe weather ‘hotspots’.

• Evidently, the task before India is to recognise the human cost of poorly enforced environment laws and demonstrate the political will necessary to end business-as-usual policies.

• That would mean curbing the use of fossil fuels and toxic chemicals across the spectrum of economic activity.

Managing air and water pollution

• There are some targeted interventions that only require the resolve to reduce air and water pollution, and which in turn promise early population-level benefits.

• Aggressive monitoring of air quality in cities through scaled-up facilities would bring about a consensus on cutting emissions of greenhouse gases, and provide the impetus to shift to cleaner sources of energy.

Responsibility for pollution

•  It is significant that GEO-6 estimates that the top 10% of populations globally, in terms of wealth, are responsible for 45% of GHG emissions, and the bottom 50% for only 13%.

• Pollution impacts are, however, borne more by the poorer citizens.

Way Forward

•  Combating air pollution would, therefore, require all older coal-based power plants in India to conform to emission norms at the earliest, or to be shut down in favour of renewable energy sources.

• Transport emissions are a growing source of urban pollution, and a quick transition to green mobility is needed. In the case of water, the imperative is to stop the contamination of surface supplies by chemicals, sewage and municipal waste.

• As the leading extractor of groundwater, India needs to make water part of a circular economy in which it is treated as a resource that is recovered, treated and reused.

• But water protection gets low priority, and State governments show no urgency in augmenting rainwater harvesting.

• New storage areas act as a supply source when monsoons fail, and help manage floods when there is excess rainfall.