Hello, and welcome to this latest edition of From a Climate Correspondent, a newsletter exploring the climate crisis around the globe.
Every week we share insights on the fight against climate change, from our adoptive countries – namely Kenya, Hong Kong, Costa Rica and India.
Thanks for reading and stay safe,
From a Climate Correspondent team - India, Jocelyn, Lou and Mat
After the lockdown, imagine a cleaner India
No.17 by Lou Del Bello
Photo credit: Anshul Chopra
As we enter the second week of national Coronavirus lockdown in India, temperatures are on the rise. But while around this time Delhiites start dreading the hot spells that will keep them indoors for weeks on end, this year things are different. It’s getting warmer, yes, but the air is so impossibly clean that it feels almost cool.
Forbidden from going out for a walk, I spend my afternoons on the terrace - a feature of most buildings in the city which only now are people starting to appreciate.. Sometimes I meet my neighbours and we spend an hour chatting, grateful for a short respite to our long, lonely days, until their child decides it’s time to go play inside. “Look! I found a moon!” he shouts. We look at the sky and we marvel with him at how clear the rising moon is. Never has Delhi seen such glorious sunsets.
We all look forward to going out again, for life to get back to where we left off, but we know it will come at the cost of this breathable air. I ask my neighbour: could this be a wake up call? Could people start demanding real progress now that they have seen it is possible, and that Delhi, as well as other Indian cities, was not born polluted?
Anshul Chopra is a freelance photographer from Jalandhar, in Punjab. Last week, he snapped an iconic image that has become the symbol of the lockdown’s effect on nature. From his home, for the first time in his life, he could see the Himalayas. He describes that moment as a “wow feeling”. He didn’t take that photo thinking it would be used by a number of national newspapers, he tells me. “It was for me to remember that on this day this unique thing happened, and I was the first person to capture it”.
An energy crisis
Many have called this moment of environmental bliss “nature’s revenge”, but I like to think it’s an opportunity to build a better life once it’s all over. And while I allow myself a moment of optimism, I am well aware that the challenges that were there before the world’s economy ground to a halt are not going to go away. For each day of its mandated three weeks of lockdown, India’s economy is losing an estimated $4.5 billion. Its informal workforce, which is not regulated and is not eligible for any form of immediate government support, is already facing catastrophe.
To help consumers that can’t pay their electricity bills, the government has issued a series of emergency measures to keep the grid running during the lockdown and beyond, but since India’s energy mix is still dominated by coal, the lion’s share of these efforts will support the fossil fuel industry. The consultancy Wood Mackenzie estimates that renewable installation could fall by a fifth, or 3GW of capacity, due to the lockdown.
These findings resonate with what experts fear may happen at a global level, with solar installations expected to fall for the first time since the 1980s due to the economic crisis. The watchdog International Energy Agency warned that as they respond to the interlinked crises brought by the Coronavirus, governments “must not lose sight of a major challenge of our time: clean energy transitions”.
What next?
In the developing world, poverty adds a whole new dimension to the pandemic, easily relegating sustainability at the bottom of the agenda.
But in a country that is growing so rapidly, the opportunities to develop without repeating the same mistakes of its Western counterparts are plentiful. For example, part of the $24 billion relief package that the government is setting aside, experts say, could incentivise battery storage, a field still in its infancy where India could get ahead of the game and become an international leader. The package could also offer support to the struggling car industry provided it boosts electric mobility.
Sometimes I think that dreaming big is the natural antidote to a crisis that has thrown the whole world into the unknown. But then, small things also matter. So while we wait for the government to lay out a post-Coronavirus strategy that may be green or not, I enjoy my lazy afternoons on the terrace, and think about young Anshul Chopra, and how his photo will sweeten the memory of this brutal lockdown for years to come.
Must reads from the region
Arundhati Roy: ‘The pandemic is a portal’, Arundhati Roy, Financial Times
“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.” One of the greatest novelists of our time on how India can be transformed by the crisis.
No escape from environmental distress as migrants return home in pandemic lockdown, Sahana Ghosh, Mongabay India
India’s national lockdown sparked a mass exodus of internal migrant workers, returning to their villages after losing their livelihoods in the big cities. But many of those who make it, some walking hundreds of kilometers, find that their rural homes, affected by environmental stressors, are not the same.
India works to ensure Tiger Zinda Rahe [stays alive] after New York big cat tests positive for Covid-19, India Today
The news that big cats are susceptible to catching Covid-19 has created consternation in India, whose national animal is the Bengal Tiger. The government has been quick to respond.
New Research Links Air Pollution to Higher Coronavirus Death Rates, Lisa Friedman, New York Times
A first of its kind study connects air pollution and death rates due to Coronavirus, finding that people living in areas where they regularly breathe toxic air are comparatively more vulnerable to the infection. The study focuses on the United States, but its results are echoed by a study by the Chhattisgarh State Health Resource Centre in India.
What else I've been reading
Coronavirus: The race to stop the virus spread in Asia's 'biggest slum', Soutik Biswas, BBC
“On 23 March, a 56-year-old man living in a vast, labyrinthine slum in the western Indian city of Mumbai went to see a doctor. He was feeling feverish and had a bad cough.” BBC’s India correspondent brings us on a journey through one of the highest risk areas in India, where social distancing is impossible and contagion can spread like wildfire.
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Who we are
Lou Del Bello is an energy and climate journalist based in Delhi, India.
Jocelyn Timperley is a freelance climate & science journalist based in San José, Costa Rica.
India Bourke is an environment journalist based in Hong Kong.
Mat Hope is investigative journalist based in Nairobi, Kenya.