Pollution destroys 21% wheat, 6% rice crop every year: IIT-M study

March 11: Surface ozone is destroying around 22 million tonnes (21%) of India’s wheat yield and 6.5 million tonnes (6%) rice crop every year, a multi-institute study led by the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) has revealed, with Punjab and Haryana alone accounting for losses of 16% and 11% for wheat and rice respectively.

The economic loss caused by the plant-damaging pollutant to the country is estimated to be about USD 5 billion for wheat and USD 1.5 billion for rice.

Surface ozone is generated by chemical reactions between primary pollutants such as oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight.

The sources of these primary pollutants are power plants, vehicles, industries, and biomass burning.

“Like any other gas, surface ozone enters the plant leaves through its stomata as part of normal atmospheric gas exchange. Upon uptake it dissolves in the water present in the plant and further reacts with other chemicals affecting photosynthesis and thereby crop yields,” said Sachin Gunthe, principal investigator and associate professor, environmental and water resources engineering division, department of civil engineering at IIT-M.

Researchers said the findings of the study are important in view of the projected rise in manmade pollution, including surface ozone, with significant impact on the Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) which is an important agricultural region. A decrease in crop yield in India – also the second-most populous country – therefore will have a serious impact on its food security and economic growth.

A previous study estimated losses of 15% and 6% for wheat and rice yield, respectively based on measurements of surface ozone levels recorded mostly in urban, suburban and high altitude areas, thus not adequately accounting for ozone over rural agricultural areas which can be compensated by using chemistry transport meteorological models.

The new study attributed the increase in both crop yield and economic losses in the new study to the regional chemistry transport model WRF-Chem simulations, which factored in differing ozone chemistry in rural agricultural fields away from urban and semi-urban monitoring stations.

The study provides spatial distribution of yield losses, which could be of interest to scientific communities not limited to environmentalists, botanists and plant physiologists.

Wheat is a Rabi crop cultivated between November and April, while rice is grown during the Kharif season from June to October as well as Rabi season. Compared to wheat, crop loss for rice is less because surface ozone levels are lower as the main harvesting period is soon after the monsoon and also because rice is relatively less sensitive to ozone compared to wheat.

Although there is a permissible human exposure level for surface ozone set by the Central Pollution Control Board, there are no safe levels prescribed for plants.

For the study, the five-member team used WRF-Chem model to simulate mixing ratios for surface ozone every hour to derive accumulated ozone levels that exceed 40 parts per billion by volume (ppbv) – also referred to AOT40 – during the Kharif and Rabi seasons across various states.

Findings showed that a combination of higher crop production and coincident exposure to elevated surface ozone levels resulted in IGP region, comprising of states of Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh (UP), Bihar and West Bengal, to bear the maximum brunt of losses in wheat and rice yields. Among the leading wheat producing states, the highest crop loss of estimated 5.5 million tonnes (23%) is recorded in MP, followed by 5 million tonnes (21%) in UP every year. Both these states incur an economic loss of more than USD 1 billion each every year.

Of the major states – Punjab, UP, Bihar and West Bengal in the IGP region, and Orissa and Andhra Pradesh (AP) – that cultivate rice, Punjab incurs a maximum loss of around 1.5 million tonnes (11.5%) followed by 1 million tonnes (9%) in UP annually. These two states suffer an annual economic loss of around USD 0.3 billion each.

“There is an urgent need to conduct strategic ozone observations, especially over agricultural fields, and the development of annual regional-emission database to support policy making in India,” said Gufran Beig, co-author, Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune. “There is also a need for aggressive cooperation between agricultural scientists and scientists involved in studies on air pollution to carry out research to develop ozone-resistant cultivars.”

Gurugram world’s most polluted, 4 other NCR cities in top 10: Report

March 5: India’s national capital region (NCR) emerged as the most polluted region in the world in 2018, a new pollution report says, with Gurugram, Ghaziabad, Faridabad, Noida, and Bhiwadi in the top six worst-affected cities.

Worryingly, air pollution is likely to cause the death of an estimated seven million lives globally in the next year while costing the world’s economy nearly $ 225 billion, said the report which was released Tuesday morning in Jakarta.

The situation is increasingly grim for south Asia, the report said. Of the 20 most polluted cities in the world last year, 18 were in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh, the study found.

Delhi is ranked 11th in the list; the only non-Indian city in the top five is Pakistan’s Faisalabad.

Beijing, once considered the most polluted city in the world, has shown remarkable improvement in air quality and ranked 122nd in the list last year, the report compiled and analysed by IQ AirVisual, a software company that tracks pollution worldwide, and Greenpeace, an environmental NGO found.

“China’s skies remain gray but progress is impressive,” the report said.

“Average concentrations in the cities in China fell by 12% from 2017 to 2018. Beijing ranks now as the 122nd most polluted city in the world, according to the AirVisual dataset, with PM2.5 levels falling more than 40% since 2013. If Beijing’s PM2.5 concentration had stayed at 2013 level, the city would rank as the 21st on the list in 2018,” it added.

There are only two Chinese cities now in the top 20 most polluted, Hotan and Kashgar, both in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (XUAR) in northwest China.

“The new data reveals the true scale of South Asian air pollution crisis: out of 20 most polluted cities in the world, 18 are in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. The data also exposes nine South Asian cities that are even worse than Delhi,” the report said.

The latest data compiled in the IQAir AirVisual 2018 World Air Quality Report and interactive World’s most polluted cities ranking, prepared in collaboration with Greenpeace Southeast Asia, reveals the state of particulate matter (PM2.5) pollution in 2018.

“Out of the over 3000 cities included, 64% exceeded the WHO’s annual exposure guideline (10µg/m3) for fine particulate matter, also known as PM2.5. Every single one of measured cities with data in the Middle East and Africa exceeded this guideline, while 99% of cities in South Asia, 95% of cities in Southeast Asia and 89% of cities in East Asia also exceed this level. As many areas lack up-to-date public air quality information and are for this reason not represented in this report, the total number of cities exceeding the WHO PM2.5 threshold is expected to be far higher,” the report said.

There are lessons that India can learn from China, experts involved with the report said.

“The National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) recently launched by Ministry of Environment and Forest in India seems to be improving on the data availability and transparency among other things which is another key aspect which helped Beijing fight the battle to reduce air pollution levels,” said Sunil Dahiya, senior campaigner, Climate & Energy, Greenpeace India.

“Set specific targets for pollution reduction rather than given a wide window for specific cities. Make the pollution reduction targets legally binding on the polluters and authorities, So that compliance can be achieved in aggressive and efficient ways,” Dahiya added.

India should also set pollution/emission reduction targets and consumption caps on polluting fuels such as coal, diesel in polluted geographies aiming at emission load reduction, Dahiya added.

“Adopt a regional and air-shed approach while targeting aggressive pollution reduction for polluted cities.”

The NCAP is a programme in the form of a report launched by the ministry of environment and forest (MOEF&CC) on January 10, 2019.

“This NCAP aims to reduce pollution levels by 20-30% till 2024 compared to 2017 levels in 102 non-attainment cities (identified by CPCB, Central Pollution Control Board based on older data till 2015),” Dahiya said.

The report identified some of the major sources or causes of ambient air pollution.

“Industries, households, cars, and trucks emit complex mixtures of air pollutants, many of which are harmful to health. Of all of these pollutants, fine particulate matter has the greatest effect on human health,” it said.

“Most fine particulate matter comes from fuel combustion, both from mobile sources such as vehicles and from stationary sources such as power plants, industry, households, agriculture or biomass burning,” the report added.

“Air pollution steals our livelihoods and our futures, but we can change that. In addition to human lives lost, there’s an estimated global cost of 225 billion dollars in lost labour, and trillions in medical costs. This has enormous impacts, on our health and on our wallets,” executive director of Greenpeace South East Asia, Yeb Sano, said

“We want this report to make people think about the air we breathe because when we understand the impacts of air quality on our lives, we will act to protect what’s most important.”

2018 was fourth hottest year on record: UN report

NEW YORK, Feb 6: Last year was the fourth warmest on record and the outlook is for more sizzling heat approaching levels that most governments view as dangerous for the Earth, a UN report showed on Wednesday.

Weather extremes in 2018 included wildfires in California and Greece, drought in South Africa and floods in Kerala. Record levels of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from burning fossil fuels, trap ever more heat.

Average global surface temperatures were 1.0 degree Celsius (1.8 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial times in 2018, the UN’s World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said, based on data from US, British, Japanese and European weather agencies.

“The long-term temperature trend is far more important than the ranking of individual years, and that trend is an upward one,” WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas said in a statement. “The 20 warmest years on record have been in the past 22 years.”

To combat warming, almost 200 governments adopted the Paris climate agreement in 2015 to phase out the use of fossil fuels and limit the rise in temperatures to 2C (3.6F) above pre-industrial times while “pursuing efforts” for 1.5C (2.7F).

“The impacts of long-term global warming are already being felt - in coastal flooding, heat waves, intense precipitation and ecosystem change,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Last year, the United States alone suffered 14 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion each, led by hurricanes and wildfires, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) said.

NOAA and NASA contribute data to the WMO.

This year has also started with scorching temperatures, including Australia’s warmest January on record. Against the global trend, parts of the United States suffered bone-chilling cold from a blast of Arctic air last week.In WMO records dating back to the 19th century, 2016 was the hottest year, boosted by an El Nino weather event in the Pacific Ocean, ahead of 2015 and 2017 with 2018 in fourth.

Risks of 1.5 c

The British Met Office, which also contributes data to the WMO, said temperatures could rise to 1.5C above pre-industrial times, for instance if a natural El Nino weather event adds a burst of heat.

“Over the next five years there is a one in 10 chance of one of those years breaking the (1.5C) threshold,” Professor Adam Scaife of the Met Office told Reuters of the agency’s medium-term forecasts.

“That is not saying the Paris Agreement is done for ... but it’s a worrying sign,” he said. The United Nations defines the 1.5C Paris temperature target as a 30-year average, not a freak blip in a single year.

The United Nations says the world is now on track for a temperature rise of 3C or more by 2100. The Paris pact responded to a 1992 UN treaty under which all governments agreed to avert “dangerous” man-made climate change.

A UN report last year said the world is likely to breach 1.5C sometime between 2030 and 2052 on current trends, triggering ever more heat waves, powerful storms, droughts, mudslides, extinctions and rising sea levels.

US President Donald Trump, who has cast doubt on mainstream climate science and promotes the coal industry, plans to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement. He did not mention climate change in his State of the Union speech on Tuesday.

Patrick Verkooijen, head of the Global Center on Adaptation in the Netherlands, told Reuters that the WMO report showed “climate change is not a distant phenomenon but is here right now.”

He called for more, greener investments, ranging from defences against rising seas to drought-resistant crops.

The Garden of Eden is no more: David Attenborough

DAVOS, Jan 23: The “Garden of Eden is no more,” Sir David Attenborough warned the world’s movers and shakers at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and called for a renewed global endeavour to contain fallout of climate change. The world has changed since he first began his television career six decades ago, the legendary broadcaster and naturalist said.

“The world then seemed unexplored, it was a wonderland. You’d step off the beaten track and it was primary jungle, unexplored and exciting. Everywhere you turned you saw something exciting. The human population was only a third of what it is now, and you really did get the feeling you were in the Garden of Eden,” he added.

Sir David, 92, was in Davos to present a special screening featuring never-before-seen footage from his new series, Our Planet, which will be aired on Netflix in April and was in discussion with the Duke of Cambridge, Prince William.

It’s difficult to overstate the crisis humanity is now facing, he said. “We are now so numerous, so powerful, so all-pervasive, the mechanisms that we have for destruction are so wholesale and so frightening, that we can actually exterminate whole ecosystems without even noticing it because the connection between the natural world and the urban world since the Industrial Revolution, has been remote and widening,” said Sir David.

“I was born during the Holocene – the period of climatic stability that allowed humans to settle, farm, and create civilisations,....; (but)the Holocene has ended. The Garden of Eden is no more. We have changed the world so much that scientists say we are in a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the age of humans,” he added.

Humanity really needs to be to aware of the destruction it is causing before the damage becomes irreversible. “Almost everything we do has its echoes, duplications and implications across the natural world. The natural world, of which we are a part, is incredibly complex and it has connections all over the place. If you damage one, you can never tell where the damage is going to end up, because of all the broken connections. And if you break all of them, then suddenly the whole fabric collapses and you get eco -disaster,” he warned.

It isn’t just about animals, Sir David said.

“It’s not just a question of beauty, or interest, or wonder, the essential part of human life is a healthy planet. We are in danger of wrecking that.”

Delhi is like a gas chamber: Supreme Court

NEW DELHI, Jan 18: It is better not to be in Delhi, the Supreme Court said on Friday, expressing despair over the lack of implementation of measures to curb air pollution and traffic congestion in the capital which, it added, has become like a “gas chamber”.

“In the morning and evening, there is so much pollution and traffic congestion,” Justice Arun Mishra said, hearing a matter related to air pollution in the National Capital Region.

“It is better not to be in Delhi. I do not wish to settle in Delhi. It is difficult to live in Delhi,” he said.

A bench of justices Mishra and Deepak Gupta said these problems affect the right to life.

Justice Mishra cited an example to explain the problem of traffic, saying he was stuck in traffic on Friday morning and could have missed the swearing-in of two judges at the apex court.

Advocate Aparajita Singh, assisting the court as an amicus curiae, told the bench that Delhi has become a “gas chamber” due to pollution. And Justice Gupta agreed, “Yes, it is like gas chamber.”

Singh told the court that authorities always say they take measures to curb pollution but the reality is different.

“We would like to understand,” the bench said.

“What are the things which are required to be done in actuality? What remains to be done as per the comprehensive action plan? What is required to keep in check environment pollution in Delhi? What more can be done?” it said, adding, “implementation is definitely lacking”.

It said that many polluting vehicles enter Delhi at night and asked authorities how they were allowing these to enter the national capital.

The court asked the Delhi police what action they have taken to remove unclaimed vehicles — that are no longer required in legal cases — from police stations. It also asked the Delhi government why they have not appointed district ‘nazir’ (record keeper of record room).

The Delhi government’s counsel told it they are yet to receive a reply from Delhi Development Authority for allotment of land to build malkhana (record room).

“If you can dispose of the junk vehicles, you will get several acres of land,” the bench said.

The court posted the matter for further hearing on February 1.