Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Paper 3- Making businesses recognise their carbon footprint
The article explains the global trend in investors and lendors are demanding companies to recognise their impact on environment and act on it.
Accountability on climate change: global trend
- There is a wave of investors pushing large corporations from across sectors, to recognise their carbon footprint and take affirmative action.
- Aviva, the British insurance company announced it would divest stock and bond holdings in 30 of the biggest corporate emitters of carbon, if their boards failed to take affirmative action over climate change.
- MPs in the United Kingdom called on the Bank of England to ratchet up environment standards in its pandemic stabilising, corporate bond programme.
- Swedbank AB, Sweden’s biggest mortgage bank, has taken a decision not to provide fresh loans to new oil and gas projects.
Companies realising social and environmental impacts
- Several large and growing companies, especially in Europe, are realising their social and environmental impacts and making it a boardroom agenda even without investor guns on their heads.
- Schneider Electric, the energy management and automation company, has embedded environmental, social and governance (ESG) considerations into every facet of its activities.
- The company climbed from 29th to number 1 rank in the 2021 Global 100 ranking in the Corporate Knights index of the world’s most sustainable companies.
- Only one company from India, Tech Mahindra, has made it to the world’s 100 most sustainable list.
Indian scenario
- Indian institutional lenders and investors are simply not demanding enough on sustainability.
- A majority of Indian companies are only meeting compliance norms set out by various state or city authorities.
- Rarely do they go beyond rule-based compliances and implement environment, social and governance or ESG goals with purpose and passion like their European counterparts.
Way forward
- SEBI is putting the final touches on the Business Responsibility and Environment Reporting (BRSR) guidelines.
- The new ESG reporting norm will apply to the top 1,000 listed companies on Indian exchanges.
- Under BRSR reporting guidelines, companies will have to declare their R&D spends on improving environmental and social outcomes.
- They will have to disclose energy and water consumed to turnover ratios, and the percentage of recycled or reused input materials, among many other social and governance disclosures such as CSR, employee skilling and gender diversity.
- It’s time for lending institutions and investors to align with SEBI and use their muscle to drive a deeper change.
Consider the question “Indian institutional lenders and investors are not demanding enough on sustainability from the companies. Rarely do they go beyond rule-based compliances and implement environment, social and governance or ESG goals with purpose and passion like their European counterparts. In light of this, suggest the measures to nudge the businesseses to act on their environmental responsibilities.”
Conclusion
Stepping up green standards to meet Paris Climate Agreement goals cannot be the government’s responsibility alone. Businesses must be part of the movement, or the target of containing global warming to less than 1.5 degrees of pre-industrial levels, will remain elusive.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Not much
Mains level: Paper 2- Catalysing accountability and creative governance in local government
The article explains the innovative approach adopted by the Fifteenth Finance Commission in devolution of funds.
Steep hike in grants
- Local governments are the closest to the people at the grassroots level.
- They provide critical civic amenities such as roads, water and sanitation, and primary education and health.
- With this in view, the Fifteenth Finance Commission (FFC) has recommended grants of Rs 4,36,361 crore from the Union government to local governments for 2021-26.
- This is an increase of 52 per cent over the corresponding grant of Rs 2,87,436 crore by its predecessor for 2015-20.
Innovation in recommendations
1) Scaling of capacities in municipalities
- The Commission has recommended Rs 8,000 crore as performance-based grants for incubation of new cities and Rs 450 crore for shared municipal services.
- This is designed to foster innovations in urban governance to transform our cities with speed and scale.
- There is an urgent need for synergistically combined area-based development to spur economic growth and job creation, and decongesting through the development of satellite townships.
- Separately, the massive scaling of capacities in municipalities, particularly the 4,000-odd smaller ones, cannot be done by building capacities in each one of them, but through institutional and technological innovations, without compromising their autonomy.
- The shared municipal services model, with mobile internet, maps, platform thinking, and outsourced services all taken together, can help us fast-track the creation of municipal capacities at scale.
- This is one of the innovations in the FFC recommendations.
2) Allocation covers all three tiers of panchayats
- Of grants for all local governments with 90 per cent weightage on population and 10 per cent on area remains unchanged from the Fourteenth Finance Commission.
- For panchayats, the FFC allocations cover all the three tiers — village, block, and district — as well as the Excluded Areas in a state exempted from the purview of Part IX and Part IX-A of the Constitution.
- Funds to all three can improve functional coordination and facilitate the creation of assets collectively across smaller jurisdictions.
- This is the second new aspect of the FFC recommendations.
3) Focus on metropolitan governance
- The FFC calls for a focus on urban agglomerations (UAs) that include urban local bodies, census towns and outgrowths.
- In 2011, out of the total urban population of 377 million, 61 per cent lived in UAs.
- The FFC has emphasised the need to focus on the complex challenges of air quality, drinking water supply, sanitation, and solid waste management in the million-plus UAs and cities.
- Thus, for 2021-26, there is a Million-plus Challenge Fund of Rs 38,196 crore that can be accessed by million-plus cities only through adequate improvements in their air quality and meeting service level benchmarks for drinking water supply, sanitation, and solid waste management.
- This focus on metropolitan governance through substantive but 100 per cent outcome-based grants is the third innovation.
- For ULBs other than the million-plus category, the total grants are Rs 82,859 crore.
- The grants to local governments, both urban (less than a million category) and rural, contain a mix of basic, tied as well as performance grants.
4) Entry-level conditions
- The efficiency, smooth functioning and accountability of local bodies have been plagued by:
- (i) lack of readily accessible and timely audited accounts,
- (ii) absence of timely recommendations of State Finance Commissions and suitable actions thereon,
- (iii) inadequate mobilisation of property tax revenues (especially in ULBs).
- Finance Commissions in the past have drawn pointed attention to these issues, but with limited success.
- These entry-level conditions for availing any grants and their applicability to all local governments is the fourth innovation.
Consider the question “Examine the innovative approach adopted by the Fifteenth Finance Commission for the devolution of funds to panchayats and municipal bodies.”
Conclusion
Hopefully, over the next five years, through a partnership among the Union, states, and local governments, in the spirit of cooperative federalism, these recommendations and innovations will catalyse progress in the accountability and effectiveness of local governments in India.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Various missions on Mars
Mains level: Mars mission worldwide and their success
NASA’s rover Perseverance, the most advanced astrobiology laboratory ever sent to another world has landed safely on the floor of Jezero Crater on Mars.
Last week, separate probes launched by the UAE (Hope Mission) and China (Tianwen-1) reached Martian orbit. NASA has three Mars satellites still in orbit, along with two from the European Space Agency.
Perseverance Rover
- The Perseverance rover weighs less than 2,300 pounds and is managed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab.
- It is a part of the mission named ‘Mars 2020’.
- The rover’s mission will be to search for signs of past microbial life. It will also collect samples of Martian rocks and dust, according to the release.
- All of NASA’s previous Mars rovers — including the Sojourner (1997), Spirit and Opportunity (2004) and Curiosity (exploring Mars since 2012) — were named in this way.
Objectives of the mission
- Looking for habitability: identify past environments capable of supporting microbial life.
- Seeking bio-signatures: seek signs of possible past microbial life in those habitable environments, particularly in special rocks known to preserve signs over time.
- Caching samples: collect core rock and regolith (“soil”) samples and store them on the Martian surface.
- Preparing for humans: test oxygen production from the Martian atmosphere.
Major components
(a) Looking for underground water
- Perseverance will carry the Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment (RIMFAX).
- The instrument will look for subsurface water on Mars – which, if found, will greatly help the case for a human mission or the cause of a human settlement on Mars.
(b) Testing a helicopter
- The Mars Helicopter is a small drone. It is a technology demonstration experiment: to test whether the helicopter can fly in the sparse atmosphere on Mars.
- The low density of the Martian atmosphere makes the odds of actually flying a helicopter or an aircraft on Mars very low.
(c) Producing oxygen on Mars
- Perseverance will have an instrument – MOXIE, or Mars Oxygen In-Situ Resource Utilization Experiment – that will use 300 watts of power to produce about 10 grams of oxygen using atmospheric carbon dioxide.
- Should this experiment be successful, MOXIE can be scaled up by a factor of 100 to provide the two very critical needs of humans: oxygen for breathing, and rocket fuel for the trip back to Earth.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: India Energy Outlook Report, 2021
Mains level: India energy sector
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has recently released the India Energy Outlook 2021 report.
Try this MCQ:
Q.The Global Energy Transition Index recently seen in news is released by:
a) International Energy Agency (IEA)
b) World Economic Forum (WEF)
c) International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA)
d) International Solar Alliance
Highlights of the India Energy Outlook Report
(1) Energy consumption
- India at present is the fourth-largest global energy consumer behind China, the United States and the European Union.
- It will overtake the European Union as the world’s third-largest energy consumer by 2030.
- It will account for the biggest share of energy demand growth over the next two decades.
(2) Energy demand
- India accounts for nearly one-quarter of global energy demand growth from 2019-40 — the largest for any country.
- Its share in the growth in renewable energy is the second-largest in the world, after China.
- A five-fold increase in per capita car ownership will result in India leading the oil demand growth in the world.
- Also, it will become the fastest-growing market for natural gas, with demand more than tripling by 2040.
(3) Industrial consumption
- By 2040, India is set to account for almost 20 per cent of global growth in industrial value-added, and to lead global growth in industrial final energy consumption, especially in steelmaking.
- The nation accounts for nearly one-third of global industrial energy demand growth to 2040.
(4) Dependence on fossil fuels
- To meet its energy needs, India will be more reliant on fossil fuel imports as its domestic oil and gas production stagnates.
- India’s oil demand is seen rising by rising by 74 per cent to 8.7 million barrels per day by 2040 under the existing policies scenario.
- The natural gas requirement is projected to more than triple to 201 billion cubic meters and coal demand is seen rising to 772 million tonnes in 2040 from the current 590.
(5) Coal trade
- India currently accounts for 16 per cent of the global coal trade.
- Many global coal suppliers were counting on growth in India to underpin planned export-oriented mining investments.
(6) Per-capita emission
- On a per-capita basis, India’s energy use and emissions are less than half the world average, as are other key indicators such as vehicle ownership, steel and cement output.
- India will soon become the world’s most populous country, adding the equivalent of a city the size of Los Angeles to its urban population each year.
About International Energy Agency
- The IEA is a Paris-based autonomous intergovernmental organization established in the framework of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) in 1974 in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.
- It was initially dedicated to responding to physical disruptions in the supply of oil, as well as serving as an information source on statistics about the international oil market and other energy sectors.
- At the end of July 2009, IEA member countries held a combined stockpile of almost 4.3 billion barrels of oil.
- They are required to maintain total oil stock levels equivalent to at least 90 days of the previous year’s net imports.
- The IEA acts as a policy adviser to its member states but also works with non-member countries, especially China, India, and Russia.
- The Agency’s mandate has broadened to focus on the “3Es” of effectual energy policy: energy security, economic development, and environmental protection.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Willingness to pay mechanism
Mains level: Air pollution in Delhi
Air pollution claimed approximately 54,000 lives in Delhi in 2020, according to a Greenpeace Southeast Asia analysis of the cost to the economy due to air pollution.
Try this question from CS Mains 2015:
Q.Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata are the three megacities of the country but the air pollution is a much more serious problem in Delhi as compared to the other two. Why is this so?
Deaths due to Air Pollution
- Globally, approximately 1,60,000 deaths have been attributed to PM 2.5 air pollution in the five most populous cities — Delhi, Mexico City, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Tokyo.
- Six Indian cities — Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Lucknow — feature in the global analysis.
- An estimated 25,000 avoidable deaths in Mumbai in 2020 have been attributed to air pollution.
- Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad estimated an approximate 12,000, 11,000, and 11,000 avoidable deaths respectively due to polluted air.
The ‘Cost Estimator’
- The ‘Cost Estimator’, an online tool that estimates the real-time health impact and economic cost from fine particulate matter (PM 2.5) air pollution in major world cities.
- It was deployed in collaboration between Greenpeace Southeast Asia, IQAir and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA).
- Using real-time ground-level PM 2.5 measurements collated in IQAir’s database, the algorithm applies scientific risk models in combination with population and public health data.
Computing the “Lost Years”
- To show the impact of air pollution-related deaths on the economy, the approach used by Greenpeace is called ‘willingness-to-pay.
- It refers to a lost life year or a year lived with a disability is converted to money by the amount that people are willing to pay in order to avoid this negative outcome.
- The cost estimator also sustained the estimated air pollution-related economic losses of ₹1,23,65,15,40,000.
Greenpeace recommends-
- Despite a temporary reprieve in air quality owing to the lockdown, the latest figures from the report underscore the need to act immediately.
- The need of the hour is to rapidly scale up renewable energy, bring an end to fossil fuel emissions and boost sustainable and accessible transport systems.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Tree Cities of the World
Mains level: Urban forestry
Hyderabad city has received another feather in its cap by being chosen as one among the ‘Tree Cities of the World’.
Tree Cities of the World
- The Tree Cities of the World programme is an international effort to recognize cities and towns committed to ensuring that their urban forests and trees are properly maintained, sustainably managed, and duly celebrated.
- This status is accorded by the Arbor Day Foundation jointly with the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the UN.
- To receive recognition, a town or city must meet five core standards:
- Establish Responsibility
- Set the Rules
- Know What You Have
- Allocate the Resources and
- Celebrate the Achievements
Try this question:
Q.The Miyawaki Forests technique has to potential to revolutionize the concept of urban afforestation in India. Discuss.
Why it is a great achievement?
- Hyderabad is the only city in the country to have been selected for this recognition in response to its commitment to growing and maintaining urban forestry.
- The recognition stands Hyderabad alongside 120 cities from 23 countries, including developed nations such as USA, UK, Canada, Australia and others.
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Note4Students
From UPSC perspective, the following things are important :
Prelims level: Blue Economy
Mains level: Blue Economy and its contribution to GDP
The Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES) has rolled out the Draft Blue Economy policy for India in the public domain inviting suggestions and inputs from various stakeholders.
Blue Economy Policy
- India’s draft blue economy policy is envisaged as a crucial framework towards unlocking country’s potential for economic growth and welfare.
- The draft policy outlines the vision and strategy that can be adopted by the govt to utilize the plethora of oceanic resources available in the country.
Objectives:
The policy aims to-
- Enhance the contribution of the blue economy to India’s GDP
- Improve the lives of coastal communities
- Preserve marine biodiversity and
- Maintain the national security of marine areas and resources
What comprises India’s blue economy?
- India’s blue economy is understood as a subset of the national economy.
- It comprises an entire ocean resources system and human-made economic infrastructure in marine, maritime, and onshore coastal zones within the country’s legal jurisdiction.
- It aids the production of goods and services that have clear linkages with economic growth, environmental sustainability, and national security.
- The blue economy is a vast socio-economic opportunity for coastal nations like India to utilize ocean resources for societal benefit responsibly.
Need for such policy
- With a coastline of nearly 7.5 thousand kilometres, India has a unique maritime position.
- Nine of its 29 states are coastal, and the nation’s geography includes 1,382 islands.
- There are nearly 199 ports, including 12 major ports that handle approximately 1,400 million tons of cargo each year.
- Moreover, India’s Exclusive Economic Zone of over 2 million square kilometres has a bounty of living and non-living resources with significant recoverable resources such as crude oil and natural gas.
- Also, the coastal economy sustains over 4 million fisherfolk and coastal communities.
Key areas
The policy recognizes the following seven thematic areas.
- National accounting framework for the blue economy and ocean governance.
- Coastal marine spatial planning and tourism.
- Marine fisheries, aquaculture, and fish processing.
- Manufacturing, emerging industries, trade, technology, services, and skill development.
- Logistics, infrastructure and shipping, including trans-shipments.
- Coastal and deep-sea mining and offshore energy.
- Security, strategic dimensions, and international engagement.
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