Climate Change and You is a fortnightly newsletter written by Bibek Bhattacharya and Sayantan Bera. Subscribe to the newsletter to get it directly in your inbox.
It's that time of the year again. North India is shrouded in a haze, and it's essential to check air pollution levels before going for a walk. It's a persistent problem which hits us year after year. The reasons behind the toxic air are well known. Round the year, it is caused by vehicular pollution, emissions from industries and power plants and biomass burning for cooking. During the winter season, biomass burning for heating and burning of paddy stubble adds to this load.
What happens during the winter is this: since the air close to the soil surface is dense and cold, the warm air above blocks the cooler air, trapping it by forming an atmospheric lid. Due to low wind speed, pollutants are not dispersed in the wider area, turning the national capital into a gas chamber. Experts suggest that no policy or measure will be effective unless Delhi and its neighbouring states work together to solve this problem.
Yet, the Delhi government is giving cloud seeding a shot. A trial was carried out on Tuesday, which failed to induce rain because of low moisture levels. Experts have called this a gimmick with poor evidence that it will work. Meanwhile, water sprinklers are being used near air quality monitoring stations, leading to allegations of data manipulation. The air quality in 2025 was comparatively better than in past years largely due to the frequency of rainfall. Then the apex court allowed bursting of "green" crackers on Diwali. Not surprisingly, the post-Diwali air quality numbers were the worst in three years.
Also, do we really know how poor the air is? Because the official index severely downplays the data by capping it on the worst of the days. Here's an explainer.
Climate change is reshaping life in the Himalayas. Marginal pastoralist communities are struggling to make a living as water and vegetation become increasingly scarce. Plants and animals are moving to higher altitudes due to rising temperatures. Ladakh is now home not just to the elusive snow leopard but also to the common leopard, which is found in lower altitudes. Conflicts among people and between people and the wildlife will intensify as land gets diverted for large-scale infrastructure projects, renewable energy, and mining. Read this first-person account of a conservationist to understand how climate change is upending life in the Himalayas.
* India could set up a Low Carbon Development Commission to guide policy and action on climate action and energy transition.
* Lobbyists from fossil fuel companies are a sizable presence at climate talks. Taking a cue from the fight against big tobacco, it's time to exclude them from the high table, argues Soumya Sarkar in Mint.
* India's total forest area ranking has seen an improvement, according to the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025.
* As ancient microbes wake up with thawing permafrost, they could release massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.
* Global wildfires burned an area of land larger than India in 2024.
* The Donald Trump administration has allowed oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, one of the last remaining tracts of pristine wilderness in the US.
* Just 10 banks are responsible for almost 75% of all direct financing for oil and gas projects across the Amazon basin since the Paris Agreement was signed in 2016, finds a new report.
Conference of the Parties, or COP, is the highest decision-making body of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, also known as the UNFCCC. It's an annual high-level meeting where countries gather to negotiate and take decisions on climate change, assess progress and set targets. Since its first meeting in 1995, 29 COPs have been held to date. In 2025, Brazil will host COP30 from 10 to 21 November.
One of the most significant developments in the history of COP was the 2015 Paris agreement, where 195 countries agreed to limit global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius (and well below 2 degrees) above pre-industrial levels. Following the Paris agreement, countries have put forth their plan of action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, also known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). A synthesis report on new NDCs published by the UN this week shows that countries have committed to reduce emissions by 17% (compared to 2019 levels) by 2035 -- lower than the 37% cut required to keep temperatures below 2 degrees.
At COP30, climate adaptation will be a vital theme, which seeks to protect communities and ecosystems from the damaging impacts of climate change. "We are entering a perilous era in which the wealthy -- in both developed and developing nations -- insulate themselves behind climate-resilient walls while the poor are left exposed," the COP30 president designate André Aranha Correa do Lago wrote in a letter to all participating nations on 23 October. Without adaptation, climate change becomes a poverty multiplier, dismantling livelihoods, displacing workers and deepening hunger, the letter said.
About 7.9 million lives were lost worldwide due to air pollution in 2023, according to the latest State of Global Air report. Also, air pollution was the second-largest risk factor for death worldwide, surpassed only by high blood pressure. According to the report, India and China each had over 2 million deaths attributable to air pollution, followed by Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nigeria (200,000 deaths each). The death rate attributable to air pollution in South Asia -- at 191 deaths per 100,000 people -- is more than 10 times that of high-income countries (17 deaths per 100,000 people).
The report said 2.6 billion people worldwide are exposed to pollution from burning solid fuels for home cooking. Among adults over 60 years of age, 95% of the deaths attributable to air pollution were due to non-communicable diseases like COPD, dementia, diabetes, heart disease, and lung disease. In India, the report highlighted that if the country can push all households enrolled under the subsidized cooking gas scheme to exclusively use LPG (and no solid fuels like firewood and coal), it could avert more than 150,000 deaths every year.
The whole meaning of life, stand-up comedian George Carlin once said, is trying to find space for one's stuff. Your house is just a place to keep all your stuff while you go out and get more. Carlin's was actually a pun on consumerism and our unending desire to accumulate. After you watch Carlin, see this short documentary, The Story of Stuff, which looks at modern production and consumption systems and the environmental costs of our obsession with stuff. Did you know, for instance, that 99% of the stuff that is harvested, mined, processed, produced, and transported in North America is trashed within six months!