India must recognise the human cost of poorly enforced environment laws

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

The Hindu