Publication Type: Journal articles

Impact of heatwaves on all-cause mortality in India: A comprehensive multi-city study

Background

 

Heatwaves are expected to increase with climate change, posing a significant threat to population health. In India, with the world’s largest population, heatwaves occur annually but have not been comprehensively studied. Accordingly, we evaluated the association between heatwaves and all-cause mortality and quantifying the attributable mortality fraction in India.

 

Methods

 

We obtained all-cause mortality counts for ten cities in India (2008–2019) and estimated daily mean temperatures from satellite data. Our main extreme heatwave was defined as two-consecutive days with an intensity above the 97th annual percentile. We estimated city-specific heatwave associations through generalised additive Poisson regression models, and meta-analysed the associations. We reported effects as the percentage change in daily mortality, with 95% confidence intervals (CI), comparing heatwave vs non-heatwave days. We further evaluated heatwaves using different percentiles (95th, 97th, 99th) for one, two, three and five-consecutive days. We also evaluated the influence of heatwave duration, intensity and timing in the summer season on heatwave mortality, and estimated the number of heatwave-related deaths.

 

Findings

 

Among ∼ 3.6 million deaths, we observed that temperatures above 97th percentile for 2-consecutive days was associated with a 14.7 % (95 %CI, 10.3; 19.3) increase in daily mortality. Alternative heatwave definitions with higher percentiles and longer duration resulted in stronger relative risks. Furthermore, we observed stronger associations between heatwaves and mortality with higher heatwave intensity. We estimated that around 1116 deaths annually (95 %CI, 861; 1361) were attributed to heatwaves. Shorter and less intense definitions of heatwaves resulted in a higher estimated burden of heatwave-related deaths.

 

Conclusions

 

We found strong evidence of heatwave impacts on daily mortality. Longer and more intense heatwaves were linked to an increased mortality risk, however, resulted in a lower burden of heatwave-related deaths. Both definitions and the burden associated with each heatwave definition should be incorporated into planning and decision-making processes for policymakers.

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Strategies for green industrial and innovation policy–an analysis of policy alignment, misalignment, and realignment around dominant designs in the EV sector

Summary

Governments in industrialized as well as emerging economies are racing to implement policies to accelerate clean energy innovation and capture the economic benefits of decarbonization. This paper explores which combination of technology-push and demand-pull policies best situates a country to lead in clean energy innovation, as new or dominant designs emerge and replace older technologies. A new analytical framework for green industrial policy is introduced regarding the alignment, misalignment, and deliberate misalignment of policies. This framework is applied to battery electric vehicle drivetrain technology to examine the use of policy alignment and misalignment by countries with big automakers as they pursue strategic green industrial policy. We find that countries that achieved early and sustained (not inconsistent) policy alignment gained a first-mover advantage compared with countries that deliberately or accidentally misaligned their policies. We also find that first-mover advantage can be lost due to deliberate misalignment of policies caused by an inability of governments to effectively incentivize their firms to develop and deploy cleaner and more efficient technologies. In situations where governments adopt misaligned or conflicting policies, incumbent industries tend to pursue their prior comparative advantage and maximize return from investments in prior technologies. We also find that deliberate misalignment of policies can be an effective catching-up strategy.

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Intergenerational Labour and Just Transition in Coalfields

Introduction

India’s coal dependency is more complex than that of countries in the Global North. Amidst deliberations on coal phase-down and just transition planning and strategies post COP-26, the intricacies of this dependence make any phase-down a delicate and intense socio-economic and political process. Apart from the country’s reliance on coal for energy security, this dependency is also spread across economy, especially amongst coal communities. More importantly, accounting for the impact on livelihoods and jobs of coal communities are at the core of coal dependency discussions in the country. There are two approaches to examine coal labour in India. The first is to map direct, indirect and induced employment and the other is to study formal and informal labour in the coal ecosystems. However, these studies largely focus on the magnitude of labour dependency.

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What Is Polluting Delhi’s Air? A Review from 1990 to 2022

Introduction

Delhi’s annual average PM2.5 concentration in 2021–22 was 100 μg/m3—20 times more than the WHO guideline of 5 μg/m3. This is an improvement compared to the limited information available for the pre-CNG-conversion era (~30%), immediately before and after 2010 CWG (~28%), and the mid-2010s (~20%). These changes are a result of continuous technical and economic interventions interlaced with judicial engagement in various sectors. Still, Delhi is ranked the most polluted capital city in the world. Delhi’s air quality is a major social and political concern in India, often with questions regarding its severity and primary sources, and despite several studies on the topic, there is limited consensus on source contributions. This paper offers insight by reviewing the influence of Delhi’s urban growth since 1990 on pollution levels and sources and the evolution of technical, institutional, and legal measures to control emissions in the National Capital Region of Delhi.

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Solar Rooftop Systems and the Urban Transition: Shall the Twain Ever Meet? Interrogations from Rewari, India

Summary

India is facing two major transitions. In 2040, its energy demand will double while 800 million Indians will live in cities by 2050. Situated at this intersection, this article contributes to the field of urban energy research by looking at Solar Rooftop Systems (SRS) in a district located in the extended periphery of Delhi. Using a multi-pronged qualitative methodology in a corridor made of villages and small towns, we argue that public policies are framed applying a rigid territorial grid opposing urban and rural, ignoring the motivations of both residential and professional users, which are not bounded by the rural/urban binary. This disjunction explains that renewable energy does not lead to a new imagination of urban and energy systems. These two fields remain disconnected while solar energy fuels consumption and the city expansion in its peripheries. Finally, the observed variegated urban energy landscapes (UEL) embody a land and energy intensive form of urban growth.

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Coal extraction, dispossession and the ‘classes of labour’ in coalfields of eastern India

Introduction

Drawing upon long term fieldwork conducted in the coalfields of eastern India, the paper argues for the formation of multiple, fragmented and hierarchical ‘classes of labour’ in the ‘new public sector’ coal mines of India. Employing an intersectional lens, it shows that the organisation of ‘classes of labour’ is greatly dependent upon the differentiated negotiating powers for compensatory employments linked to pre-existing land and other social relations shaping up as ‘politics of incorporation’ in mining jobs. It demonstrates the exacerbation of socio-economic inequalities between Dalits, women and dominant caste and class communities in the dispossession process of open-cast coal mining.

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Migrant Workers in the Coal Mines of India: Precarity, Resilience and the Pandemic

Abstract

This article analyses the lived experiences of migrant workers in India under different regimes of coal mining and engages with their contemporary precarious labouring conditions and resilience. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork undertaken in the Talcher coalfields of Odisha, I argue that the labouring lives of migrant workers from marginalised communities have been invisiblised in a ‘shadow economy’ of coal extraction through subcontracting and labour recruitment by local contractors working with state-owned coal companies. The process of invisiblisation has taken place at three levels: first, at the workplace which includes recruitment patterns, contracting systems and precarious labouring conditions inflicted by the employer; second, through the exclusion of migrant workers in the land and labour politics of local dispossessed communities for coal mining jobs; and finally, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent lockdowns, observed as ‘invisible’ essential workers under the Essential Services Maintenance Act of 1981.

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Carbon Pricing in the US: Examining State-Level Policy Support and Federal Resistance

Abstract

Carbon pricing is a key policy instrument used to steer markets towards the adoption of low-carbon technologies. In the last two decades, several carbon pricing policies have been implemented or debated at the state and federal levels in the US. The Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and the California cap-and-trade policy are the two regional policies operational today. While there is no federal policy operational today, several carbon pricing proposals have been introduced in Congress in the last decade. Using the literature on interest group politics and policy entrepreneurship, this article examines the carbon pricing policies at the subnational and federal levels in the US.

First, the article explores the evolution of two main regional carbon pricing policies, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and California cap-and-trade, to identify how interest groups and policy entrepreneurs shaped the design and implementation of the respective policies.

Second, the article details the federal carbon pricing policy proposals and bills discussed in the last decade.

Third, it examines the factors that limit the prospects of realizing an ambitious federal carbon price for pursuing deep decarbonization of the US economy.

The article finds that federal carbon pricing in the US suffers from the lack of any natural and/or consistent constituency to support it through policy development, legislation, and implementation. While interest group politics have been mitigated by good policy entrepreneurship at the subnational level, the lack of policy entrepreneurship and the changing positions of competing interest groups have kept a federal carbon pricing policy from becoming a reality.

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National climate institutions complement targets and policies

Introduction

National climate institutions are a missing element in climate mitigation discussions. Yet institutions translate ambition to current action, guide policy development and implementation, and mediate political interests that can obstruct mitigation efforts. The landscape of relevant institutions is usefully categorized around ‘purpose-built’ institutions, ‘layering’ of responsibilities on existing institutions, and unintentional effects of ‘latent’ institutions. Institutions are relevant for solving three climate governance challenges: coordination across policy domains and interests, mediating conflict and building consensus, and strategy development. However, countries do not have a free hand in designing climate institutions; institutions are shaped by national context into four distinct varieties of climate governance. We suggest how countries can sequence the formation of climate institutions given the constraints of national politics and existing national political institutions.

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