Down To Earth Magazine Analysis January 2021 Part-1

Down To Earth Analysis (January 2021 – Part I)

Content

Clean Push
Ocean’s 10
Wasted Time

Introduction

German company Verbio is setting up a Compressed Biogas (CBG) plant in the middle of lush paddy fields at Bhutal Kalan village in Punjab’s Sangrur district.
According to the Company officials, if all goes well, the plant from June or July this year will start producing CBG, which holds a win-win solution to the country’s air pollution problems.
On the one hand, the plant will use paddy stubble, which farmers burn in October-November to clear the field for the next crop. On the other hand, CBG can be used to replace compressed natural gas (CNG), a clean fossil fuel mostly imported by India.

SATAT Initiative

SATAT = Sustainable Alternative Towards Affordable Transportation
The initiative was launched in October 2018 by the Ministry of Petroleum & Natural Gasand aims to promote entrepreneurs to achieve production of 15 MMT of CBG from 5000 plants by 2023.
This is enough to reduce the country’s CNG bill by 40 per cent.
This can happen with an investment of ₹1.75 lakh crore and will help generate jobs for 75,000 people and produce 50 million tonnes of bio-manure for crops.
By the end of 2020, over 70 such plants were under construction across Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.

Process Involved in Producing CBG

Producing CBG from biomass involves a two-pronged approach.
First, biogas is produced through anaerobic decomposition of biomass. Since biogas contains 55 to 60% methane, 40 to 45% carbon dioxide (CO₂) and trace amounts of hydrogen sulphide, the second process involves purifying the gas to remove carbon dioxide and hydrogen sulphide gases to prepare CBG.
Thus chemically, CBG is the same as CNG—both are compressed methane—and has the same calorific value. The difference is that while CNG is a by-product of petroleum, CBG can be produced from any biomass – crop residue, cattle dung, municipal wet waste or effluents from a sewage treatment plant.

Advantages of CBG

Given the abundance of biomass in the country, CBG has the potential to replace CNG in automotive, industrial and commercial uses. It can also be used directly in generator sets to produce clean power. Just like CNG, CBG too can be transported through cylinders or pipelines to retail outlets.
SATAT initiative has been launched in collaboration with OMCs. OMCs will create awareness about the gas and market it, so that by the time the plants are operational, there is demand from consumers.

Advantages of CBG

To ensure a sustained interest from the industry, the government has promised to purchase gas produced by CBG manufacturers at the same rate as CNG and is offering easy loans to entrepreneurs.
Once the plants are set up and farmers have a market to sell crop stubble, they will stop setting fire to their farms. This will solve the problem of stubble burning in the farms, which is the root cause of high air pollution in winter season, in some of the Northern cities.
The plants, once fully functional, would provide employment opportunities in Rural areas and would add up to the Farmer’s income.

Advantages of CBG

Solid by-products of the process can be used as bio-manure.
Manure produced using paddy straw can result in a 20% increase in crop yield. It is a rich source of silica that not only aids in the growth and yield of crops but also bestows immunity against many diseases and prevents toxic material uptake by plants such as arsenic, cadmium, lead and other heavy metals.
The other by-product is CO₂. It can be tapped while purifying the biogas and used to produce liquid or solid CO₂, which have high demand for food preservation or to be used in fire extinguishers.

Conclusion

SATAT is a plan designed to curb burning of crop residue not by focusing on the farmer or farm-level measures, but on entrepreneurs.
CBG has a great potential in India, considering the abundance of the biomass
CBG and its by-products hold the chance for a circular economic growth.
Let’s make it work this time!

Introduction

In its 72^nd session(2017), the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) declared the 10-year period, starting January 1, 2021, as the United Nations Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development.
The aim is to provide a common framework to ensure that ocean science can fully support countries to achieve the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG)-14, which stresses on the need to conserve and sustainably use the world’s oceans, seas and marine resources and also to eliminate overfishing practices.

Introduction

Oceans not only produce food, minerals and energy for life, they also absorb about 25% of CO₂ — and produce more than 50% of the essential oxygen; minute phytoplankton, dwelling in oceans, generate the life-sustaining gas during
About 80% of the biodiversity exists in these bodies of salt water.
Their coasts are specifically important because they sustain livelihood and other economic activities, including tourism and transportation that account US $3 trillion of the blue economy.
However, marine pollution, acidification and climate change are leading to biodiversity loss and affecting food availability, causing disturbances in the biochemistry of oceans and the food web.

Implementing Body – IOC

UNGA has assigned the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission (IOC) to prepare an implementation plan by including all stakeholders concerned.
The IOC is the United Nations body responsible for supporting global ocean science and services.
This organisation enables its 150 Member States to work together to protect the health of our shared ocean by coordinating programmes in ocean observations, hazard mitigation, tsunami warnings and marine spatial planning, among others.

Action Plan

Way Forward

Already, there are Covid-19 related restrictions have hampered the ongoing observations and jeopardised weather forecasts and climate change predictions.
The UN Ocean Conference, which was scheduled to be held in June 2020 in Lisbon, Portugal, has been postponed due to Covid-19. Likewise, the International Indian Ocean Science Conference— which was to be held at the National Institute of Oceanography, Goa, from March 16 to 20— has also been postponed.
Therefore, more intense efforts are needed in this decade, dedicated to ocean science and to reverse the cycle of decline in ocean health.

Introduction

5 years have lapsed since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in UNFCCC CoP 21. In the past five years, catastrophic weather events have wreaked havoc in every part of the world.
The global temperature has already risen by 1.2°C since the 1880s. With or without the Paris Agreement, the world is set to grow 3°C or more warmer by century-end.
The Paris Agreement changed the terms of the agreement on climate action fundamentally. Till then, the world had set reduction targets of greenhouse gases (GHG) based on the responsibility of countries to the stock of emissions in the atmosphere (Kyoto Protocol).

Introduction

This created a framework for action, and built the foundations for cooperative agreement.
But countries like USA, which had been historical GHG contributors, did not want this deal as it put too much onus on them to make They wanted to erase the very idea of the past and to focus on the need for all to take actions based on what they believed they could do.
Paris Agreement succumbed to this idea. It was a historical deal. All countries threw in their targets into the ring, called the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs).

India NDCs

To reduce the emissions intensity of GDP by 33%–35% by 2030 below 2005 levels;
To increase the share of non-fossil-based energy resources to 40% of installed electric power capacity by 2030, with help of transfer of technology and low-cost international finance including from Green Climate Fund (GCF);
To create an additional (cumulative) carbon sink of 2.5 to 3 GtCO₂e through additional forest and tree cover by 2030.

Performance

Paris Agreement said it would “aspire” to keep the world below 1.5°C and “well below” 2°C from the pre-industrial era of 1880s.
But now, five years later, when the COP to the climate agreement will not even meet physically, the news is not good.
Global emissions may have reduced marginally in the past year because of Covid-19, but this slowdown is temporary. The Emissions Gap Report 2020 finds that global GHG emissions have continued to rise in the past three years. In 2019, emissions reached a record high.
It is clear that at current levels of emissions, the world will “exhaust” the carbon budget by 2030 for 5°C target.

Emissions Gap Report 2020

Record high Green House Gas (GHG) emissions

Global GHG emissions continued to grow for the third consecutive year in 2019, reaching a record high of 4 Gigatonne carbon equivalent (GtCO₂e) without including land use changes (LUC).
GHG emissions are declining in Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) economies and increasing in non-OECD economies.

Record Fossil Fuel Carbon Emission

Fossil carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions (from fossil fuels) dominate total GHG emissions. Fossil CO₂ emissions reached a record 38.0 GtCO₂ in 2019.

Emissions Gap Report 2020

G20 countries account for bulk of emissions

Over the last decade, the top four emitters (China, the United States of America, EU27+UK and India) have contributed to 55% of the total GHG emissions without LUC.
The top seven emitters have contributed to 65%, with G20 members accounting for 78%.
The ranking of countries changes when considering per capita emissions.

Forest fires increasing GHG emissions

Since 2010, global GHG emissions have grown 1.4% per year on average, with a more rapid increase of 2.6% in 2019 due to a large increase in vegetation forest fires.

Six Sector Solution

Way Forward

The world must focus on a green pandemic recovery to get a head start, and compliment it with real systemic change, planned and tracked through stronger NDCs and net-zero commitments, for this might be the last chance!
We need more reality checks in the climate change narrative—the impacts are certain, but the actions are not!
We deserve better. So, on this fifth anniversary of the Paris Agreement, let’s not allow lofty words to ring the bell; let’s demand action— hard, drastic, real and now.