by Pratik Mandrekar
Developing countries have a number of key issues to deal with in every election, encompassing the basic amenities like drinking water, electricity, public transport, employment opportunities, sanitation and garbage disposal. Frequent protests against industrial setups like the case of the Tata Nano (the world’s cheapest car) in Singur, West Bengal or the case of a polluting copper recycling plant in Goa are detrimental to the growth of the industry as well as the environment. However, in a democratic setup like India’s, climate change policies can be very well incorporated in election agendas as profitable business models beneficial to citizens, industrial development and the environment.
A domestic garbage dump in town, Margao, India (Photo credit: Pratik Mandrekar)
As has been demonstrated by the proceedings of the COP 15 climate talks, no single state is willing to take responsibility for mitigating climate change. The problem here is in believing the conventional wisdom that climate change control policies will always cost more than existing technologies, and essentially are equivalent to a large scale subsidy that would burden the state exchequer. Conventional wisdom need not always be right.
Consider this: venture capitalists have been investing in green tech companies at a rate which has made it the third largest investment class in India. There are a large number of companies in the private sector who are making (or saving, as you may see it) a lot of money from going green. Incorporating these changes into everyday lives of citizens is something that our elected representatives can achieve. Several initiatives in this direction, ranging from using >ICT to minimize travel costs and its related environmental offsets to using solar powered musical instruments are not only innovative ways to get attention, but also sound economics. A lot of movement in this direction has taken place in India too, many of it with support from the government. It’s time this moves from being an occasional exception to an everyday phenomenon discussed along the same lines as garbage disposal, unemployment and public transport.
The problems of land sustainability and employment for people living in lands where unpredictable monsoons and other activities have rendered them unsuitable for cultivation can be sorted by using the land for biofuel production. Cleanstar uses women’s groups, idle unsuitable land and technology to grow hardy species of trees to yield inedible oil for biofuel in automobiles and seedcakes for biofertilizers and biogas. The phasing out of CFCs harmful to the ozone layer (which was one of the goals of the Kyoto Protocol) meant new innovative techniques for heating and cooling needed to be invented. Unidyne is a company that now showcases how environmental sustainability can be a very profitable business model, too. ARTI-INDIA has a working project that coverts our country’s usual organic wastes into charcoal, while Ankur Scientific is another leading company in biomass gasification – using solid wastes to produce gas for electrification and household consumption. In the transportation sector, several companies like Eko Vehicles are producing excellent vehicles on all scales that are extremely cost efficient and environmental friendly. Water desalination, solar thermal energy generation and using soft power for logistics and automation in efficient grid and energy utility management are growing areas where government can effectively use its capabilities to consult with different industrial sectors.
The policy part of climate change and environmental sustainability has been debated upon, and several frameworks like the Union Government’s National Missions on Climate Change have been adopted. However the real change will only come when solutions like the ones elaborated in the earlier paragraph are implemented as enablers for the key development issues. Himachal Pradesh, an Indian state in the Himalayas, has adopted and implemented several such measures which include:
- Banning of plastic carry bags, which have been replaced with local alternatives.
- Strengthened management of municipal solid wastes.
- Co-processing of plastic waste in cement kilns and use of plastic waste in road construction.
- Rain water harvesting in all buildings, energy auditing and harnessing revenues through Carbon credit sales on the Mid-Himalayan Watershed project.
This clearly shows the feasibility of incorporating climate change policy as a solution to existing problems, rather than treating it as an additional burden. Also, e-waste like mobile phones which are exponentially growing in numbers in India can be an excellent opportunity for revenue generation through recycling of the precious metals, retrofitting for use in disaster management or simply reuse. Recycling 1 million cell phones can save enough energy to power 185 million households in the US, save 240,000 tonnes of raw materials including precious metals like (Tantalum-Niobium) whose extraction has led to the exploitation of Congo in Africa.
We need politicians who would think like the managers of the green tech companies and understand both the need and the benefits of incorporating strategies like the ones described here to deal with the everyday problems of their electorate – which, not incidentally, would at the same time ensure long-term environmental and climate sustainability. The discussions of the foremost leaders in the world may not be able to reach a conclusion in Copenhagen. Clearly, though, a distributed global strategy in every part of the world, which accepts climate change as an interesting business opportunity that would bring welfare to its state, would do the world a whole lot of good and help make better use of the funds pledged at the summit.
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