26 Oct 2023 : The Hindu Editorial

Editorial 1 : Unhealthy urban India must get into street fight mode

Introduction:

• India’s urban population is estimated to reach 675 million in 2035, the second highest in the world. Although there is widespread recognition that cities have been fuelling India’s rapid rise to economic superpower status, almost all are failing their inhabitants in terms of delivering on health, environmental and equity targets.

Urban India and multiple health risks

• India’s urban inhabitants experience multiscalar health risks including

1. the world’s highest levels of air and noise pollution
2. limited greenery
3. lack of access to sidewalks and parks that limit active lifestyles
4. archaic modes of transport that contribute to air pollution
5. pernicious access to nutritionally dense unhealthy foods
6. unprecedented exposure to toxic chemicals and heavy metals.

• This concatenation of exposures dramatically magnifies health risks for heart disease and diabetes, referred to as cardiometabolic disease, especially when combined with a lack of physical activity.
• Addressing the diverse and multiscaled social, environmental, and infrastructure risk factors that contribute to cardiometabolic risk in cities, by transforming the design of the built local environment as well as provisioning systems, represents a new paradigm for public health.
• Globally, there are seven key physical provisioning systems that provide food, energy, mobility, transportation, housing, green infrastructure, water and waste management that lie at the core of human health, wellbeing, equity and sustainability.
• Dysfunctional provisioning systems consume more than 90% of the world’s water and global CO2 emissions and facilitate an estimated 19 million premature deaths annually.
• Based on the primal importance of India’s cities for its future, a new narrative for improving health and wellbeing in cities is needed. This is reflected in several high level policy frameworks, such as the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) framework, the New Urban Agenda, and the Health in All Policies approach.

Double or triple duty actions

• Investments such as clean energy and electric mobility which are underway in India offer a once in a lifetime opportunity to improve health through their immediate and dramatic impact of air pollution levels, while also helping meet India’s climate and equity goals.
• While these developments are extraordinarily important, the magnitude of their impact on health outcomes is at risk of being limited, if not simultaneously accompanied by changes in other provisioning systems such as food, mobility and green infrastructure.
• Indeed, studies show that even small changes in the latter systems may have a large catalytic effect on health and productivity and serve as double duty or triple duty interventions. For example, making way for safe walking and biking lanes, pavements and no car zones, can help not only improve physical activity and reduce sedentary lifestyles but also reduce the risk from air pollution.
• Walking and biking on many Indian roads is not only hazardous but also nearly impossible, as sidewalks are overwhelmed by building and human waste, parked vehicles or street hawkers.

Towards holistic urban policy

• Studies that have modelled the economic and health impact of the clean energy transition in the transportation sector are currently based almost entirely on the reduction in air pollution and its associated health impact.
• Ensuring that the transition to electric cars also paves the way for active transport options such as walking paths and bicycling lanes may not only provide a mechanism to connect the “last mile” but the health and consequent economic benefits of active transportation accrue on top of the benefits of reducing air pollution, making such investments even more economically viable. Thus, increasing active transportation by any means must be a critical component of a clean energy policy.
• Similarly, policies that encourage fresh fruits and vegetables and limit sugars and salt in beverages, which may have the largest impact on health outcomes such as obesity, Type 2 diabetes (T2D) and cardiovascular disease, may help contribute to not only better health outcomes but also economic productivity.

Conclusion:

• Unhealthy diets, reduced physical activity and air pollution in cities in India pose a greater risk to morbidity and mortality than most other risk factors combined including drugs, tobacco, alcohol and accidents. These need to be dealt with on a war footing if India is going to make progress in its fight against cardiovascular disease, obesity and T2D. This will necessarily entail a street fight.

Editorial 2 : Mitigating tragedies in the Himalayan region

Context:

• The recent glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) in Sikkim wreaked havoc along the Teesta river, bringing into focus the magnifying risk of climate change induced GLOF across the Indian Himalayan Region.

Glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF)

• GLOF is a type of outburst flood caused by the failure of a dam containing a glacial lake.
• A study published in Nature this year indicates that 90 million people across 30 countries live in 1,089 basins containing glacial lakes. Of these, one­ sixth live within 50 km of a glacial lake and 1 km of potential GLOF run-out channels.
• In mountains, hazards often occur in a cascading fashion — heavy rainfall triggers a landslide, which may in turn cause a glacial lake outburst and more landslides downstream, and create conditions for flash floods.
• Predicting this chain of events is difficult. Institutional awareness of these risks is increasing, but the challenge is to evolve a system to mitigate risks from such hazards, and provide early warnings.

Early warning systems

• The magnitude of the tragedy that occurred on October 3 at the South Lhonak glacial lake in Sikkim is still unfolding. Scientists are gravitating towards the view that the key trigger in the process chain of the disaster was the collapse of a huge mass of rock/moraine from the north­western bank of the lake. It displaced a significant volume of melt water, widening the river mouth at the eastern end, resulting in flash floods.
• The Himalayan Region is susceptible to a range of hydro­meteorological, tectonic, climate and human induced mountain hazards. Each of them requires an extensive set of monitoring, mitigation, and early warning strategies. The process chain of glacial melting is adequately mapped. However, the multitude of glaciers and temporal variations in glacial recession makes monitoring and estimation of the risk more difficult.

• Many geo­technical solutions for mitigation of GLOFs have been tried globally, including excavating channels for regulated discharge, drainage using pipes and pumps, spillway construction, and setting up small catchment dams to cut the speed of outflow. These measures are arduous and labour intensive, yet need to be implemented across high­ risk lakes.
• The most significant risk of such a disaster is to downstream hill communities and authorities who get a very short lead time to respond. They stand to suffer serious damage to life, property, and livelihood.
• Risks from glacial melting, slope shifting, landslides, intense precipitation, and heatwaves, among other hydro meteorological and geo­physical hazards, are rising. While meeting the development needs of hill communities, disaster and climate resilience principles need to be assimilated into government policy and practice as well as private investment.

Multi­disciplinary effort

• This requires an integrated, multi­disciplinary effort across institutions. NRSC’s atlases have provided high resolution data via remote sensing, which allows for monitoring spatial change.
• Central Water Commission (CWC) is conducting hydro-dynamic assessments of high risk lakes, mapping water flow, height and routing simulations using digital elevation models.
• NDMA’s national guidelines (2020) provide States with a technical overview of the hazard and risk zonation and suggest strategies for monitoring, risk reduction and mitigation.
• A comprehensive GLOF risk mitigation plan is in the final stages of approval and will include installation of monitoring and end to end early warning systems at high risk glacial lakes. In this endeavour, all governments and scientific institutions need to come together to integrate resources and capacities in disaster risk reduction.

Conclusion:

• While appropriate synergies have been created, increased focus on prevention and mitigation will reduce loss and damage and bring stability into the lives of hill communities.