📍Melting Arctic, Warming Planet!

 📍Melting Arctic, Warming Planet!

For many thousands of years plants and animals that died were frozen in the Arctic ice. But now the Arctic region is melting….and melting four times faster than the rest of the planet. With the melting of the permafrost, the ice preserved plants and animals have started to decompose, generating methane and carbon dioxide, two major greenhouse gases (GHG) causing global warming.

It is estimated that the amount of carbon frozen in the Arctic permafrost is three times what is in the air already. With the melting of the ice, this carbon is being released into the atmosphere, pushing up the GHG concentrations.

Studies project that by the end of this century, the gases released from the permafrost will add approximately 0.5 degree Celsius to the warming already being caused by the use of fossil fuels. This does not bode well for the state of the planet.

 📍India’s appalling rank on environmental health

Environmental scientists and researchers at Yale University and Columbia University bring out a major biennial report on the environmental health and environmental performance of countries. The 2026 report shows that India has been performing extraordinarily poorly on this matrix, ranking last (180th out of 180 countries studied) in 2022. It showed a sliver of improvement in 2024, ending up, still at the bottom at 176th out of 180. In 2026, it continued to remain at the bottom most step, 176th out of 177.

By any standard, that is an abysmal record. The report highlights an acute “development-versus-pollution” tension. India has tried to provide energy access to millions of people, relying heavily on coal with its attendant problems of deadly emissions leading to severe air pollution and shooting greenhouse gases. Other factors that were mentioned were poor biodiversity protection (small wonder given the scale at which we are destroying forests), and a sharp decline in looking after marine protected areas, as the primary reasons for the low ranking.  

It is embarrassing that instead of being self critical and trying to understand why our performance is so poor and how to fix it, the Indian Ministry of Environment has argued that the Yale-Columbia report is derived using “unscientific methods”. Really? Yale and Columbia with their record of top quality work on environmental issues out of world class labs, don’t know what they are talking about? And the pitiful occupants of our Environment Ministry have the academic excellence to challenge the work of some of the best universities in the world? A little humility and some introspection would be in order here.

The report: https://epi.yale.edu/region/2026/southern-asia