‘Heads of regulatory bodies should be accountable to Parliament’

• To make top appointments transparent, the Damodaran Committee has recommended that heads of regulatory bodies and their board-level members be made accountable to Parliament.
• This is the first time a committee has talked about making regulatory bodies accountable to Parliament.
• The committee, headed by the former SEBI Chairman, M. Damodaran, was set up after a World Bank report ranked India 132nd on the ease of doing business in 2012, well below the other countries of BRICS and the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc).
• The report says India’s regulatory architecture is getting increasingly complex with the establishment of new bodies, which, however, are inadequately empowered and insufficiently manned. “
• The committee is of the strong view that before setting up a new regulatory organisation, adequate thought should go into the need for such an organisation and the ability to man it appropriately and vest it with functional autonomy.
• The regulatory bodies should undertake a self-evaluation once in three years and put the outcome in the public domain for informed debate and discussion.”
• Referring to the contentious issue of appointment, the committee says heads of regulatory bodies should be appointed in a more transparent manner than is the case now.
• The practice of inviting applications from interested candidates and subjecting them to interviews by a panel of persons familiar with the organisation is the surest way to cause loss of public confidence not only in the process but also in the organisation.
• “The entire process should be transparent and should replicate the process followed in some developed countries where the suitability of a candidate is the subject of informed public discussions before appointment.
• To appoint an applicant or a supplicant to head a regulatory organisation is to ensure the suboptimal performance of the organisation and its resultant loss of credibility.”
• The committee consisted of ITC Group Chairman Y.C. Deveshwar, ICICI Bank non-executive chairman K.V. Kamath, Aditya Birla Group Chairman Kumar Mangalam Birla, and Mahindra Group Chairman Anand Mahindra.

Dangers of chilling on climate change

• The forthcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Summary for Policymakers, it has been reported, states that the rate of global warming has slowed over the last 15 years.
• It also argues that estimates of eventual warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are lower than was earlier thought.
• Taken individually, each of these assertions is a partial narration of ongoing climate processes. Read together, they carry the danger of fostering complacency, both about the current rate of global warming and the urgency in avoiding dangerous levels of warming.

Three theories

• There have been at least three theories in recent climate science literature seeking to explain the slowdown, or “hiatus,” in global warming.
• Global warming is measured by taking an average of near-surface air temperatures all over the globe throughout the year, but this does not account for the heat trapped by greenhouse gases that is transported into the deeper oceans.
• Warming of the ocean waters below 700 metres has been exceptional in recent years. A study in Geophysical Research Letters says that “depths below 700 metres have become much more strongly involved in the heat uptake after 1998, and subsequently account for 30% of the ocean warming,” precisely the period in which surface warming has slowed down.
• But despite being transported into the deeper oceans, much of this heat energy will show up as warming sooner or later.

Aerosols

• another proposition is that a prolonged La Niña-like cooling in the tropical Pacific has lessened the impact of greenhouse gases by 0.15° Celsius globally in the recent decade.
• It is a natural variability and, if this is the cause, the slowdown will be temporary, as a recent paper argues (Yu Kosaka and Shang-Ping Xie, ‘Recent Global Warming Hiatus Tied to Equatorial Pacific Surface Cooling’, Nature , doi: 10.1038/nature12534).
• A third theory is that near-surface warming is being masked by an increased generation of aerosols, caused by greater manufacturing occurring in China in this period and, to a lesser degree, India.

• This particulate pollution is harmful to human health but has a cooling effect in climate terms. In the decades after World War II as well, aerosols from dirty manufacturing processes — then in the developed world — slowed surface warming despite one of the most rapid rates in carbon dioxide emissions growth. Unlike CO{-2}though, aerosols have a lifespan of a few days; clean up your industrial act, and their cooling effect promptly disappears.

• These varied explanations help form a more complete picture of ongoing climate processes.
• One assumes that this more complex picture would be presented, if not in the AR5 Summary for Policymakers, then in the Technical Summary, which in IPCC’s AR4 2007 was over four times as long as the former.
• It would be premature to rush to a definite opinion before seeing what these documents say, and hearing independent scientific opinion on them. The half has not been told us.
• The second major revelation is that the lower end of eventual warming from a doubling of carbon dioxide levels has been reduced from 2°C in the IPCC’s 2007 AR4 report, to 1.5°C.
• Some have argued, though, that most such estimates do not include slow feedbacks. Feedbacks, in the climate context, are ecosystem responses to global warming that usually cause further warming.

Melting in the Arctic

• What is really worrying is the complacency that these two points — that warming is slowing and CO{-2}is less potent — read together may engender.
• As it is, sections of the Indian political class are not exactly known for their alacrity in responding to crises faced by the poor.
• Making them respond with greater urgency becomes all the more difficult if complacency about global warming spreads among political organisations and members of the public at large

Wasted food a matter of concern

• That one-third of the food produced annually for human consumption is wasted is in itself unconscionable in a world where 870 million, or one in eight people, go hungry every day.

• A United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation report now says that this high volume of wastage that occurs right through the food supply chain exerts an adverse impact on land, water, biodiversity and climate change.
• This impact is in addition to the green house gas emissions that are known to result from current patterns of food production, processing, marketing and consumption associated with global commercial flows.
• The report focuses on factors that contribute to the decrease in mass and nutritional value of food caused by poor infrastructure, logistics and technology.
• It also sheds light on multiple costs from food wastage that result from natural disasters, excessive supply, distributional bottlenecks and eating habits of consumers.
• In Asia, the already high carbon footprint from the cultivation of cereals is compounded by huge volumes of wastage owing to inadequate storage facilities.
• The carbon footprint of wasted meat in high income regions is to the extent of 67 per cent. Not to mention losses from perishables such as fruit and vegetables.
• Cumulatively, food ranks as the third emitter after the United States and China.
• Moreover, food that is produced, but not eaten, occupies close to 30 per cent of the world’s agricultural land, says the report.
• Such an extremely unproductive use of land is hard even to contemplate given the current scramble for fertile and wet lands in Africa and parts of Asia. Multinational corporations that have resorted to such means to shore up food grain supplies in the aftermath of the global food crisis have encountered hostile resistance from native populations.
• Clearly, the judicious use of available food ought to be a critical global priority.
• This is especially the case since studies have estimated that agricultural output would have to increase by 60 per cent by 2050 to cope with the demands of a growing population.

• The world is still reeling under the combined impact of the recent rise in food grain prices, commodity speculation and the havoc from freak weather patterns. Rich nations must endeavour to mitigate further economic and environmental cost through aggressive deployment of scientific know-how and technology transfers to poor countries. Under-nourishment and hunger remain the biggest risks to health today, greater than malaria, HIV-AIDS and tuberculosis combined. As with these diseases, they too can be tackled with the requisite means and, above all, political will. The time is now.

Road to efficiency

• Producing cars and other light duty vehicles with higher fuel efficiency in a major market such as India is an imperative that cannot be delayed.
• The sharp growth in demand for petrol and diesel, and the rising burden of oil imports make that a priority.
• Countries with major manufacturing capacities are working to achieve higher average efficiency in their vehicles, with the twin goals of conserving fuel and reducing the emission of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.
• Last year, the U.S. administration presented new average efficiency standards for vehicles that will be sold in 2025, of 54.5 miles per gallon of petrol.
• That metric would nearly double the efficiency of new vehicles compared to those currently being sold.
• The European Union also has a target of 4.1 litres of petrol and 3.6 litres of diesel per 100 km for 2020. China has been following a policy of mandated performance levels for each vehicle coming under specific weight classes.
• India cannot afford to delay its own programme on the wrong premise that it will affect the growth of the automotive industry.
• If anything, vehicle manufacturers should welcome the Power Ministry’s notification on fuel efficiency norms and its 2017 deadline — already pushed back from 2015 — for compliance, as it enables long-term planning.
• China moved to implement new vehicle efficiency standards from 2005 to conserve oil and, in parallel, to encourage the industry to bring in better technologies.
• As the Global Fuel Economy Initiative of the U.N. Environment Programme points out, a major manufacturing country can afford to set clear standards in advance to facilitate suitable long term investments by industry.
• Globalisation should make it possible for industry to shift better technologies to market quickly and ensure compliance with higher standards even by 2015.

Sources: Various News Papers & PIB