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Bonn of contention

CLIMATE FINANCE, reparations and adaptation remained points of contention for developing countries at the UN's mid-year climate change conference in Bonn, Germany. The 56th session of the subsidiary bodies (SB 56) was held on June 6-16 to discuss action items announced at the 26th Conference of Parties (COP 26) to the UN Framework [pg. 3] Convention on Climate Change in Glasgow last year. The Egypt presidency, which will host COP 27 in November, declared that it will prioritise climate finance, including the pledge to double adaptation funds made in Glasgow. However, negotiators from developing countries pointed out that there are still gaps in the definition of climate finance, and in the efforts taken by developed countries to meet the current annual target of US $100 billion. The other features of the conference were loss and damage (L&D) finance and adaptation. The summit began with a formal request by the Group of 77 (G77) countries and China to put these two aspects on the agenda. A global goal on adaptation was formalised, and a draft text was made under the agenda item to outline priorities for future talks. L&D finance refers to money given to communities that face the brunt of the climate crisis. It has long been avoided by developed countries. At Bonn, the agenda item was not formalised despite being a topic of interest across the discussions. High level of microplastics in Indian Ocean THE INDIAN Ocean has an average concentration of 50 microplastics per cubic metre of near surface water. This is much higher than expected to be found in the open ocean, says a new study by the HelmholtzZentrum Here on research institute in Germany. The analysis of microplastics has posed problems in the past as it is time-consuming and shown to have high error rates in calculations. However, the researchers claim to have achieved better accuracy by using a new method, laser direct infrared chemical imaging. This method allows for infrared detection of particles at the molecular level. The researchers found that the most common types of microplastics found in the Indian Ocean were paint particles (49 per cent), presumably from ships, and polyethylene terephthalate or PET (25 percent) used in disposable bottles and polyester clothing. The study says a major share of microplastics may be from the Sunda Strait in Indonesia, making it a pollution hotspot. Early onset of heat across Northern Hemisphere EUROPEAN COUNTRIES were hit by an unusually early heatwave last month, with a hot plume of 35 0 C sweeping in from North Africa to cities from London to Paris. Such a trend has only been seen in late July or August in previous years. In Spain and Germany, temperatures rose by more than 10 o C than is usually recorded in June, according to the World Meteorological Organization, leading to a spate of wildfires across both countries. Soaring temperatures were also felt in central and eastern US, which issued heat advisories covering 120 million people in the third week of the month. Earlier in June, countries such as India and Pakistan in South Asia also saw intense heatwaves. The overall increase in temperatures has also sparked greater energy demand across the affected regions. This put [pg. 4] further pressure on electricity grids that were already struggling with massive supply shortages due to the ongoing Russia-Ukraine conflict.

In a State of Flux

In the past three decades, the top 2,000 metres of the oceans have warmed up due to global warming vidual sensor arrays that float along ocean currents, to determine how the heat content of the ocean changes over time. “Our analysis indicated that human-induced climate change and natural variability were causing heat content to accumulate in the Southern Ocean,” he says. There is also a possibility that the heat could shift to the northern hemisphere in the next decade. High ocean temperatures are changing ocean currents, too. They seem to have picked up the pace by 15 per cent per decade from 1990 to 2013. The impacts are more pronounced in the tropical oceans due to surface winds that have intensified since the 1900s. The climate is changing so much that it is triggering “memory loss” in the oceans. Daisy Hui Shi, a scientist at the US-based Farallon Institute, noticed this worrying phenomenon while examining how marine heatwaves— unusually high SSTS—vary in the California Current region, which experiences a cold-water current that moves southward along the western coast of North America. She describes ocean memory as the persistence of SST from one day, month, or year to the next. “At first, we found the winter ocean memory in this region was declining throughout the 21st century in response to warming. We conducted further investigation to understand the causes and consequences of this phenomenon,” she tells DTE. Her team examined three future pathways and discovered that oceans are likely to lose nearly all of their memory in the future. SST fluctuates because of changes in the top 50-100 m of the oceans. But as warming continues, this layer could become shallower. And this means winds, for example, can change SST more easily, leading to random fluctuations of SST and the eventual decline in memory. The Indian Ocean, in particular, has emerged as the biggest victim of climate change. SST of the Indian Ocean has risen by an average of 1°C from 1951 to 2015, compared to the global average of about 0.7°C. Its average SST has touched 28.08°C, according to a 2014 study published in the Journal of Climate. But the warming is not the same everywhere. From 1901 to 2012, the western Indian Ocean warmed up by 1.28°C against an increase of 0.78°C recorded in other parts of the Indian Ocean. The pattern emerging from the Arabian Sea, the northern part of the Indian Ocean, is particularly concerning. “It used to be cooler than 28°C, but during the last few decades, it has warmed up rapidly, with temperature [pg. 5] trends crossing 1.2-1.4°C in parts of Arabian Sea since the 1950s. Now its temperatures are often above 28°C, and it has started to favour cyclones,” says Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune. Between 2001 and 2019, the Arabian Sea recorded a 52 per cent increase in cyclones. Very severe cyclones have increased by 150 per cent, says Koll. Scientists have noted another new challenge called marine heatwaves, a term coined as recently as 2011. This happens when SST exceeds 90 per cent for five days in a row, from the previous SST observations recorded at the same time in the last 30 years. “The world has taken notice of its impacts on biodiversity, and the ripple effects on the economy,” says Abishek Chatterjee, scientist at the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad. Marine heatwaves are classified as a hazard or natural calamity and these events often accompany El Nino events in the Pacific Ocean. Factors such as increased warming and weak winds contribute to its formation Both Chatterjee and Koll rue that marine heatwaves are hardly being studied in the Indian basin. In 2020, Koll and his team studied the impact of marine heatwaves on the Indian Ocean basin and found SST in the Bay of Bengal (northeastern part of the Indian Ocean) hovered 33-34 o C. “This is the highest ever recorded in open seas across the globe since we started recording temperatures,” he says. THE ARABIAN SEA, THE NORTHERN PART OF THE INDIAN OCEAN, USED TO BE COOLER THAN 28°C. BUT DURING THE LAST FEW DECADES, IT HAS WARMED UP RAPIDLY. THIS IS LEADING TO CYCLONES The team gathered further SST data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US scientific and regulatory agency that collects information from satellites that orbit the Earth 14 times a day. They found that the western part of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal were the most hit. In the former, the number of marine heatwave events went up by around 1.5 events per decade between 1982 and 2018, while in the latter, it rose by around 0.5 events per decade during the same period. The west Indian Ocean recorded over 66 events and north of Bay of Bengal saw 94 events. Chatterjee studied NOAA data for the Arabian Sea between 1982 and 2019 and found that the northern and north-eastern parts adjoining Gujarat saw prolonged marine heatwaves in the pre-monsoon period between March and May. In the summer, prolonged marine heatwaves were pronounced on the west coast, close to Kochi and Mangaluru. The duration and frequency of heatwaves increased by 20 days and 1.5-2 events per decade between 1982 and 2019. [pg. 6] Scientists suspect that they could be fuelling cyclones. Rathore’s attention was drawn to the unusual behaviour of the 2020 Amphan super cyclone. It took less than 36 hours to go from Category 1 (cyclonic storm) to Category 5 (super cyclone). He found a link between marine heatwaves and cyclones, and also identified other contributing factors such as warming in the subsurface, which is 20 m below the surface waters in the Bay of Bengal. The heat content in the subsurface ranged between 135 and 150 kilojoules per sq cm before the cyclone. “The current evidence suggests that prolonged heatwaves could act as indicators of cyclones,” says Chatterjee. High SSTS are accelerating the melting of the white Arctic region. The extent of the Arctic Sea ice cover for May 2022 was 12.88 million sq km. This was 410,000 sq km below the 1981-2010 average, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the US agency for polar and cryospheric research. In the South Pole, Antarctica does not seem as impacted. Still, the sea ice cover reached a record low in February 2022. The sea ice cover was 1.92 million sq. km, which is 190000 sq km below the previously held record on March 3, 2017. It is missing an area about twice the size of Calfornia, according to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). In 2022, Antarctica lost an ice shelf with a surface area of 1100 sq km, roughly the size of Rome. Ice shelves are ice sheets that float in the sea. This occurred as a South Pole station recorded a temperature of -18 0 C on March 17, which was 35 0 C warmer than the average of -53 0 C. The global mean sea level increased by an average of 4.5 millimetres (mm) per year between 2013 and 2021. This was two times higher than the 1993 and 2002 rates. The ipcc estimates that the global sea level could rise by 0.6 to 1.1 m by 2100 and 5 m by 2300 under the high emissions scenario. These estimations are based on global models and do not provide the complete picture, says Shailesh Nayak, director at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. “We talk about the rise of sea level globally and regionally. But the local impacts could be quite different. If I predict sea level rise of 3 mm per year, it will not happen uniformly in every part of the world,” he says.

THE CHURNING

Climate change is choking oceans and its inhabitants

Back to Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch’s seminal work on the oceans and climate change simulation experiment. In 2018, they initiated another related study: what does climate change mean for the future? This time, they used a dozen earth-system models to make their simulations more accurate. They cranked up temperatures to see how the species distributions changed. What they found was alarming: if emissions continue to climb and temperatures reach around 4.9°C by the end of this century, close to 40 per cent of marine genera could perish by 2300 and 8 per cent by 2100. The global average temperature in the current Anthropoceneera is already up by 1.1°C since pre-industrial times. If the world continues on its current path of high GHG emissions, it is expected to rise by 5 o C by 2100. Warming oceans impair water movement, which leads to poor exchange of oxygen between the surface waters and deeper waters. This results in oxygen minimum zones and dead zones in the ocean. The ideal oxygen levels in the oceans should lie between 7 and 8 milligrams per litre (mg/l). Marine organisms start to leave their homes when the levels drop to 4 mg/l. Regions with oxygen concentrations below 2 mg/l are hypoxic or low oxygen zones. And those with less than 0.2 mg/l of oxygen are called anoxic. Globally, about 1.15 million sq km of the seafloor is exposed to oxygen concentrations of less than 0.7 mg/l. “There’s evidence that the oxygen minimum zones are getting bigger globally due to global warming,” says Raleigh Hood, professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, US. He has studied the Indian Ocean basin throughout his career. “The Arabian Sea is the poster child o f oxygen minimum zones. It covers 20 per cent of the area, going as deep as 800 m,” he says. While certain organisms like myctophids, popularly called lantern fish due to their light- emitting organs, have adapted to living in low-oxygen zones, it has forced most marine organisms that breathe oxygen to set up bases elsewhere. There is more trouble. Bacteria that use oxygen as fuel can switch to nitrate or nitrite. They are called denitrifying bacteria. When their metabolism changes, it can have a big impact on the chemical properties of the ocean. These bacteria will start to release nitrogen gas, which will then enter the atmosphere, and alter the global nitrogen cycle, Hood says. Ocean oxygen levels are expected to drop by an average 3-4 per cent by 2100 overall due to climate change and increased nutrient discharges, according to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The impacts include decreased biodiversity, shifts in species distributions, displacement or reduction in fishery resources and expanding algal blooms driven by the overgrowth of microscopic algae or algae-like bacteria. While losing oxygen, the oceans are also turning acidic as they soak up more carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). The term “ocean acidification” was first coined in 2003 after researchers suspected [pg. 8] that acidic waters could take a toll on coral reefs and other organisms whose skeletons or shells are made of calcium carbonate. Acidification corrodes calcium. In 2012, scientists announced that the shells of oysters and crabs were thinning. They published these results in a report titled “Ocean Acidification: From Knowledge to Action”. When CO2 is absorbed by seawater, a series of chemical reactions occur, eventually releasing hydrogen ions into the water. Before the preindustrial era, the ocean pH was 8.2. It is now 8.1. The pH scale is logarithmic, and a 0.1-unit reduction corresponds to a 30 per cent increase in acidity. If we continue on our current trajectory, the pH could further drop to around 7.8, suggest estimates. The open ocean surface pH is now the lowest it has been for at least 26,000 years, according to IPCC. Species are already travelling poleward at a rate of 59 km per decade on average, according to the IPCC’s “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. The North Atlantic right whale, for example, is moving northwards as waters w arm and food availability dwindles. “It used to feed in the Bay of Fundy, which is between the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. These endangered giants seem to have abandoned the Bay of Fundy and moved elsewhere. Fish, lobsters, oysters, and certain crabs are also migrating to more suitable waters,” says Andrea Buchholz, a marine ecologist at the Fisheries and Marine Institute, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. The white-beaked dolphins, discovered in the cooler waters of the North Atlantic Ocean in 1846, have also moved to northwestern waters from the southern areas between 1991 and 2017 due to warming oceans. Their population has dwindled over the years. Similarly, fem ale sperm whales are unable to conceive at their norm al rate because of their exposure to warm SST for long periods. High temperatures take a toll on the survival rates of mammals and increase stress levels. As species move to newer waters, they are likely to encounter new pathogens, scientists warn.

EVERYONE'S IMPACTED

Crumbling ocean biodiversity affects humans

The effects of climate change in recent decades are beyond what we have seen before, says William Cheung, director, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Canada. And this could exacerbate it in the near future, he adds Based on depth, the oceans are divided into zones, or for practical purposes, ecological zones. The upper portion (0 to 200 m) is called the photic. Sunlight reaches this zone, allowing photosynthesis to occur. Phytoplanktons— marine microalgae that produce 50 per cent of the world’s oxygen— live here. It also is inhabited by microscopic organisms zooplankton, crabs, shellfish, and jellyfish. Beneath the photic zone is the deep sea. It begins with the dimly lit mesopelagic zone or the twilight zone (between 200 and 1,000 m). A t this depth, only a [pg. 9] small amount of light trickles down. One study estimated that up to about 90 per cent of the world’s total fish density appears here. Below 1,000 m is the aphotic zone. This is a dark world inhabited by giant squids, anglerfish and Goblin Sharks, to name a few. The aphotic zone can be broken down into the bathypelagic zone or midnight zone (between 1,000 and 4,000 m), the abyss pelagic or the abyss (between 4,000 and 6,000 m ) and the hadopelagic zone or hadal zone is 6,000 m and deeper. “People perceive that the deep-water biodiversity is less impacted by climate change because the surface ocean is presently warm in g much faster than deeper waters,” says Isaac Brito-Morales, associate research scientist, Ocean Fronts and Climate Change, Moore Center for Science, Conservation International. This might not be entirely true. In 2019, Brito-Morales and his colleagues used a supercomputer to simulate the past and future changes in climate velocity, which is the likely speed and direction a species will shift as the ocean warms. “We calculated climate velocity (the speed at which biodiversity migrates in response to climate change) across the ocean zones until 2100 using 11 climate models,” he says. They then tested the hypothetical world under different emissions scenarios: one where emissions stop now, one where they stop in 2050, and one where they continue as usual. “We saw that currently, climate velocity is twice as fast at the surface because of greater surface warming. This implies that deep-sea species are less likely to be at risk from climate change than those at the surface,” he says. The story w ill change drastically if the world continues on the highemissions trajectory. “Our simulation shows that by 2100, climate velocities in the twilight zone will be 11 times faster than the present rate,” says Brito- Morales. Cheung says warming oceans have altered the human food plate over the years. In a 2022 study, he accessed the archived historical seafood menus served in different restaurants in Vancouver and British Columbia. He collected 362 restaurant menus and categorised them into four different periods (1880-1960, 1961-1980, 1981-1996, and 2019-2021). Cheung and his team compared the menus with the 148 currently available ones from the same places. The team calculated the average temperature preference of the species of seafood included in the menus for each period or location. They found species mentioned in the menus during 2019-2021 thrived at 13.8°C. Those served between 1888 and 1960 most likely grew in 10.7°C water. The seafood menu basically reflects the ocean temperature. It also suggests that the kinds of species inhabiting a region change as ocean temperatures rise. Cheung took another route to study how warming oceans impact humans. He collaborated with archaeologists to understand traces of changes in ocean temperatures over five millennia by studying discarded fish bones. Cheung and his team decided to excavate fish bones from two archaeological sites on southwestern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, [pg. 10] Canada. “In these sites, people would eat the fish they caught and throw the bones on the ground. Eventually, the soil would bury it. By digging it up, we estimated what people were catching and eating at that time,” he says. The team found that fish catches were adapted to cooler waters about 5,000 to 3,000 calibrated years before the present, a time scale used mainly in archaeology, geology and other scientific disciplines to specify when events occurred relative to the origin of practical radiocarbon dating in the 1950s. The catches were from relatively warmer waters between 1,800 to 250 calibrated years before the present. “This suggests that there have been changes in the composition of the species of fisheries caught for thousands of years and that it may relate to environmental changes during the time,” he says. We have already largely transformed the oceans. And so climate change is becoming a huge scale factor that is affecting the effectiveness of how we can address various concerns in terms of conservation and sustainable resource management in the ocean, says Cheung.

MINING TROUBLE

World is in a hurry to start deep-sea mining without studying impacts

The ecosystem of the oceans is not just a blind world for us; we also approach it blind. The underwater world— without the energy of the sun and oxygen— is unique and beyond human imagination. Unfortunately, even before completely discovering and understanding it, there is a mad rush to exploit the vast resources through deep-sea mining. It is believed that drilling operations could start as early as 2026. Deep-sea mining involves extracting massive polymetallic sulphide ore from hydrothermal vents, ferromanganese crusts from seamounts and polymetallic manganese ore from the sea floor. These ores are rich in cobalt, manganese, zinc, and other rare metals needed to build batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy, smartphones and laptops. As of M ay 2022, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body tasked with managing deep-sea mining activities, has allocated 31 contracts to explore deep-sea mineral deposits. More than 1.5 million sq km of international seabed, roughly the size of Mongolia, has been set aside for mineral exploration, according to IUCN. The Pacific island nation of Nauru, a tiny island sitting between Australia and Hawaii, has accelerated the process to clear the w ay for Canada-based The Metals Company to mine manganese nodules in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (ccz), a prospective mining site. Lying between Hawaii and Mexico, ccz is spread across 4.5 million sq km and holds trillions of polymetallic nodules. The country invoked the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to give an ultimatum to is a to either develop regulations for deep-sea mining or allow mining proposals sans international consensus on rules. On June 21, 2021, Nauru president Lionel Rouwen Aingimea wrote to is a saying that the [pg. 11] country wants to build back better after being battered by the covid-19 pandemic. Maintaining that deep-sea mining will allow global transition towards clean enery, Aingimea has said the country will start operations by 2023. The letter also stated that “Nauru supports the efforts of large economies like the United States and the European Union to massively overhaul and decarbonise their energy and transportation system”. With Nauru’s fast-approaching deadline, is a does not have enough time to frame regulations that protect the marine environment from the potential harmful effects of seabedmining activities. After all, this is one of its mandates. The climate crisis is often cited as a reason to mine the oceans. The push to adopt renewable energy has created a demand for copper, nickel, aluminum, manganese, zinc, lithium and cobalt. Adding to this rush are plummeting deposits of these metals on land. India form ally joined the race on June 16, 2022, when the country approved the “Deep Ocean Mission” to explore the deep ocean for resources and develop deep-sea technologies for sustainable use of ocean resources. The mission is expected to cost Rs. 4,077 crore. India plans to create an integrated mining system to extract polymetallic nodules from 6,000 m depth in the central Indian Ocean. The exploration studies of minerals will pave the way for commercial exploitation in the near future, according to the government. ISA has allocated India 75,000 sq km for mining polymetallic nodules. The estimated resource potential of the nodules is 380 million tonnes, containing 4.7 million tonnes of nickel, 4.29 million tonnes of copper, 0.55 million tonnes of cobalt and 92.59 million tonnes of manganese. The National Institute of Ocean Technology in Chennai has developed Varaha, a self-propelled seabed mining machine to collect polymetallic nodules. It is tasked with collecting and pumping nodules from depths of up to 6,000 m. Mining has the potential to disturb the fine ecological balance underwater. In deepsea mining, a ship would unload a collector vehicle into the sea, which would then travel down to the seabed. Once at the site, it would scrape off the top 10 cm of the seabed at multiple locations. After picking up the nodules, the collector vehicle will pump the ore to the ship through a pipe. Once the ore reaches the surface, sediments are further removed from the nodule, and the waste is discarded into the oceans “If the seabed is soft, it will generate a lot of clay into the system, and it will affect the biota, including microorganisms,” says Nayak. The clouds could stay suspended for several years and can be carried hundreds of km away by ocean currents. Mining will also generate noise at the seabed, particularly by grinding the hard sulphides or crusts. This could disturb communication among marine organisms, which use sounds to find food and mate. There is also a risk that the operation will introduce metals into the water column, making the water column toxic. A single polymetallic-nodule mining operation, the most promising [pg. 12] technologies for seabed mining, could release 50,000 cubic metres of sediment, broken mineral fines, and seawater per day. A hydrothermal vent operation could discharge 22,000 to 38,000 cubic metres of sediment per day. These discharges could circulate in the ocean continuously for up to 30 years, researchers warn in a 2020 PNAS study. In a 2022 review study published in the journal Marine Policy, deep-sea experts from multiple institutions emphatically say that the world should steer away from deep-sea mining till such time as it knows if and how well deep ocean species can adapt to the changes. Political leaders and the industry, clearly, are moving in the opposite direction. This would only take the world closer to a situation similar to the Permian extinction.

India finally gives in on TRIPS waiver

FOR SHEER bombast it would be hard to beat Piyush Goyal’s claims on the outcome of the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s 12th ministerial conference (M C12) in Geneva. According to the Union Minister of Commerce & Industry, India saved the day for the world and w t o by taking the lead on the negotiations and “ensured benefit for the world’s masses.” By being at the centre of the conference, “it turned the tide of negotiations from full failure, gloom and doom to optimism, enthusiasm and consensus-based decision,” he said. No other country among the 164 members of the apex trade body made such an embarrassing claim; the only other cry of triumph has come from WTO’s director-general Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, who hustled countries into accepting compromises. Goyal, of course, was grandstanding for the domestic audience. From claiming that under the constant guidance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India had been 100 per cent successful in portraying the priority issues for the developing world to boasting that the country could no longer be arm -twisted, it appeared that MC12 was an incredible victory of New Delhi’s strategy. It is telling, however, that Goyal lists the achievement on the critical waiver of wto’s Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights or trips, a key demand of India along with South Africa and a host of other developing countries, almost at the bottom. This is because New Delhi has been forced to accept a heavily watered down offer by the developed countries that bears very little resemblance to the original proposal it made in October 2020 (see "'Compromise' on trips waiver is a sellout", Down To Earth, 1-15 April, 2022). New Delhi has been insisting that its more comprehensive proposal was vital for [pg. 13] developing countries to fight the pandemic, but a handful of rich nations have opposed it. For India, the outcome has been a reality check on w hat is possible at WTO, where the lobbies of the powerful continue to dictate decisions. Goyal had said just before MC12 that it is of paramount importance for India to commence negotiations on therapeutics and diagnostics. He had also made it clear that many of the conditions laid down in the draft agreement were not acceptable. India’s contention is that vaccines are no longer in short supply as sufficient and affordable stocks are available across the world. It has therefore been arguing that wto members should redouble their efforts and commence talks on therapeutics and diagnostics in tandem with the vaccine issue, since the pandemic is far from over, particularly in the poorest countries. That has not happened. Instead, after heavily contested negotiations, members agreed on a deal that removes patent barriers around COVI D -19 vaccines for just five years, and postpones discussions on extending the waiver to therapeutics and diagnostics by six months. The deal allows low- and middle-income countries (LMICS) to temporarily bypass patent protections on vaccines that can be manufactured for domestic use or export. But a crucial demand in the original proposal for waiver of protection on trade secrets, copyrights, and industrial designs were ignored altogether. The new deal actually offers little that is worth celebrating, especially as a response to a global health emergency. The exemptions it provides are already available under existing wto rules, and all it does is simplify some of the notification requirements. In fact, the agreement that was struck on June 17 undermines some of the current flexibilities of the trips agreement available to all countries; it limits export eligibility to just lmics. The spin is making these flexibilities look like new concessions. Many developing countries appear to have taken the bait, since they have welcomed the deal. A cheerleader of the deal is Okonjo-Iweala, who has been quoted saying “It’s really exciting now to go to those factories that are starting to set up all over the developing world and start to work with them about how this will actually be made real.” M any public health experts do not share her breezy optimism because of the many restrictions pushed by the EU, US, UK and Switzerland, all of whom are in thrall to Big Pharma, in particular to those companies that have been successful in developing new-age covid -19 vaccines. While Goyal might pretend that the outcome of MC12 is all to the good and was on account of India’s new-found global clout, a more honest narrative emerges from his address to the co-sponsors o f the waiver proposal on June 14, when he spoke of the hypocrisy of rich nations and the pressures they were mounting. He was categorical then that the five-year waiver was not practical. His blunt assessment was that “not a single factory, not one” will [pg. 14] ever come up with such a deal. The reason was simple: the five-year waiver was too short a period to tap investors, raise funds, draw up plans, get equipment and set up a plant. That would take around three years. Once production started, there was the reminder that within two years, producers would have to bring down exports to the normal compulsory license level. As a result, capacity will remain idle. So how would new plants find investors? Making a passionate pitch for a holistic solution that includes therapeutic and diagnostics to fight the pandemic, India had urged the co-sponsors to hold firm and not to yield to pressure. But yield they did, and what developing countries have secured is a sad deal after two years o f negotiation. It would be less embarrassing if India did not make claims that blow up in its face. WTO is a rough place for developing countries, where arm -twisting is the practised sport of powerful nations and blocs. Goyal should know this by now. If India is still able to safeguard its food security requirements, it is only due to the peace clause the Group of 33 developing countries was able to wrest at Bali in 2013. It still protects India from being challenged at WTO. It came through solidarity, and not because of any prime ministerial directive from New Delhi.

Forest orchestra

WHEN DANIELLE Rappaport, a forest scientist from the US, set foot in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso in 2016, she found patches of the Amazon rainforests resembling ecological graveyards. With sparse trees, these sites had witnessed fires mostly set by 2 humans in the past two decades. Rappaport, who was then a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, wondered w hat this degradation meant for animal biodiversity. She began a series of experiments to record the “animal orchestra” or a collection of animal sounds. The idea was to gauge how human activities impact animal biodiversity. “Every soundproducing species has a distinct sound signature,” Rappaport, who is now co-founder and chief research and innovation officer at the global learning and investment platform Amazon Investor Coalition, tells Down To Earth (DTE). By listening to them, we can estimate the diversity of animals in a region, she says. Typically, scientists survey biodiversity by physically visiting the forests and noting the species encountered; but the process is time- consuming and expensive. Most importantly, hard-to-detect organisms, such as insects, tend to slip under the radar. So, between September and October 2016, Rappaport and her two colleagues set up microphones and sound recorders across 39 burned or logged forest sites in the [pg. 15] municipalities of Nova Ubirata and Feliz Natal. The trio hiked through the forests, armed with a compass, clinometers (to measure the slope of a specific terrain and the height of building or tree), densiometer (to determine canopy thickness or density) and RGB cameras (to create images that replicate human vision, capturing light in red, green and blue wavelengths for accurate colour representation). On reaching a site, the team would strap 13 sound recorders with microphones on trees about 1.4 m from the ground. Five days later, they would move to the next site, repeating the process. The exercise continued till they covered all 39 sites. Of the 39 surveyed sites, 15 witnessed fires between 1999 and 2014; nine saw multiple fires; and three burned at least five times over that period. “Repeated fire from climate change and unsustainable economic pressure on Amazon forests is cannibalising the habitat available for non-human animals, such as birds, amphibians, insects, primates and bats— causing the Amazon ecosystem to teeter on the brink o f ecological collapse,” Rappaport tells DTE. The remaining 24 sites were affected by logging. In 2010, Moto Grosso had 50.7 million hectares (ha) of natural forest, covering 56 per cent of its area. By 2021, it had lost 527,000 ha of the cover, as per Global Forest Watch, an open-source web app that monitors global forests in near real-time. The exercise yielded a cumulative 214 full-day sound records. This, however, was only the beginning of her six-year-research. In 2019, Rappaport joined forces with Anshuman Swain, who was then a PhD student at the university. The team spent eight months analysing the sounds by processing them through the software, which also plots the frequencies o f sounds against time. This takes the form of graphs, helping them visualise the diversity of sounds at every hour of the day. The analysis showed that forest fires inflicted more dam age than logging, “Fires leave lasting effects. The sounds w e recorded were quieter and more homogeneous. We could hear the same few sounds,” says Swain, who recently completed his Ph.D and is now a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard University, US. Fires resulted in a reorganisation of the animal communities, with a diverse com m unity being replaced by a low-diverse population, he adds. They also saw that insects are more powerful markers of forest degradation than birds. “We saw a bigger reduction in the number of insect sounds. They also appear to be more vulnerable to fires and logging,” Swain explains. Birds can fly away, but not all insects can.

INCREASED RELEVANCE

In recent times, more scientists have turned to sound recorders or microphones to capture animal sounds. The technology is beneficial for the Global South, which lacks funds to conduct the conventional means of surveying biodiversity, Swain points out. This is [pg. 16] especially true for places like Brazil, India, Indonesia and Africa, which are home to vibrant, diverse rainforests, he adds. The threat of extinction of species, driven largely by human activities, has also triggered interest in the field. As such, the technology which developed in the 20th century, with the invention of sound recorders and spectrograms, is now finding application in ecological research— from gauging impact of anthropogenic activities (such as noise pollution) on species to understanding animal behaviour to estimating populations. For instance, Simon Butler, an associate professor at the University of East Anglia, recorded a decline in sound diversity after analysing bird data o f 620 species in North America and 447 species in Europe from 1996 to 2018. The data, he says, was sourced from citizen scientists. “Each year, the observers go bird watching in late April through to early June, the breeding season for birds. They make a note of all the species that they detect and their numbers,” Butler says. He and his team converted this species data (in numbers) into bird vocal recordings or sounds capes. For example, if five skylarks were recorded on the survey in a site, scientists would create five 25 second sound files. If the number of individuals detected at a site declines over the years, fewer sound files are inserted in the sounds cape for successive years. After reconstructing the sounds cape, the team measured the intensity of sounds and their distribution across frequency bands over the years in the surveyed sites. The recordings showed that the sounds had become quieter and more homogenous. A healthy sonic diversity should possess a range of frequencies, from low pitch to high pitch, different tempos, from a well-spaced pulse to pulses rapidly moving back and forth, says David George Haskell, an American author and professor o f Biology and Environmental Studies at Sewanee, The University of the South, US. “Maybe an analogy to this is thinking about the diversity of human voices in a particular community,” he explains. Other studies have corroborated Butler’s findings. In 2021, Australian researchers discovered that the critically endangered Regent honeyeater, a nectar-feeding bird, was losing its song culture. Two forms of vocals are common in birds: calls and songs. Calls are not necessarily melodious but often convey meaning, says Manjari Jain, associate professor at the Indian Institutes of Science Education and Research (IISER), Mohali. Some birds produce calls to inform their peers of where they can find food. Songs are more melodic, but they are primarily for display: to attract mates or warn other birds of trespassing. Juveniles learn songs from their adults. This loss of language mirrors the plummeting population of Regent honeyeaters. In 2013, Jain began working on Jungle babblers, a bird that exists and hunts in groups of six or seven, earning them the name “seven sisters”. These ash-brown birds can be easily [pg. 17] spotted in urban areas of north India. “This makes it easier as we do not have to visit forests,” she notes. Jain and her team followed the birds for years, recording their calls using sound recorders and microphones. To understand the bird's behaviour, they needed context too. For that, Jain and her team physically observed the sender (the bird making the call) and the receiver (the bird responding to the call). The experiments helped the team found that when Jungle babblers hunt, a member takes an elevated position, producing a very soft call. “We suspect that this bird dons the role of a security guard. The soft calls could be its way of conveying that all is well. But in the presence of a predator, it produces an alarm call. The group then responds by scurrying for cover,” she adds. Overall, the team identified 15 call types connected with a host of social behaviours such as group movement, brood care, foraging, vigilance and aggression. Eight of these calls (53 per cent) likely indicated vigilance. They published these findings in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology in 2021. V V Robin, assistant professor at IISER, Tirupati, uses bioacoustics to identify birds. Once his team collects recordings, they feed the data into a commercially available software powered by machine learning, a type of artificial intelligence, which detects a species by comparing the new sound data with a library of sounds of known species. “We can also recognise individuals within some species like Sholakili, a blue-grey coloured bird,” says Suyash Sawant, a member of Robin’s research team. These birds are concentrated in Nilgiri hills and AnnamalaiPalani hills in Tamil Nadu; South Wayanad hills in Kerala; and in southwest Karnataka.

UNDERWATER SOUNDS

The technology can also be used underwater. Isha Bopardikar, a researcher in Robin’s lab, has been visiting the Sindhudurg coast of Maharashtra since 2014 to spy on Indian Ocean humpback dolphins and Indo-Pacific fin-less porpoises. Both species are threatened by anthropogenic pressures such as habitat degradation and accidental mortalities due to by- catch. Every year, between October and May, Bopardikar ventures up to 6 km into the Arabian Sea. The crew has a suite of gadgets— acoustic equipment, GPS and a range finder to measure the distance. In the sea, they drop the hydrophones —waterproof microphones—into the water while the recorders attached are on the boat. “Many aquatic animals have evolved to use sound as primary mode of communication,” says Bopardikar. Nachiket Kelkar, head, Riverine Ecosystems and Livelihoods programme at Wildlife Conservation Trust, Mumbai, uses bioacoustics to study the population, behaviour and anthropogenic impacts on the endangered Ganges river dolphin. These animals inhabit the Ganga, Brahmaputra and Indus systems which are sedimentrich and hence poor in visibility. The Ganges river dolphins are essentially blind and emit sounds in the ultrasound range, at [pg. 18] 65-75 kilohertz, which is way beyond the human hearing range. They produce clicks, which sound like some drill operating distantly in the background, explains Kelkar. Kelkar and his colleagues studied how boats and tourist vessels impacts these dolphins. The analysis shows that noise from the propellants and engines could be interfering with the dolphins' communication and navigation. The team was able to record how dolphins reacted before, during and after the ship passed them. “If we are in a crowded place, we speak louder. We saw something similar in dolphins,” he says, adding that the dolphins tried to change the sound pressure of their clicks. But dolphins accustomed to loud noises simply reduced their activity. This could lower their chances of finding prey. He published the study in 2019 in Scientific Reports. “I think bioacoustics has taken off in a big way in wildlife monitoring in India in the last 10-12 years,” Kelkar says. Robin, however, believes that bioacoustics’ reach is limited, mainly due to fund shortage. “Most of the equipment is manufactured abroad; and hence costs are high and importing equipment is a slow process leading to delays in projects,” he says. “It is paradoxical that humans are both creators and destroyers. We have got beautiful languages, and incredible music: it is beautiful; it is sophisticated; it is complex. So we are champions of sound, but we are also destroyers. We are destroying the sounds of the living Earth,” says Haskell.

Neighbour's envy

JUST 10 years ago, this whole area was under jute, as far as the eye could see. Not anymore,” says Narayan Ghosh, pointing at a vast stretch of farm land in Saguna village of West Bengal’s Nadia district. “The vegetation w as so dense and the plants so tall, over 3 m, that the traders who cam e to buy jute did not dare to enter the fields alone for fear o f being lost,” says Ghosh, a farmer who owns 0.5 hectares (ha) in the village. Ghosh’s words best capture the decline o f India’s jute economy (see ‘Study in contrast’, p16). Production of the cash crop has fallen by over 13 per cent in the past decade— from 2.03 million tonnes in 2011-12 to 1.77 million tonnes in 2021-22— as per the third advanced estimates released by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare in May 2022. Sam e is the case with land under jute. According to a 2021 report by the Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP), the average area under jute in the country was 0.82 million ha between 2000-01 and 2009-10, which declined to 0.73 million ha between 2010- 11 and 2019-20. In West Bengal— the country's largest jute-producing state, which also has 70 of India's 93 jute mills—the area under jute has reduced by 0.1 million ha between 2009- [pg. 19] 10 and 2020-21. Jute can be highly profitable. Its leaves are sold in markets as a vegetable even before the crop is harvested. The inner stem can be used to manufacture paper while the outer layer produces the fiber. What, then, ails the jute economy? “There is no market for it,” Ghosh says. Ten years ago, he used to grow jute across his 0.5 ha, but gradually reduced and stopped cultivating the crop by 2011, shifting to horticulture crops. “The jute price kept falling. From Rs. 30,000-40,000 per tonne in late 2000s, it reduced to Rs. 25,000 in 2010-11. This was barely enough to recover the input cost,” he says. Other farmers in the village agree that jute stopped fetching fair price, and was even causing losses When the prices fell, the Jute Corporation of India (JCI) Ltd, a government of India enterprise for procurement of raw jute from the growers at the minimum support price, barely intervened. This reflects in official procurement figures as well. Between 2007-08 and 2021- 22, the quantity procured by JCI decreased from 0.14 million tonnes to 0.014 million tonnes. The poor procurement figures came despite the government being the largest buyer of jute bags, which form the highest share of the total jute products manufactured in the country. There is a special law—the Jute Packaging Materials (Compulsory Use in Packing Commodities) Act 1987 (JPM a)—that provides for use of jute packaging material for foodgrains. Under this Act, the government issues orders from time to time for mandatory use of jute packaging. Since 2017, the norms provide that 100 per cent of foodgrains and 20 per cent of the sugar should only be packed in jute bags. Due to this, jute sacks account for 75 per cent of the total production of the jute industry. Ninety per cent of the jute sacks are supplied to the Food Corporation of India and state procurement agencies, as per a Union government press release dated November 10, 2021, while the remaining are exported or sold directly. It also says the government purchases jute sacks worth RS. 8,000 crore every year from mills.

THE BANGLADESH STORY

While India’s production and acreage declined, Bangladesh’s production and area under jute has increased over the years. India is still the largest producer of jute but in terms of acreage, Bangladesh is the largest cultivator. It also accounts for nearly 75 per cent of the global jute exports, while India’s share is just 7 per cent, says the CACP report. Ironically, even India imports jute products (yarn, floor coverings and jute hessian) from Bangladesh, as per the Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry. In 2020 21, Indian imported products worth Rs. 1,123 crore from Bangladesh. The CACP report says imports from Bangladesh have adversely affected the domestic [pg. 20] industry, given that the landed price of jute and its products from the neighbouring country is less than the domestic rate. Bangladesh has traditionally enjoyed a comparative advantage in export of jute products because of its low cost of production driven by lower wages, favourable power tariffs, cash subsidy for export and better fibre quality. Quality, in particular, has been a sore point in India’s jute cultivation. Jute in India is marred by poor infrastructural facilities for retting, a process done after harvesting of the crop. Under retting, jute bundles are kept under water at a depth of about 30 cm. This process gives the fibre its shine, colour, and strength. It should ideally be done in slow moving, clean water bodies like rivers. But Indian farmers do not have access to such resources. Sajjan Mallick, who has 1 ha under jute in Saguna, says there is no free flowing water body in his village. He points to a small pond, where hundreds of farmers submerge their jute bundles in muddy water for days. “When we take them out, there is a discolouration,” he says. There is another bigger pond at a distance, but with jute being a bulky crop, moving bundles raises labour costs. To overcome such concerns, the Central Research Institute for Jute and Allied Fibres (CRIJAF) under the Indian Council of Agricultural Research has developed a model retting tank with slow moving water. “We have the technology, but it needs promotion and adaptation,” says Gouranga Kar, Director, CRIJAF. Bangladesh also does well in exports because it has three to four different kinds of subsidies. For instance, it gives 9-10 per cent export subsidy for food-grade packing bags, which is much higher than India’s 1.5-3 per cent subsidy. Another reason for the country's success is its capturing of the diversified jute products market, for which there is a huge international demand. India's major jute exports, in contrast, are sacking and hessian bags. Moloy Chakraborty, the Jute Commissioner o f India, points out that diversifying into other products can open new avenues for the sector and reduce its dependence on the government. “Being environmental friendly, jute has a huge potential in the diversified goods market, especially in regions and nations that have banned plastic,” he says. High-end fashion brands are also coming out with more jute products such as sandals. With India’s high production, it should be in a position to capture this market. “Some 85 per cent of our jute is consumed domestically, while 15 per cent is exported. The situation is reverse for Bangladesh,” says Kar. “Diversification is key if India wants to make the jute market successful. Demand for diversified products has to be created even domestically. This can be a big boost for a plastic-free India as well,” he adds. Currently, 92 per cent of the total domestic jute produced is used for packaging purposes and just 8 per cent is for other products, as per the Office of the Jute Commissioner. [pg. 21] Why, then, are jute mills not focusing on product diversification? JPM a ensures that the government purchases 70 per cent of the mills' total production, says Rishav Kajaria, deputy chairman, Indian Jute M ills Association (IJMA). This should put the m ills on a strong footing to capture diversified markets for the rest 30 per cent. However, only a handful of mills have the capacity to diversify.

SORRY STATE OF MILLS

Jute mills are marred by issues of machinery modernisation, mismanagement, labour shortage and unrest, and dependence on the government. Industry experts Down To Earth spoke to said that of the 70 mills in West Bengal, only around 60 are currently operating. At least 10 mills closed down between October 2021 and May 2022, after a state government decision to cap pricing of raw jute on September 30, 2021. The decision was opposed by the industry and revoked on May 19 this year. Experts also say that the decision led to massive losses. The Union government capped the price at which the jute mills can purchase raw jute at Rs. 6,500 per quintal (1 quintal equals 0.1 tonne), and it based its purchases of jute bags on this cap. But the actual price borne by mills to buy raw jute was Rs. 7,000- 7,200 per quintal. Of the 10 mills that closed down, three have not managed to open again, rendering around 60,000 workers unemployed. Kajaria also says that one of the reasons the business has not been profitable is inadequate and arbitrary pricing of jute bags by the government. This pricing is fixed on a formula derived by the tariff commission, under the Union Ministry of Commerce and Industry. Currently, the bags are priced on the basis of the provisional rates of 2016, which were meant to last for just six months, till the commission came out with a new report. The report was finally submitted to the Union Ministry of Textiles in April 2021 and is pending implementation. In the meantime, IJM a has been in a tussle with the Union textile ministry, demanding revision of prices. At the current prices, according to the association, the industry is making a minimum loss of Rs. 3,000 per tonne by supplying jute bags to the government. “Raw jute prices are increasing but the costs have not been updated," says Kajaria “The industry is in survival mode right now. Some 70 per cent of my market is not paying me fairly. We do not have a strong balance sheet to think about innovation,” says Kajaria. “There are very few mills that can take themselves out of a bad economic situation,” says Amlesh Mishra, president of Loomtex Engineering Private Limited in North 24 Parganas, West Bengal. He has been working in the jute industry for the last 37 years. Experts say that of the functioning mills, only 8-10 are in good financial health and can [pg. 22] survive seasonal losses. The business of another 20 mills is just average. The rest of the mills are financially unsound. At the Baranagar Jute Mill in Kolkata, for instance, workers complain that the operations have significantly reduced in the past few years, and so have the wages of the employees. “I get work for hardly 12 days a month now,” says Ashok Kumar Das, who has been working at the mill for the last 20 years. Sushil Jaiswal, leader of the jute workers' trade union, who has also worked at the Baranagar mill in the past, alleges that it is being converted into a warehouse. “The machines are being dismantled,” he says. D P Bhatter, an official at the mill, agrees that they are running at only 50 per cent capacity, but blames the pricing cap for the situation. But even the mills that are doing well are marred by problems. Samir Kumar Chanda, director of Hukumchand Jute Mill, said to be Asia’s largest jute mill, in North 24 Parganas, says they are at least 2,000 labourers short. “It has become difficult to find workers ready to work in a jute mill.” The company has recently adopted a new policy, under which its human resources manager goes to nearby villages to look for people interested in working in a jute mill and make them aware of the incentives and wages the mill is giving. All is not lost, says Chanda. “Jute has a bright future. We need to create a demand for diversified products and modernise,” he says. For modernisation of the jute mills, the Union government is implementing the Incentive Scheme for Acquisition of Plant & Machinery, under which capital subsidy is being provided to replace the old machines. However, mill officials say the subsidy has been stopped since last two years. Chakroborty confirms that the scheme has been stopped, but only temporarily, since a new version of the scheme for the whole of textile industry is in the works.

‘Climate change making La Nina impact severe’

EAST AFRICA is experiencing its worst drought in four decades. The last four monsoons have been majorly deficit and the coming season in October-December is forecast to follow suit, making the overall situation exceptional. The last rainy season— March to May— was the driest in 70 years for Ethiopia, Kenya and Somalia. In the first w eek o f June, a joint statement by agencies that include the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Center, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, Famine Early Warning Systems Network (fews net), and the World Food Programme (WFP), warned of a famine unseen in recent history. As per WFP, some 7 million livestock have died and about 20 million people are facing severe [pg. 23] hunger. This exceptionally dry weather in East Africa is attributed to an unusually protracted La Nina, a natural large-scale cooling of surface temperature in central and eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean. As the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in its bulletin on June 10, the event started in 2020 and will persist till 2022, with a high possibility o f continuing till 2023. WMO said that the naturally occurring climate event is having unusual impacts: though “La Nina has a cooling influence, temperatures are continuing to rise due to global warming”. In July-August 2011, a strong La Nina resulted in the worst drought in 60 years in East Africa and the UN had to declare a famine in the region after a gap of 30 years. The current situation is worsening to that level. Close to 50 per cent of Somalia’s population faces crisis- level food insecurity. On June 6, A dam Abdelmoula, Deputy Special Representative of the Secretary- General of the U N, Resident and Humanitarian Coordinator, said, “Famine cost the lives of 260,000 Somalis in 2010-2011. This cannot be allowed to happen again in 2022.” In Ethiopia, over a million livestock have died due to crop loss and dry weather while an estimated 7.2 million people are in immediate need of food aid in the southern and south- eastern regions. In Kenya, the number of people in need of assistance has seen an over fourfold rise in less than two years. Scientists from across the world have been forecasting on famine situation to help governments and aid agencies to direct relief through fews net. This body, under the US Agency for International Development (usaid), was set up in 1985 in response to the famine in East and West Africa that killed more than a million people. Climate Hazards Center (chc) in UC Santa Barbara, US, is one institution that equips fews net with precise data. The focus of chc is East Africa, one of the world’s most drought-prone areas. CHRIS FUNK, director of chc, has been assessing the frequent droughts in the region and their link to climate change. “In 12 out of the past 24 years there have been La Ninas,” Funk says adding, “I am very confident that the circulation disruptions they cause are being amplified by climate change.” He along with other scientists predicted the 2010 famine in Somalia. But he has a grievance: even if forecast is precise, what if we do not act on it? RICHARD MAHAPATRA speaks to Funk on the crisis in East Africa, the role of early warning and the importance of using it to avert human tragedy. Excerpts: Four rainy seasons have failed in East Africa, precipitating a crisis. How do you explain the climate event? The current droughts have been produced by an interaction between La Nina and climate change. Naturally occurring La Ninas are associated with cool sea surface temperatures in the east Pacific. The impact of La Ninas is increasing for East Africa because of human induced warming in the oceans. When there is a La Nina event, the west – to – east winds [pg. 24] over the Pacific Ocean intensify, pushing the extra heat in the Pacific into the western Pacific. These warm waters cause the rainfall around Indonesia to increase, to the west of this precipitation one finds dry hot sinking air over East Africa, which reduces the total rainfall and increases air temperatures. The current multi-season drought has been produced by a natural multi-year La Nina event – amplified by climate change – expressed as exceptionally warm west Pacific sea surface temperatures and exceptionally warm air temperatures over East Africa. We have an unusually long La Nina as well. Will you explain how and why this phenomenon is becoming pronounced and a threat to Africa? There are two aspects to this question— La Nina frequency and La Nina intensity. Regarding the first aspect, it is very important to note that La Nina events have been very common since 1998, over the past 25 years there have been 12 La Nina events, and there is currently about a 54 per cent chance that we will see another La Nina this October. While there is a lot of debate on this in the climate community, many observational studies and my own research has suggested that the climate is becoming more La Nina-like. Another aspect that I have a great deal of confidence in is that when a La Nina happens, now, its intensity is greatly amplified by human-induced warming in the western Pacific Why do you say that post 1997, La Nina's impact of low rainfall has aggravated? After a giant 1997-1998 El Nino event (associated with exceptionally warm waters in the eastern Pacific), sea surface temperatures in the western Pacific jumped up. There the average state is very warm, and they become even warmer during and right after a La Nina event. As describe above, these warm waters amplify the ability of La Ninas to reduce East African rains. The impact of this has been especially marked on the March-to-May rains. This sets up a very dangerous, but also very predictable, pattern of back-to-back droughts in October-December and March-May. This type of sequence produced devastating sequential droughts and food crises in 2010-11 and 2016-17. Tragically, the current two-year La Nina has created an exceptionally dangerous series of four droughts, capped by w hat seems likely to be the worst March-April- May 2022 season on record. For over 20 years, you have been forecasting and alerting droughts through the Climate Hazards Center. W hat is the trend you observe in Africa? I see two major trends— more extreme dry and wet rainy seasons, driven by more extreme changes in sea surface temperatures, as described above; and more extreme air temperatures, which can desiccate crops and pasture lands, while also having negative impacts on human and livestock health. Furthermore, as we are seeing now in the Horn of Africa, we can see these two sources of risk combine, such as when we get droughts in dry regions like East Africa. But, I am also very worried about human impacts associated with [pg. 25] extreme humid heat. We are worried about more intense dry/hot spells driving farmers into cities where they may be exposed to more extreme heat. But, in general, it is important [to note] that the trends are really produced by extreme events— events that we can monitor and predict. We are not powerless in the face of climate change. Your forecasts are a great resource to avoid a human crisis. How do you do this? The Climate Hazard Center has two main types of resources— global rain fall estimates and tailored forecasts. The first category of information is very widely used what is known as the Climate Hazards Infra Red Precipitation with Stations (chirps). In the first three months of 2022, 1.3 million chirps files were downloaded from 4,800 unique IP address, a total of 31 terabyte of data. We also have CHiRPS-compatible 1-to-16 day weather forecasts that are updated daily, and a longer “Sub-Seasonal” weather forecasts as well. These are great products that are used by many agencies to monitor and manage climate risk. The rain fall and weather forecasts can be combined, providing a powerful way to rapidly assess extreme droughts. A terrifying example is a May 27 fews net Somalia alert, which suggested that much of Somalia was likely to receive extremely poor March-May rains. Despite our improvements in monitoring and forecasting, we are fearful that humanitarian responses will be insufficient, given the severity of the food security situation.

The Great Dying 2.0

SCIENTIST JUSTIN Penn and Curtis Deutsch have simulated the climate change events that led to the Permian extinction, which wiped out most of the life under the oceans some 250 million years ago. The two scientists from Stanford University in the US believe the event holds clues to how the current climate crisis is impacting the oceans. The Permian era (298.9 million to 252.2 million years ago) was a time before the dinosaurs ruled the planet. The oceans were 10oC warmer than they are now, and oxygen levels were 80 per cent lower. During the period, land masses collided to form the arid supercontinent Pangaea. The massive Panthalassic Ocean, which covered much of the Earth, was home to many sponge and coral species, ammonites (tiny shelled organisms), brachiopods (invertebrate animals closely related to starfish), and fusulinid foraminifera (singlecelled organisms closely associated with modern amoebas). Reptiles began to flourish. Sharks and bony fish thrived. Towards the end of the era, a series of volcanic eruptions in the present-day central Siberia region injected massive amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGS) into the atmosphere. Then the uncontrolled GHG emissions triggered climatic changes. This sounded the death knell [pg. 26] for the flourishing and diverse life forms. Roughly 96 per cent of marine species and 70 per cent of land species went extinct. Thus, scientists refer to this period as the “Great Dying”. “Climate change that happened at the end of the Permian era is similar to the one that is unfolding now,” Deutsch told Down To Earth (DTE). To reach this conclusion, Penn and Deutsch first simulated the earth systems on a supercomputer, which represented the climatic conditions 250 million years ago. Next, the scientists developed the ecophysiological model to map out how species were distributed from surface to deep sea and from the equatorial waters to the poles. The team shortlisted 61 living species types. They then warmed up the climate by 2-10 o C to see how these species responded. “Some species will have to leave because it got too hot or the oxygen got too low. Some species from the tropics can move into polar waters because they are more welcoming,” says Deutsch. Life has bounced back since the Permian extinction. Oceans are the planet’s largest ecosystem, accounting for 95 per cent of all space available for life and hosting 90 per cent o f the planet’s total species (see “In a state of flux”,_p30-31). Beneath the oceans lies a world that is vast, diverse and elusive. Mountain ranges, hydrothermal vents that resemble terrestrial hot springs, and volcanoes rise from the seafloor. The landscape is dotted with trenches, which go as deep as 11,000 metres (m). The oceans are home to organisms of all sizes and shapes: from microorganisms to the blue whale. But how climate change would impact or is already impacting the oceans usually draws a long and uncertain reaction. This is because we have never explored the oceans enough to know the impacts with certainty. The average depth of the oceans is 3,700 m, and 80 per cent of the areas have not been explored at all. The exact number of species that live in the ocean is unknown; 91 per cent of the species have yet to be classified. As it is popularly said, we know more about the moon and Mars surfaces than the sea surface What we know with certainty is that the oceans modulate the global climate and control the planetary temperature, and thus the weather events like rain, storms, cyclones, floods and droughts. Human lives are intimately tied to the oceans. About 50-80 per cent of the oxygen produced on Earth can be traced back to the sea. These saltwater bodies support the livelihoods of 3 billion people, according to the United Nations (UN). Also, ocean currents— the continuous movement of water— have an essential role. Acting as conveyor belts, they transport warm water from the equators to the pole and cooler waters from the poles to the equators. Upwelling currents allow the vertical movement of water, pushing cold, nutrient- rich water from the ocean depths to the surface, which is critical for fisheries. But the most important role the oceans play is that of a carbon sink: four-fifths of the global carbon cycle is circulated through them. According to the 5th Assessment Report published by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2014, the oceans have [pg. 27] absorbed more than 90 per cent of the global warming created by humans since the 1970s. To make sense of this, without the oceans, the global average temperatures would have jumped by almost 56 o C. “The atmosphere has a low heat capacity compared to the ocean water, which can accommodate 1,000 times more heat. So, most of it is moving into the ocean,” says Saurabh Rathore, a postdoctoral researcher at l’ ocean, Sorbonne University, Paris. The continuous GHGS are preventing heat from going back into space and this is leading to the w arming up of the oceans, he adds. IN HOT WATER Soaking up more heat than ever before, the oceans are headed towards a catastrophic future The oceans must have a carrying capacity to keep on doing the job as a carbon and heat sink. Over the years, they have been heating up. The global sea surface temperature (SST) is roughly 1 o C higher than 140 years ago. Life in the oceans is intimately linked to the level of SST. Changes in ocean temperatures and currents will lead to alterations in climate patterns around the world Ocean heat content reached a record high in 2021 when the upper 2,000 m of the ocean absorbed 235 zettajoules (ZJ) heat. The sum of the energy used by humans across the world in a single year is about ha lf a ZJ. The oceans were fairly stable until about the 1980s, after which the top 500 m began to warm. Warming up to a 1,000 m depth became evident after about 1988. It reached 1,500 m in the late 1990s. And warming at 2,000 m depth has been evident since about 2005. “So, it took 25 to 30 years for the w arm in g to penetrate to about two km below the surface. We see that the heat is gradually creeping down,” says Kevin Trenberth, distinguished scholar at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado. Ocean heat content has impacted all the six major oceans since 1998. But the most significant warming has been in the southern oceans, says Rathore. His study used data from Argo floats, a network of over 4,000 individual sensor arrays that float along ocean currents, to determine how the heat content of the ocean changes over time. “Our analysis indicated that human-induced climate change and natural variability were causing heat content to accumulate in the Southern Ocean,” he says. There is also a possibility that the heat could shift to the northern hemisphere in the next decade. High ocean temperatures are changing ocean currents, too. They seem to have picked up the pace by 15 per cent per decade from 1990 to 2013. The impacts are more pronounced in the tropical oceans due to surface winds that have intensified since the 1900s. The climate is changing so much that it is triggering “memory loss” in the oceans. Daisy Hui [pg. 28] Shi, a scientist at the US-based Farallon Institute, noticed this worrying phenomenon while examining how marine heat waves—unusually high SSTS—vary in the California Current region, which experiences a cold-water current that moves southward along the western coast of North America. She describes ocean memory as the persistence of SST from one day, month, or year to the next. “At first, we found the winter ocean memory in this region was declining throughout the 21st century in response to warming. We conducted further investigation to understand the causes and consequences of this phenomenon,” she tells DTE. Her team examined three future pathways and discovered that oceans are likely to lose nearly all of their memory in the future. SST fluctuates because of changes in the top 50-100 m of the oceans. But as warming continues, this layer could become shallower. And this means winds, for example, can change SST more easily, leading to random fluctuations of SST and the eventual decline in memory. The Indian Ocean, in particular, has emerged as the biggest victim of climate change. SST of the Indian Ocean has risen by an average of 1°C from 1951 to 2015, compared to the global average of about 0.7°C. Its average SST has touched 28.08°C, according to a 2014 study published in the Journal of Climate. But the warming is not the same everywhere. From 1901 to 2012, the western Indian Ocean warmed up by 1.28°C against an increase of 0.78°C recorded in other parts of the Indian Ocean. The pattern emerging from the Arabian Sea, the northern part of the Indian Ocean, is particularly concerning. “It used to be cooler than 28°C, but during the last few decades, it has warmed up rapidly, with temperature trends crossing 1.2-1.4°C in parts of Arabian Sea since the 1950s. Now its temperatures are often above 28°C, and it has started to favour cyclones,” says Roxy Mathew Koll, climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, Pune. Between 2001 and 2019, the Arabian Sea recorded a 52 per cent increase in cyclones. Very severe cyclones have increased by 150 per cent, says Koll. Scientists have noted another new challenge called marine heat waves, a term coined as recently as 2011. This happens when SST exceeds 90 per cent for five days in a row, from the previous SST observations recorded at the same time in the last 30 years. “The world has taken notice of its impacts on biodiversity, and the ripple effects on the economy,” says Abishek Chatterjee, scientist at the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services, Hyderabad. Marine heat waves are classified as a hazard or natural calamity and these events often accompany El Nino events in the Pacific Ocean. Factors such as increased warming and weak winds contribute to its formation. Both Chatterjee and Koll rue that marine heat waves are hardly being studied in the Indian basin. In 2020, Koll and his team studied the impact of marine heatwaves on the Indian Ocean basin and found SST in the Bay of Bengal (northeastern part of the Indian Ocean) [pg. 29] hovered 33-34 o C. “This is the highest ever recorded in open seas across the globe since we started recording temperatures,” he says. The team gathered further SST data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the US scientific and regulatory agency that collects information from satellites that orbit the Earth 14 times a day. They found that the western part of the Indian Ocean and the Bay of Bengal were the most hit. In the former, the number of marine heatwave events went up by around 1.5 events per decade between 1982 and 2018, while in the latter, it rose by around 0.5 events per decade during the same period. The West Indian Ocean recorded over 66 events and north of Bay of Bengal saw 94 events. Chatterjee studied NOAA data for the Arabian Sea between 1982 and 2019 and found that the northern and north-eastern parts adjoining Gujarat saw prolonged marine heatwaves in the pre-monsoon period between March and May. In the summer, prolonged marine heatwaves were pronounced on the west coast, close to Kochi and Mangaluru. The duration and frequency of heatwaves increased by 20 days and 1.5-2 events per decade between 1982 and 2019. Scientists suspect that they could be fuelling cyclones. Rathore’s attention was drawn to the unusual behaviour of the 2020 Amphan super cyclone. It took less than 36 hours to go from Category 1 (cyclonic storm) to Category 5 (super cyclone). He found a link between marine heatwaves and cyclones, and also identified other contributing factors such as warming in the subsurface, which is 20 m below the surface waters in the Bay of Bengal. The heat content in the subsurface ranged between 135 and 150 kilojoules per sq cm before the cyclone. “The current evidence suggests that prolonged heatwaves could act as indicators of cyclones,” says Chatterjee. High SSTS are accelerating the melting of the white Arctic region. The extent of the Arctic Sea ice cover for May 2022 was 12.88 million sq km. This was 410,000 sq km below the 1981-2010 average, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center, the US agency for polar and cryospheric research. In the South Pole, Antarctica does not seem as impacted. Still, the sea ice cover reached a record low in February 2022. The sea ice cover was 1.92 million sq km, which is 190,000 sq km below the previously held record on March 3, 2017. It is missing an area about twice the size of California, according to the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (nasa). In 2022, Antarctica lost an ice shelf with a surface area of 1,100 sq km, roughly the size of Rome. Ice shelves are ice sheets that float in the sea. This occurred as a South Pole station recorded a temperature of -18°C on March 17, which was 35°C warmer than the average of -53°C. The global mean sea level increased by an average of 4.5 millimetres (mm) per year [pg. 30] between 2013 and 2021. This was two times higher than the 1993 and 2002 rates. The IPCC estimates that the global sea level could rise by 0.6 to 1.1 m by 2100 and 5 m by 2300 under the high emissions scenario. These estimations are based on global models and do not provide the complete picture, says Shailesh Nayak, director at the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. “We talk about the rise of sea level globally and regionally. But the local impacts could be quite different. If I predict sea level rise of 3 mm per year, it will not happen uniformly in every part of the world,” he says.

THE CHURNING

Climate change is choking oceans and its inhabitants

Back to Justin Penn and Curtis Deutsch’s seminal work on the oceans and climate change simulation experiment. In 2018, they initiated another related study: what does climate change mean for the future? This time, they used a dozen earth-system models to make their simulations more accurate. They cranked up temperatures to see how the species distributions changed. W hat they found was alarming: if emissions continue to climb and temperatures reach around 4.9°C by the end of this century, close to 40 per cent of marine genera could perish by 2300 and 8 per cent by 2100. The global average temperature in the current Anthropocene era is already up by 1.1°C since pre-industrial times. If the world continues on its current path of high GHG emissions, it is expected to rise by 5 o C by 2100. Warming oceans impair water movement, which leads to poor exchange of oxygen between the surface waters and deeper waters. This results in oxygen minimum zones and dead zones in the ocean. The ideal oxygen levels in the oceans should lie between 7 and 8 milligrams per litre (mg/l). Marine organisms start to leave their homes when the levels drop to 4 mg/l. Regions with oxygen concentrations below 2 mg/l are hypoxic or low oxygen zones. And those with less than 0.2 mg/l of oxygen are called anoxic. Globally, about 1.15 million sq km of the seafloor is exposed to oxygen concentrations of less than 0.7 mg/l. “There’s evidence that the oxygen minimum zones are getting bigger globally due to global warming,” says Raleigh Hood, professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, US. He has studied the Indian Ocean basin throughout his career. “The Arabian Sea is the poster child o f oxygen minimum zones. It covers 20 per cent of the area, going as deep as 800 m,” he says. While certain organisms like myctophids, popularly called lantern fish due to their light- emitting organs, have adapted to living in low-oxygen zones, it has forced most marine organisms that breathe oxygen to set up bases elsewhere. There is more trouble. Bacteria that use oxygen as fuel can switch to nitrate or nitrite. They are called denitrifying bacteria. When their metabolism changes, it can have a big impact on the chemical properties of the [pg. 31] ocean. These bacteria will start to release nitrogen gas, which will then enter the atmosphere, and alter the global nitrogen cycle, Hood says. Ocean oxygen levels are expected to drop by an average 3-4 per cent by 2100 overall due to climate change and increased nutrient discharges, according to the International union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The impacts include decreased biodiversity, shifts in species distributions, displacement or reduction in fishery resources and expanding algal blooms driven by the overgrowth of microscopic algae or algae-like bacteria. While losing oxygen, the oceans are also turning acidic as they soak up more carbon dioxide (CO 2 ). The term “ocean acidification” was first coined in 2003 after researchers suspected that acidic waters could take a toll on coral reefs and other organisms whose skeletons or shells are made of calcium carbonate. Acidification corrodes calcium. In 2012, scientists announced that the shells of oysters and crabs were thinning. They published these results in a report titled “Ocean Acidification: From Knowledge to Action” When CO 2 is absorbed by seawater, a series of chemical reactions occur, eventually released hydrogen ions into the water. Before the preindustrial era, the ocean pH was 8.2. It is now 8.1. The pH scale is logarithmic, and a 0.1 unit reduction corresponds to a 30 per cent increase in acidity. If we continue on our current trajectory, the pH could further drop to around 7.8, suggest estimates. The open ocean surface pH is now the lowest it has been for at least 26000 years, according to IPCC. Species are already travelling poleward at a rate of 59 km per decade on average, according to the IPCC’s “Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. The North Atlantic right whale, for example, is moving northwards as waters w arm and food availability dwindles. “It used to feed in the Bay of Fundy, which is between the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. These endangered giants seem to have abandoned the Bay of Fundy and moved elsewhere. Fish, lobsters, oysters, and certain crabs are also migrating to more suitable waters,” says Andrea Buchholz, a marine ecologist at the Fisheries and Marine Institute, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada. The white-beaked dolphins, discovered in the cooler waters of the North Atlantic Ocean in 1846, have also moved to northwestern waters from the southern areas between 1991 and 2017 due to warming oceans. Their population has dwindled over the years. Similarly, fem ale sperm whales are unable to conceive at their normal rate because o f their exposure to warm SST for long periods. High temperatures take a toll on the survival rates of mammals and increase stress levels. As species move to newer waters, they are likely to encounter new pathogens, scientists warn.

EVERYONE'S IMPACTED

Crumbling ocean biodiversity affects humans

The effects of climate change in recent decades are beyond what we have seen before, says William Cheung, director, Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia, Canada. And this could exacerbate it in the near future, he adds. Based on depth, the oceans are divided into zones, or for practical purposes, ecological zones. The upper portion (0 to 200 m) is called the photic. Sunlight reaches this zone, allowing photosynthesis to occur. Phytoplanktons— marine microalgae that produce 50 per cent of the world’s oxygen— live here. It also is inhabited by microscopic organism s zooplankton, crabs, shellfish, and jellyfish. Beneath the photic zone is the deep sea. It begins with the dimly litm esopelagic zone or the twilight zone (between 200 and 1,000 m). At this depth, only a small amount of light trickles down. One study estimated that up to about 90 per cent of the world’s total fish density appears here. Below 1,000 m is the aphotic zone. This is a dark world inhabited by giant squids, anglerfish and Goblin Sharks, to name a few. The aphotic zone can be broken down into the bathypelagic zone or midnight zone (between 1,000 and 4,000 m), the abyss pelagic or the abyss (between 4,000 and 6,000 m ) and the hadopelagic zone or hadal zone is 6,000 m and deeper. “People perceive that the deep-water biodiversity is less impacted by climate change because the surface ocean is presently warming much faster than deeper waters,” says Isaac Brito-Morales, associate research scientist, Ocean Fronts and Climate Change, Moore Center for Science, Conservation International. This might not be entirely true. In 2019, Brito-Morales and his colleagues used a supercomputer to simulate the past and future changes in climate velocity, which is the likely speed and direction a species will shift as the ocean warms. “We calculated climate velocity (the speed at which biodiversity migrates in response to climate change) across the ocean zones until 2100 using 11 climate models,” he says. They then tested the hypothetical world under different emissions scenarios: one where emissions stop now, one where they stop in 2050, and one where they continue as usual. “W e saw that currently, climate velocity is twice as fast at the surface because of greater surface warming. This implies that deep-sea species are less likely to be at risk from climate change than those at the surface,” he says. The story will change drastically i f the world continues on the highemissions trajectory. “Our simulation shows that by 2100, climate velocities in the twilight zone will be 11 times faster than the present rate,” says Brito- Morales. Cheung says warming oceans have altered the human food plate over the years. In a 2022 study, he accessed the archived historical seafood menus served in different restaurants in Vancouver and British Columbia. He collected 362 restaurant menus and categorised them into four different periods (1880-1960, 1961-1980, 1981-1996, and 2019-2021). Cheung and his team compared the menus with the 148 currently available ones from the same places. [pg. 33] The team calculated the average temperature preference of the species of seafood included in the menus for each period or location. They found species mentioned in the menus during 2019-2021 thrived at 13.8°C. Those served between 1888 and 1960 most likely grew in 10.7°C water. The seafood menu basically reflects the ocean temperature. It also suggests that the kinds of species inhabiting a region change as ocean temperatures rise. Cheung took another route to study how warm in g oceans impact humans. He collaborated with archaeologists to understand traces of changes in ocean temperatures over five millennia by studying discarded fish bones. Cheung and his team decided to excavate fish bones from two archaeological sites on southwestern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. “In these sites, people would eat the fish they caught and throw the bones on the ground. Eventually, the soil would bury it. By digging it up, we estimated what people were catching and eating at that time,” he says. The team found that fish catches were adapted to cooler waters about 5,000 to 3,000 calibrated years before the present, a time scale used mainly in archaeology, geology and other scientific disciplines to specify when events occurred relative to the origin of practical radiocarbon dating in the 1950s. The catches were from relatively warmer waters between 1,800 to 250 calibrated years before the present. “This suggests that there have been changes in the composition of the species of fisheries caught for thousands of years and that it may relate to environmental changes during the time,” he says. We have already largely transformed the oceans. And so climate change is becoming a huge scale factor that is affecting the effectiveness of how we can address various concerns in terms of conservation and sustainable resource management in the ocean, says Cheung.

MINING TROUBLE

World is in a hurry to start deep-sea mining without studying impacts

The ecosystem of the oceans is not just a blind world for us; we also approach it blind. The underwater world— without the energy of the sun and oxygen— is unique and beyond human imagination. Unfortunately, even before completely discovering and understanding it, there is a mad rush to exploit the vast resources through deep-sea mining. It is believed that drilling operations could start as early as 2026 Deep-sea mining involves extracting massive polymetallic sulphide ore from hydrothermal vents, ferromanganese crusts from seamounts and polymetallic manganese ore from the sea floor. These ores are rich in cobalt, manganese, zinc, and other rare metals needed to build batteries for electric vehicles and renewable energy, smartphones and laptops. As of May 2022, the International Seabed Authority (ISA), an intergovernmental body tasked with managing deep-sea mining activities, has allocated 31 contracts to explore deep-sea mineral deposits. More than 1.5 million sq km of international seabed, roughly the size of [pg. 34] Mongolia, has been set aside for mineral exploration, according to IUCN. The Pacific island nation of Nauru, a tiny island sitting between Australia and Hawaii, has accelerated the process to clear the way for Canada-based The Metals Company to mine manganese modules in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), a prospective mining site. Lying between Hawaii and Mexico, ccz is spread across 4.5 million sq km and holds trillions of polymetallic nodules. The country invoked the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to give an ultimatum to ISA to either develop regulations for deep-sea mining or allow mining proposals sans international consensus on rules. On June 21, 2021, Nauru president Lionel Rouwen Aingimea wrote to ISA saying that the country wants to build back better after being battered by the COVID-19 pademic. Maintaining that deep sea mining will allow global transition towards clean energy, Aingimea has said the country will start operations by 2023. The letter also stated that “Nauru supports the efforts of large economies like the United States and the European Union to massively overhaul and decarbonise their energy and transportation system” With Nauru’s fast-approaching deadline, is a does not have enough time to frame regulations that protect the marine environment from the potential harmful effects of seabedmining activities. After all, this is one of its mandates. The climate crisis is often cited as a reason to mine the oceans. The push to adopt renewable energy has created a demand for copper, nickel, aluminum, manganese, zinc, lithium and cobalt. Adding to this rush are plummeting deposits of these metals on land. India formally joined the race on June 16, 2022, when the country approved the “Deep Ocean Mission” to explore the deep ocean for resources and develop deep-sea technologies for sustainable use of ocean resources. The mission is expected to cost Rs. 4,077 crore. India plans to create an integrated mining system to extract polymetallic nodules from 6,000 m depth in the central Indian Ocean. The exploration studies of minerals will pave the way for commercial exploitation in the near future, according to the government ISA has allocated India 75,000 sq km for mining polymetallic nodules. The estimated resource potential of the nodules is 380 million tonnes, containing 4.7 million tonnes of nickel, 4.29 million tonnes of copper, 0.55 million tonnes of cobalt and 92.59 million tonnes of manganese. The National Institute of Ocean Technology in Chennai has developed Varaha, a self-propelled seabed mining machine to collect polymetallic nodules. It is tasked with collecting and pumping nodules from depths of up to 6,000 m Mining has the potential to disturb the fine ecological balance underwater. In deepsea mining, a ship would unload a collector vehicle into the sea, which would then travel down to the seabed. Once at the site, it would scrape off the top 10 cm of the seabed at multiple [pg. 35] locations. After picking up the nodules, the collector vehicle will pump the ore to the ship through a pipe. Once the ore reaches the surface, sediments are further removed from the nodule, and the waste is discarded into the oceans. “If the seabed is soft, it will generate a lot of clay into the system, and it will affect the biota, including microorganisms,” says Nayak. The clouds could stay suspended for several years and can be carried hundreds of km away by ocean currents. Mining will also generate noise at the seabed, particularly by grinding the hard sulphides or crusts. This could disturb communication among marine organisms, which use sounds to find food and mate. There is also a risk that the operation will introduce metals into the water column, making the water column toxic. A single polymetallic-nodule mining operation, the most promising technologies for seabed mining, could release 50,000 cubic metres of sediment, broken mineral fines, and seawater per day. A hydrothermal vent operation could discharge 22,000 to 38,000 cubic metres of sediment per day. These discharges could circulate in the ocean continuously for up to 30 years, researchers warn in a 2020 PNAS study. In a 2022 review study published in the journal Marine Policy, deep-sea experts from multiple institutions emphatically say that the world should steer away from deep-sea mining till such time as it knows if and how well deep ocean species can adapt to the changes. Political leaders and the industry, clearly, are moving in the opposite direction. This would only take the world closer to a situation similar to the Permian extinction.