11 percent drop in green crimes, says NCRB
The National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) released their annual report on crimes in India on August 30, 2016. The report, pertaining to 2015 data, brought out statistics on green crimes and provided satisfying data for India as compared to the data released in 2014 – NCRB’s first report on green crimes. Environmental crimes in India shows an eleven per cent drop between the two time periods.
Laws under which violators are booked are Forest Act, 1927, Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, Environmental (Protection) Act, 1986, Air (Prevention & Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 and Water (Prevention & Control of Pollution) Act, 1974.
The statistics entirely rely on crimes reported and recorded under five laws. This does not mean that violations have not occurred in the first place. Therefore there is a limitation in stating that crimes have gone down. More importantly whiles rates of environmental crimes and violations are critical to record, they have to be understood along with impacts. A legal violation related to environment or related people’s livelihoods has long lasting and often irreversible impacts which have to be taken into account.
According to the report, the number of green crimes in 2015 came down to 5,156 from 5,835 in 2014. Rajasthan contributed in large measure to the decrease with the number of green violations coming down substantially from 2,927 in 2014 to 2,074 last year.
In contrast, the number of green crimes in Uttar Pradesh increased from 1,597 in 2014 to 1,779 in the same year.
Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh together accounted for nearly 74 per cent of such crimes in the country last year.
Analysis of the NCRB data showed that nearly 77 per cent of the crimes were related to violations of the Indian Forest Act where the offenders were booked for illegally cutting trees in forest areas, encroaching upon forest land and moving forest produce without required permission.
The number of green crimes also increased in Jharkhand from 148 in 2014 to 233 last year. Similarly, it increased in Assam from 83 to 105 and in Uttarakhand from 40 to 55.
Meghalaya, Nagaland, Sikkim and Tripura are the only states which have no reported green crime in both the years.
Governmental initiatives on climate change
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) in its Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report published in 2015 states that increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions together with other anthropogenic drivers such as aerosols, land cover and solar radiation are extremely likely to have been the dominant cause of the observed warming since mid-20th century.
To cater to this the Indian government launched National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) in 2008, which outlines India’s strategy to meet the challenge of Climate Change.
Two of the eight National Missions, i.e., National Solar Mission and National Mission on Enhanced Energy Efficiency relate to mitigation of emissions and include ambitious programmes aimed at generating solar power and conserving energy. Energy Efficiency mission envisages setting norms for achieving energy efficiency with perform, achieve and trade scheme. Further, public and private sector entities participate in the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol, which helps in reducing emissions.
These initiatives have the effect of reducing carbon emissions. In addition, the government has initiated a range of policies and programmes to respond to the challenge of climate change. Some of them are:-
a) More than five times increase in renewable capacity from 35 GW (upto March 2015) to 175 GW by 2022.
b) National Solar Mission scaled up five-fold from 20 GW to 100 GW by 2022. Kochi Airport is the World’s first airport to fully run on solar power.
c) Solar powered toll plazas envisaged for all toll collection booths across the country.
d) Green energy corridor projects being rolled out to ensure evacuation from renewable energy plants.
e) Nationwide campaign for energy conservation launched with the target to save 10 per cent of current energy consumption by the year 2018-19.
f) Smart Cities Mission to develop new generation cities by building a clean and sustainable environment.
g) Atal Mission for Rejuvenation and Urban Transformation (AMRUT) is a new urban renewal mission for 500 cities across India.
h) ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’ (Clean India Mission) to make country clean and litter free by 2019 and promote waste management.
i) Faster Adoption and Manufacturing of Hybrid & Electric Vehicles (FAME India) to promote faster adoption and manufacturing of hybrid and electric vehicles.
j) Under ethanol blending programme, the government has scaled up blending targets from 5 to 10 per cent to promote blending of ethanol with petrol and its use as an alternative fuel.
k) Leapfrogging to BS-VI emission norms by 1st April 2020.
l) Eight-fold increase of coal cess in a short span of two years.
m) Initiation of project green ports to make major ports cleaner and greener.
FAO charts action plan to combat antimicrobial resistance in food and agriculture
The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations released its Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance on September 14. The release of the plan follows the adoption of a resolution on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) at FAO’s 39th Conference in June 2015 which recognised AMR as a serious threat to both public health and sustainable food production.
The FAO Action Plan aims to provide support to the agriculture and food sectors by focusing on four areas of action:
- Improving awareness of AMR among farmers, producers, veterinarians, policymakers and consumers
- Building surveillance and monitoring systems of antimicrobial resistance and consumption
- Strengthening governance related to antimicrobial use and resistance
- Promoting good practices in food and agricultural systems for hygiene, biosecurity, animal care and handling and the prudent use of antimicrobials
Antimicrobial drugs, specifically antibiotics, play a critical role in the treatment of diseases in farm animals. However, the misuse and overuse of antibiotics in animals accelerates the rise of AMR.
In intensive food-animal production settings, as in poultry, pig and fish farms, antibiotics are routinely used for non-therapeutic purposes such as growth promotion or mass disease prevention. Such rampant use can lead to greater transfer of antibiotic residues and resistant bacteria into humans through food, direct contact and the environment.
The risks from AMR in agriculture are higher in countries where laws, regulations and monitoring systems are less stringent. Except some champion countries within the European Union, the surveillance systems for antimicrobial use and resistance in livestock in many countries are weak and there is not much data available. Despite evidence, the focus on limiting the environmental spread of AMR into farm waste is limited.
Globally, there has been a rise in efforts to address the threat from rising AMR. The Global Action Plan to contain AMR adopted by the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2015 recognises the need to limit AMR in humans and animals.
The WHO-OIE (World Organisation for Animal Health)-FAO collaboration is addressing AMR across multiple sectors. A high-level meeting on AMR is scheduled for September 21 in New York at the UN General Assembly with the objective of garnering strong global political commitment on the issue.
The FAO Action Plan is timely and draws attention towards the terrestrial, aquatic animal and agriculture sectors. However, the plan is broad and does not detail specific steps which should be taken by developed as well as developing countries to reduce antibiotic use in food and agriculture. It largely focuses on extending assistance and support to countries or regional organisations to help them combat AMR.
India has slowly begun to recognise and address the problem of antibiotic resistance. In his monthly radio programme, Mann ki Baat, on July 31, Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, “The government is committed to stopping antibiotic resistance.” He asked citizens to take antibiotics only when prescribed by doctors. But Indian efforts must now go beyond limiting antibiotic use in humans and focus on antibiotic misuse in animals.
Non-therapeutic antibiotic use in animals, unrestricted use of human grade antibiotics in animals, easy over-the-counter availability of antibiotics, lack of monitoring of antibiotic resistance or use in animal farms or their passage into the environment are important areas of concern.
Experts warn of ‘do or die’ situation for many animals ahead of CITES meet
Pangolins are the most trafficked wild mammal, with all eight species threatened with extinction due to poaching mainly for their scales used in traditional medicine.
Humane Society International (HSI) wildlife experts warn that decisions taken at the CITES international wildlife trade meeting can be “do or die” for some of the world’s most iconic and threatened species such as the African elephant, rhinoceros and pangolin.
HSI is a global body that addresses illegal trade in wildlife among other issues.
India is one of the oldest parties to have signed the CITES convention. For CITES CoP 17, the Government of India has submitted a proposal for the up listing of Indian pangolins to Appendix 1 of CITES. It has also co-proposed the inclusion of nautilus species in Appendix 2, along with Fiji and USA.
Support has been expressed for the greater protection of Sunda pangolin, Chinese pangolin, thresher and silky sharks. The Chinese and Indian pangolins as well as nautilus are listed on India’s Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, but populations of all these animals are threatened.
With so many of our wild animal and plant species facing serious threats from rapacious poaching and commercial trade, this CITES meeting represents a “do or die” moment for iconic animals such as elephants, rhinos, lions, and pangolins.
The meeting will run from September 24 to October 5, 2016. Key proposals to be discussed include:
- Increased protection for African elephants: despite the major poaching crisis facing African elephants, Zimbabwe and Namibia are proposing to legalise their ivory trade while others are seeking approval for a mechanism to trade ivory in future. Their proposals are opposed by the 29-country-strong African Elephant Coalition, representing 70 per cent of African elephant range states, which is advocating a return to full Appendix I protection for all African elephant populations, closure of domestic ivory markets and an end to any discussion on re-opening ivory trade in future
- Swaziland’s proposal to legalise international rhino horn trade (from its southern white rhinos): only about 25,600 rhinos of five species exist today, and all rhino species, are threatened by poaching. HSI hopes to see this proposal defeated, as it could undermine worldwide efforts to eliminate demand for rhino horn
- Increased protection for African lions by transferring them from Appendix 2 to Appendix 1: there may be as few as 20,000 wild lions left in Africa. International trade in lion parts, particularly lion bones, is growing, incentivising the poaching of tigers and other big cat species. HSI supports this proposal, but a number of countries, including the European Union bloc, currently oppose it as written
- Transfer of all eight species of pangolins from Appendix 2 to Appendix 1: pangolins are the most trafficked wild mammal, with all eight species threatened with extinction due to poaching mainly for their scales used in traditional medicine. China, the main consumer of pangolin, is expected to oppose the proposal
- Listing the silky shark, thresher sharks and devil rays on CITES Appendix 2: silky and thresher sharks are threatened by commercial trade in their fins, used in shark fin soup in Asia, and devil rays by trade in their gill plates, used in health tonics in Asia
- Listing chambered nautiluses on CITES Appendix 2: these unusual marine invertebrates are being overfished for their beautiful shells for decorative purposes
- Providing increased international protection for the helmeted hornbill: Poaching for the “ivory” in its bill is threatening to wipe out Asia’s largest hornbill, already listed on Appendix 1
BBIN Road Initiative Takes Off As India Approves $1 Billion Transnational Connectivity Project
To increase inter-regional trade and ease passenger and cargo movement, the Government of India recently approved a $1 billion project to construct and upgrade nearly 558 km of roads. It will provide connectivity to Bangladesh, Nepal and Bhutan.
The Ministry of Finance has given its nod to the project, and the Asian Development Bank (ADB) will be funding around 50 percent of it. For now, the Indian side will include roads in Manipur and West Bengal.
Apart from this billion-dollar project, a 100 km long road will also come up along the Imphal-Moreh corridor.
This development follows a landmark agreement signed by the four nations, namely India, Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal, in 2015 to promote easy movement between their respective territories to aid in trade and tourism.
Recent Posts
The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.