A deep breadth
From the People, Planet, Profits & Projects Blog
by Richard Maltzman,
Dave Shirley
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Dave Shirley
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Date
Do me a favor. Read this brief paragraph (below in yellow highlighting) and then stop and take a deep, deep breath. A breath of probably much cleaner air than many, many other people are taking.
The World Health Organization (WHO) compiled a list of the 1600 cities with the worst air quality in the world. India as a whole is home to 11 of the top 20 cities on the planet with the worst air quality. The worst U.S. city was Fresno, California, which came 162nd on the list.
(Compiled by the World Health Organization, which collected pollution levels from these cities between 2008 to 2013.)
Most of us have come to associate “poor air quality” with Beijing. It is indeed bad there. But New Delhi (for example) is much worse. The worst US city is number 162 on the list of 1600 metro areas and India has 11 of the top 20? Wow!
NPR just published an excellent article about this topic, and another quite striking fact is this: President Obama, who visited New Delhi for 3 days recently, is estimated to have lost 6 hours off of his lifespan based only on breathing the air from New Delhi on the visit. Wow again!
The problem of air pollution is the immediate, visible outcome of unsustainable growth. The real problem is actually much more insidious. Quoting from the article:
The impacts of climate change would hit people in India harder than almost anywhere else in the world, making it more vulnerable to flooding and drought. "Tropical cyclones are likely to become more intense. We're also seeing that climate change is going to have an impact on the monsoon," says Richard Hewston of the global risk assessment firm Verisk Maplecroft.
His company looked at which countries around the world are most vulnerable to storms, flooding and other acts of nature. India is already at the top of the list, first in the world. Two of its biggest cities, New Delhi and Kolkata, with a combined population of more than 14 million, are on the top 10 list of global cities most vulnerable to natural hazards.
What’s happening in India is important – even critical – not just for India, but for the world. What India is able to accomplish in terms of new projects to promote and develop clean energy and to limit climate change will say a lot about what the rest of the world can do. They have set high targets in these areas, and in many ways will lead the world in implementing sustainable development en masse. Again, quoting from the article:
In the filtered, cooled air of the U.S. Embassy in New Delhi, Ambassador Richard Verma tells me he thinks India is poised to take the lead on clean energy and climate change. Already, it has set an ambitious target of 100 gigawatts of solar energy by 2022, which would be a faster buildup than any country has managed.
“There’s no other country on the planet that has set the kind of renewable targets and goals that India has. So I think the way to get there is a challenge, but India, I think, is really going to be a trailblazer in this whole area,” he says.
The challenge for India is how to manage the tension between development and climate change. What happens next here could have a huge impact on the world and has the potential to write a new story on how developing countries enter the 21st century — including whether the world can alter the course on climate change or not.
It’s worth having a look at some of these goals and objectives. Click here for a 30-ish page report which summarizes them.
Why is this covered in a project management blog? A few reasons. First, we can see some of the effects of climate change – or at least air pollution – on a population. We can see that a government appears to be taking the threat seriously and is responding to the threat with a detailed, significant plan that launches all sorts of projects and programs. If nothing else, these will employ thousands, perhaps tens or hundreds of thousands of project managers, to turn these ideas into reality. Agree or not with the concept of climate change, whether to you it is fiction or reality is actually of no import. What you can read from this is that there will be real project work for real project managers. We’d assert that this is good, just work that must be done.
So the topic is wider than you may think. It has - for lack of a better expression- deep breadth.
For a recent news story on this topic, click here.
Photo Credit: Gajendar Nadav, Financial Express
Posted
by
Richard Maltzman
on: May 15, 2016 09:37 PM |
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Comments (1)
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 | Anonymous |
Correction, their might be some other cities in India that might be prone to natural hazards, but in my whole life time (30+) I haven't see any catastrophic hazards in these 2 cities. So may be the author of that book should also have looked restropectively :-)
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