‘Our ATR-72 broke through the thick smog at about 3,000m after takeoff from Kathmandu. An ocean of grey-brown pollution blanketed the Tarai, and stretched right across to the southern horizon. Out of the right-hand window, the Annapurnas rose above the carpet of smog, with Mt Machapuchre appearing like a black pyramid devoid of snow.’ That paragraph is from my column in this paper from January 2019.
Even until February 2020, we believed it would take a miracle to get rid of the appalling pollution that blanketed the Indo-Gangetic plains. But it happened. NASA released satellite data from March 2017, 2019 and compared them to those in March 2020. The NO2 concentration over Lahore, New Delhi, Karachi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Dhaka had reduced by between 28-56% on average.
After Nepal went into lockdown in March, Kathmandu’s air cleared dramatically. This newspaper printed pictures of Mt Everest visible from Kathmandu Valley, residents in Jalandhar in the Punjab plains saw the Dhauladhar range of Himachal Pradesh, and Kangchenjunga was visible from Siliguri.
This week, a sudden change in wind direction swept away thick smoke from crop residue burning and other industrial and vehicular pollution that had enveloped the Ganga plains most of October. It was like a Dasain from 50 years ago, with crystal clear skies and one end of Nepal visible from the other. The Nepali social web was full of photos of Mt Makalu visible from Rajbiraj, of Mt Manaslu from Nawalparasi, and Mt Everest from Kirtipur.
However, the lower concentration of particulate matter and pollutant gases in the air were not outcomes of effective implementation of environment-friendly public policy or innovation. Nor were they a result of voluntary changes in societal behaviour. They came about because of social containment measures to stem the spread of the novel coronavirus.
Strict lockdowns forced vehicles off the roads for months, industries and the service sector shut down, reducing sources of most pollution. But this came at enormous cost as economies were brought to their knees. Millions of jobs and livelihoods across South Asia were lost. Migrant labourers, domestic helpers, cleaners, drivers, guards, in construction and factories, crop harvesting, brick kilns – all trudged back to their villages in the biggest movement of people in the Subcontinent since Partition in 1947.
Over the past decades, our countries have invested billions on social safety nets, in food security, safe drinking water supply, primary health care. Yet, at a time of greatest need, those most affected by the emergency had no access to food, water, medical care.
The plight of migrants during the pandemic reflect a deeply divided socio-political landscape and failure of governance.
It is a warning that we must transit to more frugal ways of living, minimising our environmental footprints, and engendering both structural and behavioral changes for a greener, healthier, and more inclusive future.
Before the lockdown, pollution levels exceeded permissible levels, and mitigation received only lip service. There was a stark dichotomy between public concern about the health impact of pollution and state intervention to address it. The main reasons were procedural lapses, inadequate regulation and poor policy implementation. In short, the failure of politics to improve governance. The crisis has shown that there must be more accountability.
Increased investments in clean energy sources guided by creation of new jobs, mitigation of air pollution and balancing the natural ecosystem should be cornerstones of the new order. Action to stem air pollution will not just remove a persistent urban hazard, but also reduce the spread of Covid-19 into the future. Studies have shown that dirty airworsens pre-existing medical conditions, and can also elevate coronavirus risk.
The good news is that the sources of air pollution are broadly known: vehicular and aircraft emissions, dust from roads, excavation, debris of demolished buildings, construction sites, brick kilns, setting fire to crop residue burning, open burning of plastic and solid waste, inefficient hospital incinerators, industries, crushers and mixers, asphalt plants and metal and automobile repair units, poor fuel quality and shoddy pollution test of vehicles.
Each can and must be tackled systematically at source. Honest efforts are needed to overcome procedural lapses, make regulation effective, and enforce compliance to policies. In 2018, long before the pandemic hit, the mayors of Katmandu Valley got together to express a collective commitment to curtail air pollution.
They had just been elected, and were responding to public opinion pressure about unhealthy air. Not much came of it because of the lack of inter-agency coordination and little central and provincial government support. Local governments must get households, citizen groups and researchers involved in mitigation, joint learning and in policy innovations.
This needs to happen not just in Kathmandu Valley, but across Nepal and the Indo-Gangetic plains. As we have seen with Mexico City, the air will not be cleaned overnight, it will take decades to remove the sources of pollution one by one. But the pandemic lockdowns have shown us it can be done, we just have to find a way to do it without the socio-economic cost.
The benefits will be enormous – for public health of hundreds of millions of people, reduction of the region’s huge carbon footprint, and even in slowing down the melting of Himalayan glaciers because of the deposition of soot particles.
Many years from now, when Covid-19 becomes just another flu and these mitigation efforts start yielding results, looking out of an aircraft window on a winter morning flight westbound from Kathmandu, we may finally be able to see the Ganga plains and the foothills of the Annapurnas from the air, just like we did during the lockdowns.
Ajaya Dixit is research adviser at the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET-Nepal) and contributes this column Climate for Change for Nepali Times.
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