Delhi suffocates in smog after lockdown gave city a breather
INDIA’S capital city i s once again swathed in smog after respite earlier in the year due to Covid-19 restrictions.
Air in New Delhi was the worst it had been since February this week as pollution levels rose above 300 – classed as “very poor” on the air quality index.
During the Covid-19 lockdown earlier this year, reduced activity led to unusually clean air, prompting locals to call on the government to do more to tackle the city’s persistent smog problem.
In winter, the city experiences especially poor air caused by traffic, the burning of farming waste and industrial pollution. Last year, New Delhi and its satellite cities made up half of the 12 most polluted cities in the world.
In April, pollution in northern India reached a 20-year low, Nasa scientists said. Analysis from the World Bank found that, while lockdown had contributed to lower levels of pollution, a broad longer-term trend was also leading to an overall decline in the number of days where air pollution reached unacceptably high levels.
On Tuesday Safar, India’s primary environment monitoring agency, said the poor conditions would persist for up to two days. “Wind speed was supposed to pick up due to a deep depression in the Bay of Bengal but that did not happen,” it said.
It came as a study published in the journal Nature found that pollution levels fell across the world earlier this year as travel and industry ground to a halt.
Global carbon dioxide emissions fell by almost nine per cent during the first half of this year compared to the same period in 2019, a trend driven by a reduction in road and air travel.
The percentage fall was greater than that seen during any previous global downturn, or the Second World War, the authors said, though numbers quickly began to return to normal as countries reopened near the end of June.
In China, emissions in May were 5.4 per cent higher than in the same month in 2019. A more persistent decline was seen in the United States, which has experienced a consistently high incidence of Covid-19 since the first serious outbreaks occurred in March.
“If the pandemic remains under control in the next f ew months, the decrease of annual emissions will be considerably less than during the first half of the year,” the paper said.
Scientists warned that this was a relatively modest reduction in carbon dioxide emissions compared to the catastrophic global economic impact.
“This means that the long-term emissions decreases needed in this century to achieve low warming targets must be based on structural and transformational changes in energy production systems, decarbonisation of transportation and improved building energy-use efficiency, that is an improvement of the carbon intensity of economies rather than decreases of human activities.”