This year, India witnessed many intense extreme weather events — cyclones, floods and heatwaves — that upended lives and destroyed food systems. These, along with the erratic weather patterns, came as a sign of how the world is hurtling towards a point of no return in terms of climate change.
The cataclysms not only harm human lives and livelihoods, they also deal a deadly blow on every other natural ecosystems; the flora, fauna and their habitats are reeling from the severe wounds inflicted by disasters made frequent and more intense by anthropogenic global warming.
Alongide, the country and the world saw emergence of new health threats and antimicrobial resistance grew as a challenge due to unscientific methods widespread in medical settings.
India and other developing countries also struggle with the dual and often conflicting ambitions of economic growth and climate mitigation. Some development projects in the country, such as the Great Nicobar Project, raised concerns regarding their impact on biodiversity and indigenous communities. These highlighted the need for adopting sustainable development pathways.
But, as the experts have pointed out in conversations to Down To Earth through 2024, there are solutions. By understanding the natural systems and meteorological functions, and by adapting sustainable practices, the damages can be reduced.
Researchers on health, biodiversity, natural disasters and agriculture give us an outline as to how India can minimise climate impact and achieve its Sustainable Development Goals.
A common thread that emerged is the need to spread awareness about these issues and stimulate the environmental consciousness of the mass. This is where the role of art and mass media come into play. Language, music, poetry, films and the various artfoms play a crucial role in our fight to save planet Earth. Anthropologists and "artivists" DTE writers spoke to illuminated the evolution of this role through history and its importance at present.
We also gained deeper knowledge on the areas of science governing the solutions. Scientists helped us decode latest advancements in genetics, space technology and other fields that underpin climate action and adaptation.
Here is a collection of our interviews from this year:
Extreme weather events will also likely spike as the global climate emergency continues. What will be the WMO strategy in the face of this crsis? Former WMO Deputy Secretary General Elena Manaenkova talked to us about the current global climate, extreme weather and water.
The concept of sustainable development emerged from the Brundtland Commission (1984-87) to bridge environmental and developmental concerns. Championed by economist Nitin Desai, whose role in climate negotiations during the 1980s and 1990s helped propel its prominence, the notion underscores the imperative of meeting present needs while safeguarding the interests of future generations.
But despite its historical roots, sustainable development continues to evolve in global policy discourse, the economist tells DTE.
There have been speculation that bird flu can snowball into a pandemic. Bird flu expert Suresh Kuchipudi explained the tendencies of the virus and the threats that it poses for our readers.
Karthik Raman, professor; Pratyay Sengupta, scholar under Prime Minister’s Research Fellows scheme; and Shobhan Karthick, undergraduate student, Department of Biotechnology, Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, authored a study on microbes in space and strategies used by them for survival.
They said that evolutionary pressure exerted by space conditions drives microbes to develop new strategies for survival and potentially increases their pathogenicity.
There isn't enough evidence that the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme is going to reduce incidence of tuberculosis (TB). It is more of an intervention, a research implementation study, says Soumya Swaminathan, former chief scientist of the World Health Organization and principal advisor for the programme.
She also addressed safety concerns regarding the Bacille Calmette-Guerin vaccine and other strategies that can be prioritised to containTB.
Environmentalists have decried the Great Nicobar project as ecocidal and genocidal for the island and its inhabitants ever since the government of India envisioned it in 2021.
Great Nicobar is home to tribes like the Nicobarese and the Shompen, the latter being a particularly vulnerable tribal group, which have special needs and rights.
The arrival of people from outside could expose these tribes to cultures and diseases against which they have no defence, author Pankaj Sekhsaria, curator of The Great Nicobar Betrayal, a collection of articles on the Great Nicobar Project published by media outlets, told Down To Earth.
The 30x30 Target of the Biodiversity Plan, earlier known as the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, is ambitious as it mandates that at least 30 per cent of land and sea be protected by 2030. The world currently has protected only 17.29 per cent of land and 8.17 per cent of marine areas.
Rita Maria El Zaghloul, director of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People, talked about the progress since COP15 held in 2022.
At a time when abundant luminosity is synonymous with economic progress, a growing body of scientific research links excessive artificial lights to ecological chaos and illnesses among humans.
Shanthakumar Wilson Rajaratnam, professor of sleep and circadian medicine at Monash University in Australia, spoke to us on the impact of light pollution on the circadian rhythm of species and how it makes them more susceptible to diseases.
Scientists from the US, India and Finland have found that Indians derive 1-2 per cent of genes from humans’ archaic relatives, the Neanderthals and the Denisovans. These findings could provide clues to humans’ inherited dispositions, particularly in terms of health, said co-author Priya Moorjani, assistant professor in the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology, University of California, Berkeley, in an interview with DTE.
In 2024, India was shaken by devastating floods such as the one in Wayanad, Kerala in July. Aaron Opdyke from the School of Civil Engineering, University of Sydney in Australia talked about housing and rehabilitation in landslide-prone areas.
With the arrival of television, followed by the internet, a plethora of cookery shows have exploded in our drawing rooms. Most are anchored by those with elite, upper caste backgrounds. The recipes, too, are most often from groups belonging to the upper echelons of society.
Shahu Patole from Maharashtra’s Marathwada region, however, was an outlier. He was keen to highlight the cuisines of India’s subaltern sections — its Dalits and Adivasis — which led him to write Dalit Kitchens of Marathwada.
He spoke to us on the little-known food practices of Maharashtra’s Dalit communities.
The struggles of people travelling to other states to find daily-wage work are mostly documented for how they build a life in an alien land with very little means and away from the support system of their families. But in fact, their hardship begins even before they land in the destination city — during their journey.
The one time their journey did make headlines was when they were left with no option but to walk miles across the country to return to their hometown amid a nationwide lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Ishita Dey, a food anthropologist and assistant professor of sociology with the South Asian University, Delhi studied the internal migration of informal sector workers, travelling with them to observe the arrangements they have to make in trains that are just not designed for their needs.
In her interaction with us, she talked about discrimination and intolerance in such situations and how people's disparate relationship with food expose the country's gastropolitics.
There is very little chance that natural languages created by humans in past eras will continue to exist in their current form, scholar and linguist Ganesh Narayan Devy told us in an interview.
His new book India: a linguistic civilisation looks into the about the multiple linguistic realities of India as a nation. In the conversation with us, he also talks about the future of language.
The instruments that we have used for centuries, take inspiration from sounds in Nature. Many are manufactured using natural materials which are now in danger due to the climate change around us.
Historian and ethnomusicologist Radha Kapuria talked to us about the association between nature and sound. Her first book published last year, Music in Colonial Punjab: Courtesans, Bards, and Connoisseurs, 1800-1947, is the first social history of musical life in undivided Punjab.
The idea of the ecology and environment needs to be a bit more wide-ranging and all-embracing, she told us.
One of the many folk-art forms of South Asia is Kobigaan from the Bengal region, now divided into West Bengal and Bangladesh.
It first found mention in British-ruled Bengal in the 1800s. What makes it unique (although regional variations are found across the subcontinent) is its dialogical nature, incorporating a number of elements.
Priyanka Basu, lecturer in Performing Arts at Kings College London, talked to us about her book on the changes the artform has undergone over the years and the current challenges it faces. She also explored questions related to agency as well as identities of caste, class, religion, ethnicity and gender.
Ramachandra Guha is among India’s foremost historians and environmentalists. In a discussion with DTE regarding his new book Speaking with Nature: The Origins of Indian Environmentalism, he was biting in his critique of governments’ lack of concern for environmental issues in India.
He also spoke about the recent disasters at the opposite ends of the country — in the Himalayas and the Western Ghats and whether India can ever have a mainstream Green Party.