India has captured the world’s sympathy as it faces a devastating COVID-19 surge, but beneath that acute crisis lies another slow-burning threat that could be more destructive in the long run: environmental degradation.
Set to become the most populous country in the world by 2014, India faces the lingering challenge of bringing hundreds of millions more out of poverty while somehow tackling climate change and reducing pollution.
The size of this herculean task means no single stakeholder — whether the government or nonprofits or companies — can address it alone, experts said during a Georgia Indo-American Chamber of Commerce discussion on the “Business Case for Nature.”
“We cannot do it unless we partner with business. We have to find market-based solutions,” said Priya Shyamsundar, lead economist at The Nature Conservancy. “We need the state, we need public financing, but we definitely will not be able to get where we want to go without the business sector’s involvement.”
Ms. Shyamsundar said her organization has been working on reducing the physical footprint of renewable-energy installations — solar is the cheapest form of new energy and is a key aspect of India’s clean growth plan, but utility-scale installations also occupy a good bit of scarce land. Rooftop and other installations will help conserve natural forests and other lands as power demand triples by 2040.
The Nature Conservancy is also working to tackle the ever-present air pollution that plagues the Indian capital, Delhi, creating its own public health crisis. Some calculations put the death toll attributable to air pollution at nearly 1.7 million in 2019 alone. By comparison, the government says 200,000 have died of COVID-19 during a pandemic year.
“Reducing air pollution is not a luxury,” Ms. Shyamsundar told the attendees. “It handicaps foreign direct investment; it makes India unattractive for people like you and me and people who want to do business in India.”
Ms. Shyamsundar said much of the problem stems from farmers in the India’s breadbasket — the northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana — spend two weeks burning their fields in order transition their fields from rice to wheat each fall. The conservancy is introducing a tractor-pulled Happy Seeder machine that allows them to sow wheat directly into the soil without burning the straw from the rice harvest. The conservancy and its partners hope to have a quarter-million hectares of farmland transitioned to the new technology over the next few years. Always sensitive, farmer incomes have become an especially hot topic recently as extensive protests over planned agricultural reforms rocked Delhi and other major Indian cities for months.
Major U.S. and Indian company representatives on the call echoed The Nature Conservancy’s all-hands-on-deck appeal, in India and beyond.
Paul Fleming, co-founder of the Water Resilience Coalition and Global Water Program lead at Microsoft, said tech giant’s India-born CEO, Satya Nadella, is putting a new emphasis not just on profit, but also people and the planet.
“In order for Microsoft to do well, we need the world to do well,” Mr. Fleming paraphrased the CEO as saying.
Microsoft has committed to becoming “water-positive” by 2030, meaning that it will return more water back to the environment than it consumes by recycling, conserving, harvesting, reusing and treating water across its operations. It also aims to improve access to water for 1.5 million people in seven countries where it works, partnering with NGOs affiliated with the nonprofit Water.org.
In India, Microsoft will re-treat 100 percent of the water at its new campus in Hyderabad (Mr. Nadella’s hometown) and repurpose it for landscaping, flushing and cooling tower use. In Chennai, it’s partnering with the Nature Conservancy to improve wetlands around Lake Sembakkam. One aspect of the plan requires removing sediment from oxbows, stream sections that have been cut off from their main waterways. When restored, they can store excess water during flood events — relatively common in Chennai — and act as a filter for excess nutrients.
Wipro Ltd., the Indian software giant that employs 200,000 mostly young engineers across the country, has come to terms with the fact that risks to environment are business risks and must be part of firms’ contingency plans.
“If there are negative impacts on nature, there are negative impacts on business. There may be a time lag, but the core relations between the two are very clear,” said P.S. Narayan, global head of sustainability and social initiatives for Wipro, which operates an Atlanta development center.
Having a forward-thinking strategy on this front has also been key to recruiting climate-conscious younger employees, who are more “clued in” to how their companies are helping address global challenges, he said.
“They’re increasingly aware that the company of the future, it has to attract the right talent. It must appeal to their sensibilities about the environment and about society,” said Mr. Narayan.
View the full webinar below: