DeBriefed 28 June 2024: Global floods; Heat deaths uncertainty; India’s climate protest music

Aruna Chandrasekhar

Welcome to Carbon Brief’s DeBriefed.
An essential guide to the week’s key developments relating to climate change.

§ This week

Record floods across the globe

IVORY COAST: Floods and landslides killed at least 24 people in Ivory Coast’s largest city of Abidjan after a week of heavy rains that was “four times the usual volume in some cases”, the Associated Press reported. The newswire added that the city’s disadvantaged communities are “particularly vulnerable” because of poor storm drainage in informal settlements.

CHINA ‘SWAMPED’: Landslides killed eight people in their homes in southern China’s Hunan province, said the South China Morning Post, with Taoyuan county receiving 39.5cm of rain in a day. Record rains “swamped” Hunan’s capital of Changsha, “turning roads into rivers and submerging subway tunnels”, Reuters wrote. By Monday, 33 rivers had “exceeded warning levels”, Xinhua reported. Associated Press also reported that flooding killed two people in the “deluged” US midwest.

BANGLADESH INUNDATED: Widespread flooding has stranded nearly two million people in north-east Bangladesh, CNN reported. It added that “large swathes” of Sylhet and Sunamganj provinces were underwater after a second wave of flooding hit the region in less than a month, with 772,000 children “in urgent need of assistance”. Camps in Cox’s Bazaar that accommodate “almost [one million] documented [Rohingya] refugees have been overrun by the incoming floodwaters”, Down to Earth reported, with at least 10 Rohingya fatalities out of the total 31 deaths in the Bangladesh floods this year.

Heat deaths: tolls apart

PAKISTAN’S FATAL HEAT: Doctors in Karachi “treated thousands of victims of heatstroke at various hospitals” after a “days-long heatwave” scorched southern Pakistan, the Associated Press reported. While local media reported that the heatwave “killed more than two dozen people” in Karachi alone, AP added that “no government spokesman was available to confirm the number of heatstroke-related deaths”. However, the Edhi ambulance service told BBC News it had taken around 568 people’s bodies to the Karachi city morgue in Pakistan over the past six days – up from its usual rate of 30-40 bodies a day.

‘TOLLS APART’: In neighbouring India, the country’s health ministry said 143 people across the country had died of heatstroke from the start of summer until 20 June, far lower than 209 confirmed and 448 suspected deaths tallied by Times of India. Meanwhile, a non-profit report estimated that “192 homeless individuals died from the heat in just nine days” in the national capital region alone, experts in India Development Review Online wrote, “highlighting the significant underreporting of heat-related deaths” in the country.

CULPABLE HEAT: In the US, the Boston Globe reported that New England experienced the “highest rate of heat-related emergency department visits” in the country, with temperatures in the region crossing 32C. Meanwhile, prosecutors in Arizona could “reasonably press homicide charges against big oil” for heat deaths in the state last year, the Guardian reported. Finally, Reuters wrote that the “sweltering summer” is worsening conditions in Gaza, where “nearly all the 2.3 million inhabitants have been driven from their homes by Israel’s military campaign” with almost no access to electricity and little clean water.

§ Around the world

  • COW TAX: Denmark is set to introduce the world’s first carbon tax on agriculture after a historic agreement on Monday, Politico reported. Farmers will be charged “almost €100 a year” per cow once the levy rolls out in 2030, Financial Times said.
  • PARLEY VOUS: In a “new and surprising” move, South China Morning Post reported that China agreed to talks with the EU over its plans to raise tariffs on electric vehicle imports by 48%. 
  • MAI KUHIHEWA: Youth in the US state of Hawaii who sued transport authorities for their use of fossil fuels reached a “first-of-its-kind” settlement that recognised their “constitutional rights to a life-sustaining climate”, Teen Vogue reported.
  • OILSTRUCK: Financial Times reported on ExxonMobil’s development of “one of the largest offshore oil developments in history” and what it could mean for Guyana.
  • BP U-TURN: Oil and gas giant BP has imposed a hiring freeze and paused new offshore wind projects to place a greater emphasis on oil and gas rather than renewables amid investor discontent, sources at the company told Reuters.
  • PIPELINE PROTESTS: 37 activists in Uganda were arrested for protesting the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP), calling on China to “reject financial support” to the project, All Africa reported.

§ £116bn  £30bn  £2.8tn

Some of the “scary-sounding” numbers being used to mislead the public about the “cost” of net-zero in the UK general-election campaign. Carbon Brief’s Dr Simon Evans has factchecked them.

§ Latest climate research

  • A new study in Nature Ecology and Evolution found that Earth’s most extreme wildfires increased 2.2-fold in the past 20 years, with the last seven years seeing the six most extreme fires on record.
  • According to new research in Nature Climate Change, a 1C rise in average temperatures would mean four extra minutes every day spent collecting water for women. By 2050, women could spend 30% and 100% more time – globally and regionally – collecting water, “undermining” their welfare.
  • New research on grounding zones – where ice transitions from land to water – suggests that sea-level rise projections could be substantially underestimated, according to a Carbon Brief guest post.

(For more, see Carbon Brief’s in-depth daily summaries of the top climate news stories on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.)

§ Captured

Image - UK governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have missed their tree-planting targets set in 2020 and failed to plant an area of forest nearly the size of Birmingham. (note)

New Carbon Brief analysis found that UK governments in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have missed their tree-planting targets set in 2020 and failed to plant an area of forest nearly the size of Birmingham. Tree-planting is a “significant” part of the UK’s net-zero strategy to compensate for other polluting sectors. By 2050, the unplanted trees would have removed some 8.5m tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, roughly 2% of the UK’s annual emissions in 2023. This shortfall will need to be made up for with stronger efforts elsewhere if the UK’s net-zero by 2050 target is to be met.

§ Spotlight

Monsoon mixtape

As the UK gears up for Glastonbury, Carbon Brief interviews pioneering Indian hip-hop and folk artists about protest music and the role of artists in an era of climate change. 

When Carbon Brief spoke to the Marathi-language rapper MC Mawali from the hip-hop collective Swadesi, Mumbai was under an orange alert for extremely heavy rains, after stalling for most of the month. 

The monsoon has changed along with the mega-city most defined by it. Massive infrastructure projects have cost the island city its flood buffers, including the much-diminished Aarey forest, home to the Indigenous Warli tribe and the only urban leopard population in the world.

In 2019, Mawali, along with fellow Swadesi rappers and Warli bard Prakash Bhoir, gave Mumbai’s #SaveAarey movement its protest anthem, The Warli Revolt – its chorus warning of a dystopian climate future to come.

“I used to go to Aarey to swim in the Vihar lake as a kid, but I didn’t know about [Warli] culture, their instruments, their songs going extinct that are not on the internet,” said Mawali.

When the chainsaws came for the forest, Mawali says he “felt helpless”, but he’s happy to hear that Warli Revolt has become a go-to anti-deforestation anthem across the country since. He added:

“Today’s music business is about labels pouring in music and splashing their artists all over platforms that censor messages like ours, but, through hip-hop, we’ve learned to hijack that same system to keep folk, tribal and conscious music alive.” 

To anti-caste singer-poet Dhammarakshit Randive from the Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch collective, the word “green” has turned into “its own kind of propaganda” that justifies “ask-no-questions development”, with high displacement of people and a large emissions footprint.

“‘Green’ often becomes propaganda, telling us you can offset 100 trees in a biodiverse forest that Adivasis (Indigenous peoples) depend on by planting another 1,000 somewhere else,” he told Carbon Brief.

Randive sees climate change, anti-caste and “movements to centre democracy” as interlinked, “affecting all our lives, everywhere”. To him, the main role of musicians and artists in responding to climate change is to establish that intersectionality. He told Carbon Brief:

“Otherwise, those fighting for forests are dying unheard in those same forests, sanitation workers are dying in the same sewers, factory workers are dying in the heat and there’s no one to widen peoples’ perspectives to say ‘this is all part of the same struggle’.”

Taru Dalmia, also known as Delhi Sultanate, was among the earliest pioneers to fuse dub and dancehall with protest anthems penned by Indigenous singers, such as Bhagaban Majhi, protesting mining projects in central India. Blood Earth, the album Dalmia made with producer Chris McGuiness, is now 12-years-old, but remains just as relevant. 

“At that time we made it, I felt that there was a kind of hidden violence and not as much discourse about a war-like situation in [mineral-rich Indian states],” said Dalmia, speaking to Carbon Brief. He feels that, since then, “there’s definitely more awareness and politicisation which has to do with how much more repressive things have gotten and [environmental and other] issues staring at us in the face”. 

While hip-hop has “blown up” over the past half-decade, he feels that little has changed as far as mining companies are concerned, since “profit margins remain huge”. Dalmia added: 

“This awareness of how fundamentally our way of life is based on extraction, extractive industries and destruction and how that’s a direct continuation of the colonial project…sure, there’s more politicisation, but the depth of it is still missing.”

While extreme weather has not quite made its way to the airwaves, aside from boilerplate Bollywood songs invoking heat and rain, mercury levels were the subject of one of India’s earliest environmental campaign songs.

Image - Sofia Ashraf stars in a music video for Kodaikanal Won’t in 2015. Credit: Jhatkaa Org/YouTube - Sofia Ashraf stars in a music video for Kodaikanal Won’t in 2015. (note)

In 2015, a young Sofia Ashraf dropped the single Kodaikanal Won’t, a rap parody of Nicki Minaj’s Anaconda, demanding that Unilever clean up toxic waste from its thermometer factory dumped in the rainforest and compensate its workers for mercury poisoning. It drew over 2m views, praise from Minaj and a public apology and settlement from Unilever. Speaking to Carbon Brief, Ashraf said: 

“Since Kodaikanal Won’t, there has been a whole gamut of songs around climate change, from general awareness-building to pointed information-sharing, music has been used effectively to express the dread a lot of us live under. The downside is that greenwashing is constantly on the rise and there is too much onus on the audience to parse this content for the truth.”

But she remains optimistic, telling Carbon Brief:

“As long as art still strives to build conscious narratives, I feel we are headed in the right direction.”

§ Watch, read, listen

PETROCENTRIC: Adam Hanieh, author and professor of political economy at the University of Exeter, spoke to the Break Down about all the ways in which oil came to “permeate” our lives.

MIC TEST: Vox tuned in to how scientists are listening to Puerto Rico’s frogs to understand how climate change is altering life on the rainforest island.

NON-ALIGNED: A piece in Drilled unpacked new research prompting questions of what “Paris-aligned” means and whether “climate pledges…need a terminology overhaul”.

§ Coming up

§ Pick of the jobs

DeBriefed is edited by Daisy Dunne. Please send any tips or feedback to [email protected].
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