Refine
Year of publication
Document Type
- Article (10)
- Postprint (3)
- Doctoral Thesis (2)
- Master's Thesis (2)
- Other (1)
- Part of Periodical (1)
Keywords
- India (19) (remove)
Institute
- Institut für Biochemie und Biologie (3)
- Institut für Geowissenschaften (3)
- Wirtschaftswissenschaften (3)
- Institut für Umweltwissenschaften und Geographie (2)
- Sozialwissenschaften (2)
- Extern (1)
- Fachgruppe Volkswirtschaftslehre (1)
- Historisches Institut (1)
- Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik (1)
- Institut für Physik und Astronomie (1)
In the Shadow of Ukraine
(2022)
In 2022, India captured global attention over its response to the war in Ukraine. While calling for both parties' return to diplomacy, India abstained from several United Nations resolutions condemning Russian aggression. For a country that ostensibly subscribes to the values of democracy and territorial integrity, its response appeared frustrating and contradictory, but it is broadly consistent with its long-standing policy of non-alignment. Although India's relationship with China is increasingly contentious, New Delhi is not yet fully convinced that it is in India's interest to swing westwards. The country's relations with Russia and China are deep, complex and substantive. In addition to the military and economic benefits it derives from its connection with Russia, New Delhi and Moscow share an avowed preference for a more equal, multipolar world. India will eventually have to reflect on the extent to which it can sustain its balancing act.
Rainfall-intense summer monsoon seasons on the Indian subcontinent that are exceeding long-term averages cause widespread floods and landslides.
Here we show that the latest generation of coupled climate models robustly project an intensification of very rainfall-intense seasons (June-September).
Under the shared socioeconomic pathway SSP5-8.5, very wet monsoon seasons as observed in only 5 years in the period 1965-2015 are projected to occur 8 times more often in 2050-2100 in the multi-model average.
Under SSP2-4.5, these seasons become only a factor of 6 times more frequent, showing that even modest efforts to mitigate climate change can have a strong impact on the frequency of very strong rainfall seasons.
Besides, we find that the increasing risk of extreme seasonal rainfall is accompanied by a shift from days with light rainfall to days with moderate or heavy rainfall. Additionally, the number of wet days is projected to increase.
Groundwater arsenic contamination in the Bengal Delta Plain is an important public health issue
(2021)
There is a close association between human biology, epidemiology and public health. Exposure to toxic elements is one area of such associations and global concerns. The Bengal Delta Plain (BDP) is a region where contamination of ground water by arsenic has assumed epidemic proportions. Apart from dermatological manifestations, chronic exposure to arsenic causes a heavy toll through several carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic disorders. This article provides a global overview of groundwater arsenic contamination in the BDP region, especially the sources, speciation, and mobility of arsenic, and critically reviews the effects of arsenic on human health. The present review also provides a summary of comprehensive knowledge on various measures required for mitigation and social consequences of the problem of arsenic contaminated groundwater in the BDP region.
In this paper, we move from the large strand of research that looks at evidence of climate migration to the questions: who are the climate migrants? and where do they go? These questions are crucial to design policies that mitigate welfare losses of migration choices due to climate change. We study the direct and heterogeneous associations between weather extremes and migration in rural India. We combine ERAS reanalysis data with the India Human Development Survey household panel and conduct regression analyses by applying linear probability and multinomial logit models. This enables us to establish a causal relationship between temperature and precipitation anomalies and overall migration as well as migration by destination. We show that adverse weather shocks decrease rural-rural and international migration and push people into cities in different, presumably more prosperous states. A series of positive weather shocks, however, facilitates international migration and migration to cities within the same state. Further, our results indicate that in contrast to other migrants, climate migrants are likely to be from the lower end of the skill distribution and from households strongly dependent on agricultural production. We estimate that approximately 8% of all rural-urban moves between 2005 and 2012 can be attributed to weather. This figure might increase as a consequence of climate change. Thus, a key policy recommendation is to take steps to facilitate integration of less educated migrants into the urban labor market.
Climate-related costs and benefits may not be evenly distributed across the population. We study distributional implications of seasonal weather and climate on within-country inequality in rural India. Utilizing a first difference approach, we find that the poor are more sensitive to weather variations than the non-poor. The poor respond more strongly to (seasonal) temperature changes: negatively in the (warm) spring season, more positively in the (cold) rabi season. Less precipitation is harmful to the poor in the monsoon kharif season and beneficial in the winter and spring seasons. We show that adverse weather aggravates inequality by reducing consumption of the poor farming households. Future global warming predicted under RCP8.5 is likely to exacerbate these effects, reducing consumption of poor farming households by one third until the year 2100. We also find inequality in consumption across seasons with higher consumption during the harvest and lower consumption during the sowing seasons.
Feminist Solidarities after Modulation produces an intersectional analysis of transnational feminist movements and their contemporary digital frameworks of identity and solidarity. Engaging media theory, critical race theory, and Black feminist theory, as well as contemporary feminist movements, this book argues that digital feminist interventions map themselves onto and make use of the multiplicity and ambiguity of digital spaces to question presentist and fixed notions of the internet as a white space and technologies in general as objective or universal. Understanding these frameworks as colonial constructions of the human, identity is traced to a socio-material condition that emerges with the modernity/colonialism binary. In the colonial moment, race and gender become the reasons for, as well as the effects of, technologies of identification, and thus need to be understood as and through technologies. What Deleuze has called modulation is not a present modality of control, but is placed into a longer genealogy of imperial division, which stands in opposition to feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism that insists on non-modular solidarities across seeming difference. At its heart, Feminist Solidarities after Modulation provides an analysis of contemporary digital feminist solidarities, which not only work at revealing the material histories and affective ""leakages"" of modular governance, but also challenges them to concentrate on forms of political togetherness that exceed a reductive or essentialist understanding of identity, solidarity, and difference.
Cash vs. in-kind transfers
(2019)
Historically, India has relied on subsidizing staple food as a major instrument in improving food security. Recently, however, cash transfers have entered the debate as an alternative, as they are associated with lower market distortions, leakages and fiscal costs. This study contributes to this debate by analyzing India’s Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS). Our main objective was to explain the under-purchase, or low take-up, from the TPDS, which is typically attributed to ‘leakage’, i.e. the diversion of food grains from eligible consumers. We provide an alternative solution based on self-targeting; while poorer households increase their consumption from the TPDS, wealthier households restrain from consuming subsidized commodities. Using a large household dataset, we estimated that such a voluntary opt-out system, based on income, would save a minimum of 6.5% of grains released through the TPDS. Besides these demand-driven aspects, our analysis indicates that poor regions perform better at lowering the diversion of grains and that large targeting errors exist among female-led households. Finally, we find substantial regional price differences that would benefit the poor and rural population under a uniform cash-transfer system that does not correct for regional price levels.
Precipitation patterns and extremes are significantly influenced by various climatic factors and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns. This study uses wavelet coherence analysis to detect significant interannual and interdecadal oscillations in monthly precipitation extremes across India and their teleconnections to three prominent climate indices, namely, Nino 3.4, Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD). Further, partial wavelet coherence analysis is used to estimate the standalone relationship between the climate indices and precipitation after removing the effect of interdependency. The wavelet analysis of monthly precipitation extremes at 30 different locations across India reveals that (a) interannual (2-8 years) and interdecadal (8-32 years) oscillations are statistically significant, and (b) the oscillations vary in both time and space. The results from the partial wavelet coherence analysis reveal that Nino 3.4 and IOD are the significant drivers of Indian precipitation at interannual and interdecadal scales. Intriguingly, the study also confirms that the strength of influence of large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns on Indian precipitation extremes varies with spatial physiography of the region.
We analyse current and possible future reforms of the Indian food policies for the most important staple grains, wheat and rice, within a two-commodity dynamic partial equilibrium model with stochastic shocks. The model is empirically grounded and reproduces past values well. It uses a new reduced-form approach to capture private storage dynamics. We evaluate the implementation of the National Food Security Act (NFSA) under several policy measures with the current regime as well as two scenarios with a regime change - implementation of cash transfers and deficiency payments. Implications for market fundamentals and fiscal costs are simulated in the medium term - until 2020/21. The NFSA puts a high pressure on fiscal costs and public stocks. Relying on imports with low support prices results in low fiscal costs and stable, but higher domestic and international prices, and a high risk of zero stocks. A policy strategy to manipulate procurement prices in order to maintain public stocks close to the norms leads to slightly higher fiscal costs with lower, but more volatile prices. The highest domestic price volatility occurs under a strategy which uses export bans in order to maintain sufficient public stocks. A cash-based regime can bring considerable savings and curb fiscal costs, particularly if targeted to the poor, and would leave sufficient stocks due to higher private stocks.
The SusKat-ABC (Sustainable Atmosphere for the Kathmandu Valley-Atmospheric Brown Clouds) international air pollution measurement campaign was carried out from December 2012 to June 2013 in the Kathmandu Valley and surrounding regions in Nepal. The Kathmandu Valley is a bowl-shaped basin with a severe air pollution problem. This paper reports measurements of two major greenhouse gases (GHGs), methane (CH4) and carbon dioxide (CO2), along with the pollutant CO, that began during the campaign and were extended for 1 year at the SusKat-ABC supersite in Bode, a semi-urban location in the Kathmandu Valley. Simultaneous measurements were also made during 2015 in Bode and a nearby rural site (Chanban) similar to 25 km (aerial distance) to the southwest of Bode on the other side of a tall ridge. The ambient mixing ratios of methane (CH4), carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapor, and carbon monoxide (CO) were measured with a cavity ring-down spectrometer (G2401; Picarro, USA) along with meteorological parameters for 1 year (March 2013-March 2014). These measurements are the first of their kind in the central Himalayan foothills. At Bode, the annual average mixing ratios of CO2 and CH4 were 419.3 (+/- 6.0) ppm and 2.192 (+/- 0.066) ppm, respectively. These values are higher than the levels observed at background sites such as Mauna Loa, USA (CO2: 396.8 +/- 2.0 ppm, CH4: 1.831 +/- 0.110 ppm) and Waliguan, China (CO2: 397.7 +/- 3.6 ppm, CH4: 1.879 +/- 0.009 ppm) during the same period and at other urban and semi-urban sites in the region, such as Ahmedabad and Shadnagar (India). They varied slightly across the seasons at Bode, with seasonal average CH4 mixing ratios of 2.157 (+/- 0.230) ppm in the pre-monsoon season, 2.199 (+/- 0.241) ppm in the monsoon, 2.210 (+/- 0.200) ppm in the post-monsoon, and 2.214 (+/- 0.209) ppm in the winter season. The average CO2 mixing ratios were 426.2 (+/- 25.5) ppm in the pre-monsoon, 413.5 (+/- 24.2) ppm in the monsoon, 417.3 (+/- 23.1) ppm in the postmonsoon, and 421.9 (+/- 20.3) ppm in the winter season. The maximum seasonal mean mixing ratio of CH4 in winter was only 0.057 ppm or 2.6% higher than the seasonal minimum during the pre-monsoon period, while CO2 was 12.8 ppm or 3.1% higher during the pre-monsoon period (seasonal maximum) than during the monsoon (seasonal minimum). On the other hand, the CO mixing ratio at Bode was 191% higher during the winter than during the monsoon season. The enhancement in CO2 mixing ratios during the pre-monsoon season is associated with additional CO2 emissions from forest fires and agro-residue burning in northern South Asia in addition to local emissions in the Kathmandu Valley. Published CO = CO2 ratios of different emission sources in Nepal and India were compared with the observed CO = CO2 ratios in this study. This comparison suggested that the major sources in the Kathmandu Valley were residential cooking and vehicle exhaust in all seasons except winter. In winter, brick kiln emissions were a major source. Simultaneous measurements in Bode and Chanban (15 July-3 October 2015) revealed that the mixing ratios of CO2, CH4, and CO were 3.8, 12, and 64% higher in Bode than Chanban.
The Kathmandu Valley thus has significant emissions from local sources, which can also be attributed to its bowl-shaped geography that is conducive to pollution build-up. At Bode, all three gas species (CO2, CH4, and CO) showed strong diurnal patterns in their mixing ratios with a pronounced morning peak (ca. 08:00), a dip in the afternoon, and a gradual increase again through the night until the next morning. CH4 and CO at Chanban, however, did not show any noticeable diurnal variations.
These measurements provide the first insights into the diurnal and seasonal variation in key greenhouse gases and air pollutants and their local and regional sources, which is important information for atmospheric research in the region.