Dispatches in Decarbonization: Next Generation Equity Must Move Us to Net Zero
This article first appeared in Mahesh Ramanujam’s monthly LinkedIn newsletter, Dispatches in Decarbonization, on July 18, 2024. Subscribe on LinkedIn to receive these updates.
A global study on the impacts of air pollution on human health and well-being recently published by The Health Effects Institute revealed a staggering statistic: 464 children under the age of five in India die each day as a result of air pollution. In 2021, the report states the cumulative count for India was 2.1 million.
These numbers are disturbing. But for me, they are especially gutting — not only because I was once a child growing up in Chennai who managed to evade the worst consequences of a growingly polluted India, or because 2.1 million children died from the effects of air pollution at the height of a pandemic that killed many of my friends and family members in India — but because they signal generational trauma destined to worsen with the accelerated warming of our world.
Two weeks ago, while at home in Chennai to attend the engagement party of my niece, Varsha, I was reminded both of the urgency and personal impact of these concerns. Family events look and feel a little different these days. When the pandemic began, I was still grieving the loss of my father, who was someone we all looked up to, and whose absence felt as fresh as the day he’d passed nearly seven years earlier. And after the loss of so many loved ones during the outbreak, the heartache only intensified. Today, I certainly have a greater appreciation for any opportunity to come together, safely celebrate our traditions, and find a healing sense of comfort in being alive and well enough to fight for a better future.
Varsha is the same way — always in search of the silver lining and finding happiness amid the heaviness. I believe that’s because my father’s hopefulness rubbed off on her the way it rubbed off on me — perhaps even more so.
Over the years, I’ve talked at length about how when I was growing up in Chennai, sustainability was a way of life. I’ve explained that I had two pairs of clothes for an entire year and attended school in no small part because of the meal program in tandem with my education. But I’ve also always maintained that because of my parents, my childhood was never about what I didn’t have. We were poor in finances, but thanks to my father and mother’s ingenuity and devotion, we were never lacking in family or unconditional love. And because of that, while I certainly experienced the discomforts that come with poverty, I never associated the practices of sustainable living with suffering.
While watching my niece and her fiance enjoy their special day, my mind wandered first to the past, to my father and wishing the head of our family could have been there to celebrate this momentous occasion, as he had been so many times before. Then it drifted, as it often does, into the sobering questions of a worrisome uncle concerned for the future: Even with their financial stability, even with everything they’ve earned and made of themselves, in the midst of our warming world, would that be enough? With the imminent challenges at hand, will they be able to ensure their own future children live in Chennai without the suffering we know is all but guaranteed with extreme heat, water scarcity and growing pollution?
The reason I am so concerned about this is that even in my contentment as a kid, I still had an acute understanding that our limited resources were directly connected to our livelihood — which is to say that looking back, I can say that even at a young age, even if I wasn’t old enough to know the sociological name for what we were doing, I still knew that in 1970s Chennai, sustainability and survivability were indistinguishable from one another.
I don’t want my niece’s future children, or my friends’ and colleagues’ children, or any children, to grow up believing that a survival-based existence is the best we can do — because it isn’t.
Varsha is a fiercely independent woman. She champions greater equity for women. She is marrying a man not only unthreatened by her strength and indomitable spirit, but inspired by her passion for women’s rights. And she is incredibly self aware of the stakes they will face — particularly when raising a family in India. She understands that historically, women have taken the bigger hits from our warming planet.
It’s not lost on her for example, that according to Seema Bhaskaran of the Transform Rural India Foundation (an organization tracking gender equity challenges), “Women in India often assume primary roles in agriculture while men migrate to urban areas, which makes the women especially vulnerable to the direct effects of climate change. A government labor force survey for 2021-22 found that 75% of the people working in agriculture are women. But only about 14% of agricultural land is owned by women, according to a government agriculture census.”
And she understands that without intervention, the next generation of Indians, and particularly India’s women, will endure unnecessary and preventable suffering. A recent global report from UNESCO, Monitoring and Evaluating Climate Communication and Education project and the University of Saskatchewan finds a disturbing trend in the impact of climate change on childhood education, citing data that shows rainfall shocks over the first 15 years of life in India negatively affected vocabulary at age five and mathematics and non-cognitive skills at age 15. In fact, the report states, "Climate change increases the likelihood of displacement and is one of the reasons why internal displacement has reached the highest levels on record. During 2022, 32.6 million were internally displaced due to disasters.” Additionally it shows that an “analysis of five countries — Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Tuvalu and Vietnam — finds five displacement patterns: temporary displacement, permanent migration to urban settlements, government-planned relocation, cross-border migration and trapped populations. These displacement scenarios lead to different barriers to education, related to a lack of financial resources, documentation or residency requirements.”
I will never forget that we aren’t going back to a time before COVID-19. What I mean is that when we find ourselves saying “in an emerging post pandemic landscape” or “after this is all over,” that we can “get back to normal,” we aren’t being honest with ourselves. None of what’s happening now, in the wake of a global respiratory pandemic, is normal, or is a way of life we should ask ourselves, let alone future generations, to accept. The climate challenges will only compound and even cause our worsening health crises. If we’re smart, we would recognize that, unlike millions of our fellow men, we are still here with a second chance. We have lessons about this pandemic that will help us tackle or even possibly prevent the next one. We can learn from them, adapt, and ensure that survivability is not our baseline standard of living.
Last month GNFZ curated Designing for Air Quality: Boosting Accessibility and Zero Emission Goals, a groundbreaking session for AIA’s 2024 Conference on Architecture & Design. In it, our brilliant colleague and GNFZ Advisor Beth Heider sat down with Dr. Holly Samuelson, Associate Professor of Architecture — Building Technology and Sustainable Design at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Emma Van Lieshout, Energy and Sustainability Manager for The RMR Group, and GNFZ’s very own VP of Client Success, Manisha Yadav.
Their in-depth conversation pinpointed why equity in design and decarbonization is the key to unlocking cleaner air and better living. As Beth pointed out, “If the pandemic has taught us anything these last four years, it’s that indoor and outdoor air quality are interconnected. They are inextricably tied to each other, and to the actions we take — and avoid — in creating our built environment. In every corner of the world, how we design today and in the very near future will have a significant, if not existential impact on the people breathing inside and beyond the confines of the world we build.”
During the session, Dr. Samuelson presented a design prototype for better breathing and what designing with energy efficiency can do to create more equitable communities. Emma Van Lieshout highlighted LEED v5 and additional performance strategies to optimize indoor air quality. And GNFZ’s Manisha Yadav presented the net zero acceleration of SRK, a Surat-based, multinational brand who, by prioritizing IAQ alongside its net zero emissions goals, demonstrated its holistic approach to environmental stewardship, corporate responsibility, and community development and addressing obstacles caused by rising temperatures in the global South.
In other words, these extraordinary women gathered to share lessons learned over the last few years. Though the topic differs from my niece’s professional specialty, their commitment to advancing equity — and specifically tackling equity challenges that disproportionately harm women and children — is aligned. Throughout the panel, they discussed proactive measures for reducing emissions as a driving factor in more equitable access to universal living standards. And in particular, they posed tangible methodologies for stopping excess deaths from air pollution, especially in children and vulnerable communities. They also focused on prioritizing longevity by reducing and eliminating pollution, improving indoor and outdoor air quality — or put clearly, they made the case of why we shouldn’t settle for a survival mindset.
The Chennai that I grew up in no longer exists. Even with all its faults, it faced much less air pollution, water scarcity, and heat waves than my family experiences there today. The quality of life is called into question in new and more complicated ways with each passing day. The suffering is real.
But what also didn’t exist were the tools and technology we can now equip our loved ones and their loved ones with.
The women of our AIA panel walked us through the tools and strategies already at our fingertips, and they remind me of why survival isn’t the legacy we should resign ourselves to leaving. In doing so, they also reminded me of why I can remain hopeful about my niece and her future. In fact, they proved why we must all be able to rely on the advancements made by people who share our passion for humanity. They explained how, if we collectively work toward change — with the technology and innovation readily available, and with the connective tissue we have in our recent memory about lesser emissions, cleaner air, disease mitigation, and longer living — we can build a world that rejects the premise that any of us should endure suffering, or live with the bare minimum of comfort and health, and instead embraces the idea that equity can and will be the expectation of generations to come — not the exception that it has been thus far.