By Spotlight Correspondent
Madhvi Chittoor Founder of Madhvi4EcoEthics and Global EcoEthics movement and UN Child Advisor has become the first to challenge the UNFCCC to consider holding a cumulative impacts analysis on a Global scale.
Cumulative Impacts Analysis relates to the total effects on ecosystems, public health and global warming due to multiple combination of past, present and future human activities. These are usually considered in the areas of oil and gas, change of land use and processes of energy.
In an interview with Spotlight Global News, young Madhvi echoed the importance of a combined analysis study on how cumulative impacts affect the rate levels of carbon emissions being emitted into the atmosphere.
“Human activities like development projects or wars for that matter, should not be assessed independently with silo mentality. Many of them have profound direct or indirect negative impacts on air, water, soil, space, fire, food, flora, fauna and thereby our health and global climate. They cause ecosystem stressors and their interaction among themselves may be additive, subtractive, or multiplicative and even exponential. Therefore, cumulative impacts must be considered very early, even when a development project comes for permit approval and, further monitored throughout its lifecycle. We can keep the global temperatures from rising above 1.5 deg Celsius if and only if cumulative impacts analysis is mandated by UNFCCC for all nations on a global scale”.
Madhvi’s call comes at a time when UNFCCC is expected to publish the first Global Stocktake Report which will give a clear update on the combined efforts made so far to reach the 1.5 degrees temperature limit on a global scale.
Against this background Madhvi tips the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change to mandate parties to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change to urgently start communicating their NDC targets by also including data generated from cumulative impacts.
“Many data points indicate that cumulative impacts cannot be ignored. Without their inclusion, any net-zero or carbon calculation and reporting is a flaw. Cumulative Impacts analysis puts the checks and balances in place on an otherwise greedy disastrous economic development and plundering of natural resources by us humans and causing a climate collapse.”
So far nations nations are mandated to communicate NDCs known as Bi-Annual Updates and National Communications to the UNFCCC through Measurement Reporting and Verification (MRV) under a framework called Enhanced Transparency System.
It has been scientifically proven that cumulative impacts affects natural ecosystems, biodiversity, aquatic life, pollution. The worrying factor is that, cumulative impacts also result in the realise of carbon emissions thereby causing global warming
