BEYOND EL NIÑO: FROM IDEAS TO RELIEF

GOVERNANCE in India is afflicted by a kind of retrograde amnesia. Every crisis revives the same lessons, and every calm period shelves intent and ideas.

- SHANKKAR AIYAR

If Newton’s law has a political cousin, it is this: momentum for reform rises with the pressure of crisis, and evaporates once the crisis retreats.

Now that the Strait of Hormuz is open again, the heated calls for resilience, for transition to renewables and for conservation seem to have fallen silent. But water scarcity and water cuts are an all-season urban reality. The systemic response is to treat the structural as cyclical— El Niño, bad monsoon or extreme events.

India is a nation of competing crises and conflicting compulsions. Politics and policy follow a familiar pattern: from hectic rhetoric to insolent drift, leaving the challenge of resilience and resolution for another day. There is no dearth of innovative climate solutions—from geothermal and ocean-wave energy to solar-powered desalination, from AI enabled precision farming to smart urbanisation—that can be adapted and adopted to deliver relief.

Europe is a red-hot zone this week as soaring temperatures notch new highs. To combat heat, cities are deploying district cooling systems. In Paris, water from the Seine is used in cooling networks for major institutions like the Louvre. Toronto’s Deep Lake Water Cooling system draws water from Lake Ontario to cool towers, hospitals and data centres. Stockholm’s district cooling system takes water from the Baltic Sea to onshore heat exchangers to provide ‘free cooling’ to the city grid.