Cloud over the haze
the un Environment Programme (unep) needs to revamp its publicity department so that it can report with accuracy. With the World Summit on Sustainable Development (wssd) at Johannesburg barely a few weeks away, it chose to release the preliminary study on the Asian haze, which it claims to have sponsored. Predictably the western media went overboard with the so-called un report, based on the findings of the six-year-old Indian Ocean experiment (indoex) project, describing the "Asian brown haze' as contributing to global warming and possibly shifting across the Pacific to Europe and the us.
Ironically, a report that is supposed to have such overreaching significance for Asia, and the Indian sub-continent in particular, was rushed to the western capitals but simply not available to the developing world. All the press reports from unep's press conference emanated from London with the un's publicity managers ignoring New Delhi, where a major chunk of the indoex project was conducted.
Equally predictable is that this hamhanded publicity by unep is creating a backlash. The Indian government has in a statement called the report unfortunate and far-fetched as it draws links between droughts and floods in a chronically disaster-prone region and aerosol pollution, without conclusive evidence. It is worried that the unep report and the publicity about threats of transboundary movement of aerosols will embarrass India at the wssd and compromise its negotiating position on global warming.
Perhaps. unep has definitely overplayed issues in its haste to get publicity. Some would even call it bad politics. For instance, it says that the brown haze is leading to thousands, perhaps millions of premature deaths. There is no way the scientists could have estimated this. At most they can draw inferences from the fact that particulate pollution in Indian cities has severe health impacts.
What is known is that indoex found a vast cloud of aerosols over the Indian Ocean in the winter months. It also found, on chemical analysis that the tiny particles were from anthropogenic sources. It then went on to run a number of models to estimate the possible impacts of this cloud and the variety of scenarios
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