Good evening friends. I know it's very difficult time when the entire world humanity is facing COVID virus. I'm sure you're all saying staying safe, maintaining social distance and sanitizing your you know I have a sanitizing liquid here and you know everyone in your family, home, workplace are all staying safe and maintaining social distance. The reason why I'm here today evening to discuss with you is to understand this pandemic or what this pandemic is doing to us to humanity and the what what sort of pandemics the world has faced and what role has environment disaster, environment degradation and climate change are playing a role in this spread and spread of pandemics. I would like to go to a year you know 1994. I would like all of us to travel to Australia, somewhere close to in in Queensland, somewhere close to Melbourne or you know one second let me just sorry Brisbane. So we all travel to Brisbane to the year 1994. That area there is there is a small suburb named Hindra. It's on the northern fringe of Brisbane. It's a very very small small suburb and that area is known for horse stables, horse races and you know a lot of people used to own horses and they used to have paddocks. They used to have stables where they used to train the horses and you know nurse them, nurture them and there used to be conducting there you know there used to be a lot of horse races. So one such horse is named drama series. She was a she's a female horse. She is known for her endurance in horse races. She got retired from horse race and the trainer or the owner of that horse is Wic. His name is Wic Rail and he used to he he had a very excellent stable Wic rail. Yeah he has an excellent stable in in in Hindra. So during the month of September 1994 the horse got conceived and she was and she was pregnant and usually rail Wic rail used to you know allow the horses to a small paddock where they used to grace to remain there to stay there and you know after sometime he goes and brings them back to the stable. On a one day on September suddenly the horse fell sick. So somebody told Wic rail that you know horse has fallen sick. So he will ask his girlfriend to go in a trailer to pick that horse and come back. So she will go there. She will she will carry back the drama series horse back to the stable and Wic rail will see the lot of swelling in the mouth especially in the lips area to be broken. There will be a lot of patches you know the horse was not looking normal so tired. So maybe Wic we will talk that the horse would have you know since it is sort of you know it would got tired or you know bitten by some snake or some insect. So it is having that. So he will leave that horse in this table and call for his veterinarian. So the veterinarian doctor will will come. His name is Reed. He will come. He will check that horse and he will see a lot of carrot inside the mouth of horse which means it has not completely taken the food that her master has offered. So Reed would see the horse and say and prescribe some antibiotics some tablets or medicines and he will go back. Next day early morning four o'clock people from this table will call the veterinarian Reed and say it is the horse has completely gone out of control and it has broken the barricades and it is on the field and it is almost dying. So Wic and this veterinarian Reed will immediately run. So the you know the horse would go out.  He will be perplexed you know. He did not know what would have happened. They were thinking all the reasons that they would have you know whether some nearby staple owner had poisoned this horses or some or some but some snake or some insect bite anything. So they are thinking about all sort of reasons. So for the next one week so the the veterinarian the staple owner will all keep on thinking about different reasons. But after a week another 13 horses will fall sick and one by one it will it will die. Some some horses will come out of the staple. Some horses will run like mad. Some horses need to be killed you know. They are like you know mercy killed. They will be killed by the veterinarian himself. So the whole whole sort of you know mad rush in the entire region in the entire Queen Brisbane region. So I mean every every staple would get affected and then suddenly the Queensland province will get you know this information and the the department of primary industries which is which is which takes care of the veterinary and livestock. So they will be entrusted and after sometime few days this staple owner Wick real also will Wick real also will get sick. He would he would be admitted in the hospital and he would die and when they do this autopsy they will when they did the necropsy on the horses all the entire inflammatory system was compelled. The respiratory system was completely clogged with blood and the same symptom same symptoms will be on the dead body of the staple owner Wick real. So almost two cases they to almost two identical reasons they would have got. So you know day after day in a single day about seven horses died reasons unknown. So the veterinarians in that in that area will think about you know African horse sickness or African horse in Rome or you know Henta any sort of diseases or some small insect bites. So they will keep on thinking about different reasons. Even somebody would somebody would you know conspiracy theories were there saying that you know the Wick real himself poisoned because he was under debt you know all all sort of conspiracy theories. But the department of primary industries which was responsible for this for taking the taking stock of the situation they will collect blood samples they will send it to Australia and aha there is a lab in Melbourne the samples would be sent there and they would start verifying the virus strains and they would match it with some virus strains already known. It would you know very feebly it would match some strains of a particular virus but they are not very clear about what sort of virus where it has come from how it has come from nothing. So they will temporarily have some name and they will start further research and first they will rule out AHS which is African horse sickness or syndrome. They will rule out one by one and they will come to a you know some technical name till everything gets finalized and they will find out that this and they will come to a conclusion there is a new strain of virus which Australia has not seen till now has not into this drama series horse it spread to other horses and it even killed one human and the they are they are anxiety and their worries worries did not end there. So they start to think you know where was this virus all these days how did it come suddenly out of blue and attack this horse drama series and then other horses it did not come from anywhere else it did not come from you know outside Australia because after a particular virus Australia was very particular that they will not allow any exotic animals animal trade. So they were very careful on allowing exotic animals. So the virologist and the researchers in Australia were perplexed where was this virus before how did this virus suddenly attack this drama series horse they named the virus as henra virus because if the place of the place was given the virus was given name of the place as henra and you know they they started research on that the the idea the the whole thing came out when Wickel used to send his horses to paddock which is a small area where the horses would graze there there was a tree and in that tree there were bats or we call as fruit bats you know fruit eating bats. So this henra virus was in that fruit eating bats so they found out that but suddenly you know they traced back the you know ancient sequences for 200 for 2.5 crore years this bats and gangaroos were living together co-existing in Australia this virus did not go and affect gangaroos they did not affect it but this henra virus was waiting was waiting waiting waiting inside the bats till the horses went to Australia about 250 years back because horses are not native to Australia only the Europeans when they went to you know capture the soil of Australia they took horses with them otherwise horses are very far into Australia Australia doesn't have any horses. So the immunity system of gangaroos and the on the system of bats have co-evolved over 2.5 crore years so the henra virus was not able to go and attack the gangaroos which is the native species of Australia they couldn't do anything because the gangaroos immunity system has evolved over a period of time and was able to prevent virus attacks like henra and they gangaroos did not get affected but the immunity system of horses was completely foreign and was completely new to Australia and the viruses surrounding in Australia they have a very weak immune system compared to the native animals of Australia so these bats were waiting for cores of years till a horse to come and infect them with henra viruses friends if you think that humanity has has conquered smallpox humanity has conquered polio and it will conquer the SARS-CoV-2 virus then I am sorry we are mistaken. The smallpox virus which is we all know what virus it is the polio virus poliimitis and the burillo virus of which which creates smallpox are not zoonosis viruses or zoonotic viruses zoonotic viruses are the one which transfers which get transmitted from an animal to an animal or an animal to a human whereas smallpox virus and polio virus are not zoonotic viruses so this zoonotic virus is an issue that is why we are not able to find the medicines or vaccines for HIV for dengue for yellow fever all these are zoonotic diseases 60 percent of the diseases that humans get due to pathogens you know pathogens what pathogens are in Tamil we called as a no kirimihal 60 percent of diseases that humans get from pathogens due to pathogens are zoonotic diseases or from or from animals we have to understand that since 1981 till 2018 the world has lost about 3.2 3.2 crore people to different zoonotic diseases in this world friends we have to understand 3.2 crore people have died since 1981 till 2018 3.2 crore people have died only because of zoonotic diseases have we have we not seen zoonotic disease we have seen AIDS is a zoonotic disease from chimpanzee ebola is zoonotic disease merces zoonotic disease sarsis zoonotic disease dengue so but you can you can talk anything like this you know most of these are zoonotic diseases so the difference between smallpox polio and the you know the recent out pandemic outbreaks is these pandemic outbreaks that happened recent past last 30 40 50 years is because the destruction that is happening in the ecological cycle that is why we are unable to find these vaccines or therapeutic medicines for HIV or for ebola or for yellow fever or for dengue we are unable to find vaccines because these are diseases that are born out of the destruction that is happening in the ecological cycle in this world whereas diseases like smallpox and polio we are able to eradicate there because they are just pathogens and one more reason for improvement in human health is because of the sanitation improvement open defecation is come down drastically and 80 percent of our diseases have gone because of the improvement in sanitation we should also we should also not forget that virologists globally you might think that you know humanity has seen many many many pandemics yes 66th century there is a pandemic called justinian plague it affected the justinian empire or sorry it affected the bishantian empire the bishantian empire had its headquarters at constant inner pole and the bishantian empire emperor was justinian the plague the plague or the pandemic was known by his name the justinian plague it killed millions and millions of people in the sixth century the the large empire of bishantian you know fell down or got completely broke down in the next 100 years only because of this justinian plague in the 13th century we saw black death another pandemic global pandemic more than crores and crores of people have lost their lives in black death and black death brought down the influence of the catholic church on the society when when black death struck people the catholic church also was simply watching it doing nothing so people that the god the king is watching the government is watching the same way the catholic church is watching so what is the greatness in you so catholic church lost started to lose its influence in the society because of black death then we saw spanish flu many other many other pandemics but those pandemics are completely different from the pandemics that we are talking now and they see the number of pandemics that the world has faced in the last 30 40 50 years and this this zoonotic decisions can transfer from animals to animals or animals to human depending on the immunity system depending on the nature of the virus everything everything mess which is called as medialist respiratory syndrome from bats it went to camel then to humans nipah from bats to wild boars then to human the same way this virus which was called as SARS-CoV-2 which is part of the corona family of viruses has got as of now we may we may differ maybe in six months down the line or eight months down the line when the final final research or you know covalued or or you know peer reviewed whatever it is so we will have the final research maybe in in few months time but as of now as on today this viruses is being from bats to pangolins to humans bats to pangolins to humans so the virologist and the researchers have been talking about this for quite some time they have listed four main reasons for pandemics like this to to get loose or to spread like anything four may there are a lot of reasons i will come to four major reasons the first reason is habitat loss since humanity has started to encroach upon forest we start to build dams we have started to build mines there are roadways electric lines railway lines inside forest areas their habitats are getting lost or being shrunk so the interaction between human and those animals are very high and when does it happen it doesn't happen every day it's the event is called zoonotic spill over when does this spill over happen whenever the wildlife wildlife gets stressed when when humans as humans when we get stressed we get diabetes blood pressure cardiac problem and many other things likewise when the habitats are lost you know destroyed or when they are put under severe strain this zoonotic spill over happens from humans to sorry from animals to humans or animals to animals in uhan where where they say this many scientists say that it's all started from the wet market in uhan there are hundreds and hundreds of pangolins there are hundreds and hundreds of bats and inside the cages for for illegal trade so there was a zoonotic spill over it reached it touched the one person and then it spread like anything so this disease is called COVID-19 you all would know but i'm just saying that so so first reason for pandemics to go multi i mean it's going to completely uncontrolled completely uncontrolled the first reason is the habitat loss which means deforestation the first reason is that the second reason is urbanization globally if you look at which are the areas that are most affected it is the urban cities in India 70 percent of corona positive patients are in six cities or 60 to 70 percent are in just six cities Chennai Mumbai Delhi Ahamdabad Thane so these are the six cities which has about 60 percent of positive patients in our country so second reason is urbanization the third reason is illegal trade of exotic animals like bats pangolins wild boars hunting illegal trade commerce in in Wuhan the market is an illegal market the market was selling illegal meat of bats and pangolins anteaters many things so it's illegal trade of this exotic animals is the third reason and the fourth reason is the weakening of or the you know the strength of AMR antimicrobial resistance is weakening these days because our body has got an excellent antimicrobial resistance which which which doesn't allow pathogens to affect us what is this AMR what does this AMR how does it become you know weakened because of the overuse and abuse of antibiotics that we take necessary overdose or you know abuse or without reason we take antibiotics so it it weakens the antimicrobial resistance in our body and one more thing industrial level meat production like for example you grow broiler chickens so this broiler chickens are fed with antibiotics for being you know pathogen proof like you know the pathogen should not go and affect the livestock pathogen should not go and affect the you know chicken so the chickens are fed with antibiotics and the chickens are fed with growth stimulators so humans we humans eat those broiler chickens and which are fed with antibiotics and growth stimulators and we and our AMR which is antimicrobial resistance gets weakened gets weakened so these are the four major reasons that the virologists say that these are the four major reasons because of the destruction in the environmental cycle we humans get pandemics like you know COVID-19 we will have to be we have we will have to you know I will give us very simple data if the deforestation which whatever is happening today is going to increase by just 10 percent more in the coming days in the coming years months 33 lakh people will get malaria and dengue just 10 percent increase I am saying just 10 percent increase of deforestation will increase the dengue and malaria attack to 33 lakh people more other than the people who are affected now so these 33 lakh people will get affected more than what is getting affected today that is the effect of deforestation that we are trying to bring into this world and also I would like to quote one more report which was published in 2019 published by Lancet Lancet report says you know the title is climate and health so that report clearly said that the way the pathogens are going to produce diseases and the way the vectors vectors are the disease the mosquito is an example for the vector they spread the disease they carry disease from one person to another person so they spread the disease the disease spread as like mosquitoes the vector they are called vectors the pathogens the vectors are going to completely act in a different way than they were acting about 10 years 20 years 30 years back so the way the diseases are going to happen to humans and the way the vectors are going to carry these diseases to humans are completely going to get a changed or completely going to get completely changed what was happening about 20 30 years back and the report also said whatever the humanity has achieved in the last 150 200 years the progress that the humanity has achieved in terms of public health the forward movement that the humanity has achieved in terms of public health climate change will undo all the progress that the humanity has achieved in the last 150 200 years in terms of public health friends it said that and you know if they have a fantastic report maybe you know would be civil servants you like you can download those report like you know climate and health from Lancet it is a very very famous medical journal we all know that so and the report was clearly you know demonstrating data by data how climate is climate change is affecting various diseases in human beings and there is a small tool I will just like to refer to two data in that report so the when we started to collect data on you know dengue fever so from last 150 200 years so they zeroed in some 10 years which were very very you know superbly conducive for dengue fever to spread like anything 10 years they chose they chose 10 years which are most conducive for the dengue fever to spread like anything and though out of those 10 years nine years was after the year 2000 because of the amount of carbon that we emit the climate change and global warming it is happening and if the number of diarrhea days in 1981 has doubled by 2018 because of climate change and global warming diarrhea days the number of days that the world faced diarrhea it got doubled in 2018 so this climate report and also it said you know see we all know when we get fever what will our elders say that our body is raising the temperature to fight the virus was many virologists say in fact that high temperature is a lethal weapon against the virus it will it will destroy it will deactivate the virus so when you get high temperature at times not every time at times when you take medicine also at times the high temperature itself will kill the virus but today what is happening the viruses get used to higher temperatures outside of body because of global warming and climate change so when they enter our body that the body's temperature is about 37.5 37.56 degree Celsius you all would know so when the when the pathogens enter our body lower temperature than the external body inside our body are very conducive are very favorable for the pathogens to mutate and spread like anything I would like to quote the example of the mosquitoes again 10 years back when there is a mosquito man as you will light up where you are you will light up the mosquito coil and put it in your room and today you would find the mosquitoes standing on on top of the mosquito coil and dancing because the mosquitoes have got immune to the mosquito coils and they they are least bothered about this mosquito coils the same way the pathogens have got used to higher temperature outside our body and when they get inside our body they are the the temperature of our body is more conducive for the pathogens to mutate and to spread like what is happening today so this is also an effect of climate change in 2018 there was a climate change report from IPCC intergovernmental panel on climate change which said there are many things that are said I will just keep keep it aside and just focus on the health part alone the humans have to bring down the carbon emission whatever we are emitting today by 50 percent by 2030 and make it net zero by 2050 2050 so what is that net zero oceans and forests have got this capacity of absorbing the carbon that the humans release so you can release the amount of carbon that the forest and the oceans will be able to absorb only that you can emit that is called net zero so by 2030 it should be 50 percent by 2050 it should be net zero and it said the permafrost permafrost in artics in polars permafrost is what the you know the ice has snowed that was years back the permafrost would thaw would be freeze and ancient virus families would come out the report said in 2015 in Tibet in Himalayas virologists have discovered 33 ancient families of viruses it is not single virus corona is a family SARS-CoV-2 is part of that family nurses part of that family SARS is part of that family so like this there are 33 ancient virus family of viruses 33 families of viruses only in Tibet then there is Arctic then there is Antarctic Alps Siberia all these places are there and the challenge to humanity is we as a human humans we will know how corona behaves how SARS-CoV-2 behaves it affects your respiratory tract thrombosis or pneumonia so we all know how it spreads to some extent not to not to hundred percent how it spreads how it affects human bodies we all know some reasons but these ancient virus families which were active about 500 years to 15 000 years back the virus that was found out in virus families that were found out out found out in Tibet is at least 500 to 15 000 years old ancient family of viruses so this the present humanity may not will not know how those viruses will will will become contagious how those viruses will become spread what is the RO factor what which are the parts that will get affected we do not know anything we know nothing we know nothing about this viruses that is why Ion Lipkin a famous viralist in an interview to India today about a month back he said the world has not yet seen the peak of corona or covid they are yet to see the peak of covid but covid is nothing the world is yet to face one of the worst pandemics in the coming years because of climate change because of climate change he said that clearly I would like to recollect what Lancet report said the diseases that are caused by these pathogens the vectors which will carry these diseases will completely transform or completely change what the way of doing the last so many hundreds and thousands of years one example is again or corona or covid 19 you know every every day thousands and thousands of these strains using the technology called deep sequencing their genome sequencing is studied and it is getting uploaded in the GEID which is called global alliance of influenza data so GEID database is getting uploaded every day with strains from covid 19 virus or SARS-CoV-2 virus and you know what there are even now not not every different strain has been updated there even till today there are 25,000 different strains of viruses that the virologists have detected the microbiologists have detected and uploaded in the GEID platform 25,000 I am not saying everything looks you know they they don't I am not saying that they are different in nature they are different in formation no no they may be alike but there are differences in their nuclides their differences in their structures their differences in their formation I am not saying everything is externally you know very different no it may not be there that is why why I said the virus and the disease are completely going to change sometime back few years back when we get affected by a viral disease our body develops antibodies our body develops antibodies so when the virus comes in our immunity system will generate that antibody send it to the virus it will deactivate destroy and that information is stored in the memory of our immunity system so when next time when the same virus attacks happens the immunity system from its memory will understand what sort of virus is that which is the you know relevant antibody for that it will send that antibody and destroy or deactivate the virus and we don't get affected but today people who were affected by corona treated cured are getting reaffected are getting positive again this has perplexed the entire virologist community because all these days we were saying that we will have herd immunity let about 40 50 percent 60 percent of our population get affected so it becomes herd immunity I mean I don't foresee for a 100 percent proof herd immunity proof in this case South Korea India China have all got people who are reaffected or again affected by corona or become positives of COVID-19 so this is what I said you know the diseases the pathogens the vectors are going to completely change completely going to change for bad not for good for bad the way that humans got diseases the way humans were affected by diseases it's going to completely change in the coming years climate change will ensure that this is what those two reports say you can download those reports and see for yourself scientific American is there Lancet is there nature is there the lot of technical reports on on internet which you can download and go through it if you're interested the lot thousands of reports on this deforestation zoonotic diseases you know many other things and there is a organization called predict in US it was funded initially by USAID and Bill Gates Foundation also funded that predict organization they have identified 1400 odd viruses to be studied to be understood to be known they have identified 1400 viruses out of which only four or six viruses they have studied remaining are all or are there to be studied imagine the kind of you know challenges that we are going to face not only that many of friends it is going to be last year in the same month of you know April end May there was this phony cyclone which got which started as a depression from nearby equator you know below Sri Lanka moved northwards and it crossed the Orissa coast on May 3rd 4th creating havoc creating destruction you know unimaginable pain giving unimaginable pain to people there what phony pile is so why phony pile is sunny phony storm is so unique in its character usually when a depression gets formed if the depression gets strengthened become cyclone super cyclone or whatever it is it will cross the coast about 4 to 7 days time in 4 to 7 days time but phony storm phony cyclone took 11 days to cross the coast of Orissa creating havoc since it was there in the oceans for 11 days because climate change and global warming or heating up the oceans like anything there is lot of water which gets water which gets vaporized and it's there in the atmosphere this slow moving cyclone picks up all these water droplets picks up this moisture and it crosses the coast it creates havoc it create havoc in Orissa and IMD Indian meteorological department had to issue nine bulletins to change the course of the cyclone they were unable to predict they were unable to predict that they said initially it will cross the southern part southern part of Tamil Nadu then they said it will cross the central part of Tamil Nadu which is Nagapatnam then they said Chennai then they said South Andhra then they said Central Andhra then Vaisagapatnam and then finally it crossed between in Orissa between between Bhuvaneswar and Kattak and you know what we are all very lucky I would say that I am I don't believe in luck but still I would like to call lucky because it did not cross the coast in Tamil Nadu. Orissa set up its state disaster management authority about five years before the national disaster management authority was formed national disaster management authority NDMA was formed only after tsunami in 2004 the NDMA was found only in 2005 whereas the OSDMA Orissa state disaster management authority was formed in 99 2000 they had an excellent disaster management setup they had constructed some 878 shelters in the coastal area it can house about 10 lakh people in 24 hours friends for the fauney to be you know fought over or to be for the government to face that they evacuated in 24 hours 14 lakh people were evacuated from the coastal areas to safer places the life loss was very very minimal the chief minister came online and said we will try to minimize this life loss even the next disasters to come Umbandpuyal or Umbandpuyal which struck West Bengal 24 Pragnas district Mamta Vanaji the chief minister says she has never seen such a cyclone such a storm in her lifetime in her lifetime you know you know 185 degree 185 kilometers per hour speed the cyclone was crossing the coast it will cry we have seen gajah we have seen fauney it has it has inside in the oceans it will go up to 200 210 even spikes will go to 230 but when they crossed the coast they were general impression is the cyclones will weaken will become weak and then cross and slowly disappear but you know what happened in fauney it crossed the Orissa coast it went till Bengal and destroyed most of the things the same thing happened to gajah cyclone in Tamil Nadu it crossed the coast of Nahapetnam went till Kodaikanal, Pragni, Dindikal may interior parts of Tamil Nadu created destruction in those areas and went to the Arabian Sea and went till Africa so the cycle the characters of cyclones are changing the characters of the the one more one more cyclone is Oki which again couple of years back Tamil Nadu's southernmost district Kanyakumar district faced it when a when a cyclone is when a depression is formed it takes roughly about 40 to 70 hours to become a cyclone or a super cyclone depression deep depression heavy depression then cyclone mild cyclone medium and cyclone super cyclone whatever it takes about 40 to 70 hours but Oki cyclone took just six hours for from getting converted from a depression to a cyclone that is why we were not able to communicate to our deep sea fishermen from the village called Tutur in Kanyakumar district we lost thousands of fishermen in that cyclone we till now we didn't know where they were where they have gone so we assume that they are no more because of the cyclone and and you know friends now we are in double disasters and triple disasters cyclone we have got one more cyclone and Arabian sea which is expected across the coast of Mumbai in two days time how do we maintain the social distance how do we maintain our sanitizing how do we clean up our stuff how do we we say from corona covid and also face the cyclones we have got locust desert so it's disaster double disaster triple disaster the locusts are changing their habit the Gregorian phase where the locusts had you know destroyed in large numbers the crops the Gregorian phase of this locust are completely getting changed and now scientists have said yesterday that the Indian ocean dipole the Indian ocean dipole is a phenomenon which in which the temp there's a temperature difference between the eastern part of Indian ocean and the western part of Indian ocean when the when the Indian ocean dipole is positive we used to get rainfall like anything Australia will have heat that is why last year it was Indian ocean dipole positive phenomenon so Australia's bushfire one reason is is Indian ocean Indian ocean dipole being positive so Indian ocean dipole if it's become positive then which we have heavy rainfalls not only in India not only in Maharashtra not only in Kerala not only in Kannada but on the African African continent also in the Gulf region also last year there's a heavy rainfall so there's a lot of moisture content which is very conducive for desert locusts to to give birth and to grow to become Gregorian phase where they comes in swarms and swarms millions and millions of locusts come and destroy our fields and usually very generally last year it came to Rajasthan I mean 200 300 years back Madurai has got locusts but those locusts are completely different from what we are getting today what we are getting today so friends climate change we were all humans were thinking that climate change will bring heavy storms heavy downfall of downpour of rain you know famine and many other things but we forgot that climate change will bring pandemics locust strikes and many other things so we all would say that climate change is not any other issue it's a question of it's a challenge of our existence per se climate change is going to decide whether humans are going to exist or not or rather we are going to decide we as a human species we as humans are going to reside here we are going to are we going to survive here or we are we going to become extinct because what we have done to this earth you know it will happen to us so friends I would say the reason why I am talking to you you are all would be bureaucrats you would be an IFS officer you would be an IS officer or a police officer or anybody or anyone but remember when you take up the service the primary thing in your mind when you when you see browse through a file when you browse through a record you should see that will this scheme will this project affect the environment will will will add more fuel to climate change if that case you put your foot down I know very very harnessed and sincere officers bureaucrats who have stopped the projects environmentally destructive projects you are you are the you are one of the pillars of this Indian democracy civil services executive is one of the pillars of the Indian democracy you have got the powers you have got the wherewithal you will have the all the influences in this world to either say yes or no to any particular thing which would devastate our environment and add more fuel to climate change today friends we have got only two things how we are going to mitigate climate change how we are going to become resilient to climate change this is what our challenges in front of us in you know it is it is it is not anything else you can you can run a company software you know television media you can produce films you can you can run a political party everything is right fine but when you do not work to tackle or to mitigate climate change there is no point in doing anything else friends there is no point in doing anything else so we will have to understand that climate change is the question or it is questioning our mere existence it is the the debate and discussions on whether we need environment whether we need growth whether we need development environment versus development growth versus environment all those things are gone the debate in front of us is only one it is not the question of environment versus development hereafter or few years before it is the question of survival versus extinction is in front of our eyes in front of humanity survivalist is extinction living is over living is gone we left humanity has to see if it can survive in this earth and and try to hand over this earth to what we have made it today at least to the next generation if not better we would allow to do it better but at least we would we should survive in this earth and hand it over to the next generation if we whatever possible manner we are able to do it friends i am not living in a very very pessimistic note i am very optimistic youngsters like you youth like you you know would be bureaucrats like you are the only hope for us only hope for people like us you can curses that i belong to a generation which spoiled this earth yes i agree i belong to a generation which spoiled this earth which destroyed this earth i don't deny at all but i am i am 45 plus maybe under 15 years i would be and take out the flight and go back and go back and we are in between arrival launch and departure launch but you are going to live in this earth for the next 50 or 60 or 70 years and your children are going to live here your grand grandchildren are going to live here so what you are going to do will determine will decide and whether this earth can sustain humanity can humanity can survive in this earth is based on the things that you would be bureaucrats would be doing would be understanding in your in your next course in the next few years i would like to quote vangari matai vangari matai is we all know that she is the she was the first african woman to get the noble peace price so till that time the world the world did not know what world did not know about vangari matai who i mean no one knew about vangari matai she is a veterinarian by profession so she came to receive the noble peace award she got the award she came out and the whole battery of international journalist who was standing outside the hall to ask who she was so the journalist went and asked her who are you if i was there i were there i would say my name is sundar rajan i am from this place i did my engineering i am part of cool again envergal blah blah blah but she is vangari matai you know she said the small story there is a huge forest fire a huge forest fire was happening there are animals you know elephants tigers lions bears all these animals were simply sitting sleeping idling there was one small hummingbird it was flying to the nearby you know river stream took a drop of water in small beak came and dropped over the fire it did not do once it was completely doing goes to the river stream picks up that drop plot of water comes and pours in the in the fire so it was doing continuously after sometime a rabbit called this hummingbird and asked are you mad the rabbit asked the hummingbird are you mad lion is sleeping if it wants it can take so much of water in its trunk and blow it over the forest fire the dose the fire would dose off the lion the the elephant is sleeping sorry the elephant is sleeping it can it can carry water in a trunk and dose it off the lion is sleeping the tiger is sleeping many other animals are sleeping you are lily put on you are a tiny hummingbird what can you do by carrying this drop of water the hummingbird replied i will do what i am able to do to the best of my ability till how till however long i am able to do so this message reached the other animals everybody got up picked the elephant took water in its trunk the lions the tigers they carried water and dosed off the forest fire and the forest was saved and vangari matai said i would like to be the hummingbird of this world friends we all have come to an era come to a situation come to a time where we all should become hummingbirds of this world to save this earth save this humanity save this species from destruction and we will have to ensure that we survive this climate change pandemics everything for the betterment of humanity and this earth is not an i would like to complete this by saying this earth is not an asset that we have inherited from our forefathers it's a liability that we need to repay to our next generation with interest and thanks for what keeping you know for watching for the last an hour or so if there are any questions and if there are any ways of asking questions you know i would be happy to answer them hello yeah hello yeah so nice to meet you you can hello yeah yeah can you hear me yes yes what should we do for the environment then gone every what you said the global warming and what we do as a as trans as a natural liking students or what we do for the environment individual citizen you can do many things like you don't have to use plastics you you can use public transport as first possible you know use electricity very judiciously don't have junk food all those things individually as individual citizens we can be but as bureaucrats as would be bureaucrats whenever you happen to ponder over a file which talks about a project which talks about a scheme whatever it could be so you need to put in your thoughts that what is the environmental effect of this scheme what is the environmental effect of this project are the are the benefits there are more benefits maybe slight disadvantages then you will have to see how to overcome that if there are more disadvantages more destruction and add to add to more you know more fuel to climate change then you have got every right every power to stop that project to review that project or do anything that and you have got all the powers that will that you can stop that things that will jeopardize the environment so as would be citizens as are would be bureaucrats and as citizens of this world you have got two responsibilities one individually how environment friendly are you and as a would be bureaucrat how environment friendly your decisions will be how you choose environment versus rest of the things will determine many other outcomes of this of that decisions so you can be both you should be both that is the only reason I am here today evening see it is not only bats many other animals carried viruses bats are bats in fact are more reservoirs of viruses but these viruses are there or in any anything or in any human or in any animal but when they get mutated when they get transmitted is when the bats or any other for pangolin this SARS-CoV-2 was from bats to pangolin then pangolin to us at times it means it requires an intermediate host like pangolin in in mass it was camel in something else it was a wild boar so it is not that bats are which are which which carry viruses they pathogens are there everywhere when leave from pathway when there's a spill over it happens to another animal or humans and the mutation happens it becomes pandemic so we and you know what we are worried about people getting scared about bats or people getting people vilifying bats unfortunately the Indian wildlife fact has except for two species of bats they have termed the batches vermiuns vermelins like you can kill them so which we are trying to you know challenge it and which we are trying to undo it bats do excellent ecosystem services not any of us know this what there are 500 varieties of 500 species of plants which depend on bats to do the pollination what whichever the flowers have which get the flowering in the night time or in the evening time bats do the pollination and bats are insect eaters and you know what insects they eat most mosquitoes so you remember when bats revolve around your you know village or town you remember people bats are carrying mosquito bats if those bats are not there more mosquitoes will be there more dengue more malaria more fever will attack us so bats eat lot of insects so the amount of the the best second best species for the pollination is bats the first is honey bees second is bats so if bats do lots and lots of ecosystem services to for humans won't even be disturbed their habitat won't even be destroyed them it it fights back sorry use use back us so you know you don't have to vilify I don't have to worry about bats per se actually good evening sir yeah really sir it was a very informative session so thank you and I wanted to ask one question you mentioned a little bit about Lancet report yeah I would like to know some more information about it sir it's a roughly about 50 pages report it talks about each disease how it has increased over a period of time because of climate change how the overall public health system is crumbling because of climate change and how pathogens and viruses are transforming for bad when you know and the way the diseases are being conducted over the past so many decades so it is it's a very exhaustive report you know in fact I can talk about only on that report for you know a few hours so I would I would suggest that you know if you want to know every detail of it to download that report from Lancet is freely available freely you can download it it's health and climate and health in Lancet site you can download it's a very very simple English and not much of you know medical jargons in that it's very simple English you can download that and I would request everybody who has joined this call to download that report and and you know go through it thank you sir good evening sir good evening sir first of all let me thank you for this wonderful session sir my question is during this COVID times we could see n number of reports reporting the reduction in the carbon emission and also the ozone layer has been healing so is there any possibility in the future that international climate convention could bring any legislature to impact the climate change see I mean I know some this question is rise see peace being prevailing in this world we want peace but graveyards are more peaceful you know we don't want a graveyard peace we don't want graveyard silence we want peace to exist or coexist with the normal livelihood without polluting the environment there are technologies there are methodologies where you can live when the Ganga flows fine when the Kuom flows fine when you can see the Himalayas from Bihar when you can see the blue skies instead of ash skies there are technologies there there are methodologies there so you have to implement them we don't want graveyard peace I am very very clear on that it is there is nothing to you all are there is nothing to be you know happy about the environment being you know unpollutive the you know we people are able to see blue skies instead of gray skies I mean this is not the actual thing that we want we want an environmental friendly life without any corona disaster or COVID disaster you know showering on humans we can coexist without corona without COVID with blue skies with clean water flowing in Ganga with clean water flowing in Yamuna without pollution humanity can coexist the problem is we don't have the guts we don't have the political will we don't have the bureaucratic resources to tackle and you know to face this that is the only issue otherwise the same things can happen when you lead a normal life there are technologies and methodologies yeah American President Donald from Petrieu from Paris Agreement on climate change he says that has a capacity to withstand the climate change and it can interpret itself also sir we don't need to take any regulatory measures against any industries have to boost economy what do you think see as first the first question is concerned on the US president coming out of Paris Accord it's very unfortunate the entire world it's not just unfortunate for us it's unfortunate for the entire world I mean America is seeing what mistake the president did by coming out of Paris Accord by terms of COVID-19 deaths more than 100,000 deaths have caught in the US there are couple of hurricanes killed about 20 people 20 people each of those killed about 20 few weeks back it was not reported because because of the COVID situation so on in last year in October in Washington Mr. Trump leaves in or resides in White House there was a downpour of rain whatever whichever amount of rain that used to fall on fall in a month got down in a day and the press room of White House was inundated they have to be evacuated because of the flood water getting inside the press room in the basement of White House he might deny it he might change he might come out of Paris Accord but he has given 1 lakh and odd lives American lives to COVID few 100,000 lives for various hurricanes and psych and typhoons he can he has given that so it is very unfortunate that you know US president has come out of the Paris Accord and I hope that the November elections or the I mean if at all it happens will bring some sense into the country of US and they will rejoin the Paris Accord is my wish and I hope the second question was on the economy right what was your question second question yes sir and he said we don't need to take any regulatory measures against any industries because that's why the world has a capacity to articulate itself this is what he's saying no no that is very wrong because he has got advices who were CEO of ExxonMobil and Ebron and Chevron people who used to burn there's an institute called American Petroleum Institute it has published a report in 1950s not today 1950s they published a report saying how burning of carbon burning of fossil fuels like this will create a havoc in 1950s why 1950 we talk about NASA report on climate change about six months back it was it is it says if the climate change will devastate the world so you don't have to talk about he says what the science there that's what Greta Thunberg said you don't have to listen to me listen to the scientists listen to the reports listen to the researchers you and understand what's happening and the IPCC report on in 2018 which was published from Incheon in South Korea it's not a it's not a it's no no joke report it was published involving scientists in 160 countries there are 65 climatologists and there are six lakh data points from different parts of the world which they collected collected and they published this report of saying there is only about 12 years to save this world it is it is not a no meaner scientific achievement it's a it's a fantastic report you know I am I'm convinced with with whatever whatever I have read and I'm seeing it in my own eyes you know I don't have to I don't have to repeat the report name it's IPCC report it is in 2018 IPCC report in 2018 IPCC is intergovernmental panel on climate change that is a global organized global multilateral agency IPCC every country except for US has got a representative in that okay so friends thank you so much for being patient for the past about one and a half years one and a half hours and I hope that you know I am able to convey something new that you may not have known you know before attending this class thanks for a time and thanks for Chandru Khanderao so maybe we'll discuss when you come back and join your regular classes thank you


On September 4, 2020, the Centers for Disease Control halted residential evictions in the United States for nonpayment of rent because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Eviction protection still needs to be the very top priority. Forcing thousands of people out of their homes during a pandemic will make a public health crisis worse. Many states and municipalities got there first, imposing at least partial eviction moratoriums starting in March and April. The theory behind these emergency orders was that if Americans were forced to leave their homes and move into more crowded settings, it would increase transmission of the coronavirus. The federal ban was supposed to expire at the end of 2020. Then it was extended a month, then two more months, then three more months, and then until the end of July. Many states and cities have also extended their moratoriums, in some cases through the end of September, even as COVID infection and death rates are plummeting. That's going to make matters even worse for landlords. The smaller mom and pop landlords who depend the most on rent for their personal income are being hardest hit by renters not paying. Tenants will end up picking up the tab. I pay it. I have to raise rents to cover the eight or nine tenants who aren't paying that I have. Small landlords who make up the majority of rental property owners in America have been forced to raise rents, remove units from the market, or refuse low income or credit impaired tenants. Were the eviction bans necessary to protect public health during the pandemic? Two studies that got widespread media attention, and that have also been cited by the federal government to support its policies, claim to show that the moratorium saved thousands of lives. These studies that have been widely publicized are seriously flawed. The underlying data are inconsistent and incomplete. The results are implausible. The size of the effect is wildly disproportionate to other public health interventions. And the researchers claim an absurd amount of certainty, despite the fact the underlying data are highly uncertain. Aaron Brown is a statistician who was taught at NYU and UCSD. He's also the former chief risk officer at the Hedge Fund, AQR Capital Management. If these studies were correct, they should be in big bold headlines of every newspaper in America. They would be the most dramatic public health finding in history. One study from Duke University researchers found that compared to a scenario without any eviction moratoriums, policies that limit evictions could have reduced COVID-19 infections by 14.2% and deaths by 40.7%. The second study, whose lead author is a postdoctoral researcher at UCLA, found that in states that had eviction bands but lifted them before the CDC moratorium kicked in, there were between 8,988 and 12,470 excess deaths caused by lifting the moratoriums. To have the CDC come out in the context of the pandemic and say that this was their rationale for the moratorium was really powerful. Brown says the first problem with these studies is that they draw strong conclusions from poor data. Information on where, when, and how many evictions occur in the U.S. is collected by a patchwork of local governments and courts and is notoriously inaccurate and incomplete. The important question for public policy is, if we have eviction moratoriums, will it reduce COVID deaths? In order to establish a causal link of that sort, you've got to work through it step by step. How do the eviction moratoriums affect evictions? How do evictions affect crowding? How does crowding affect virus transmission? How does virus transmission affect infections and deaths? The researchers don't even try to do this, and they can't because we don't have the data on each of those links. Brown says the study's final numbers are particularly implausible when compared to other public health interventions. The Duke study, for example, claims that had the federal eviction moratorium been in place between March and November of 2020, about 40% of all Americans who died from COVID-19 in that period would have been spared. In other words, about 122,000 lives would have been saved compared to a scenario with no moratoriums at all. To put that into context, the CDC estimates that 600,000 Americans have died from COVID-19 in total. The moratoriums might have prevented tens of thousands of evictions. Even if we ignore the offsetting effect of people moving into the vacated housing and reducing crowding, the eviction moratoriums might have reduced to COVID infections by a few hundred people. Even allowing for a few super spreader events, it's unlikely that the evictees would have caused more than a few thousand additional infections in the population using the case mortality ratios at the time gives us a number of approximately 100 deaths that might have been prevented by eviction moratoriums. But the researchers claim high confidence for thousands or tens of thousands of lives saved. That's just implausible. Statistical studies not only present findings, they also include what's known as confidence intervals to express the level of certainty we should have in the results. In both studies, the authors claim 95% confidence in their final conclusions. The most precise data both studies use is the number of COVID deaths, and serious researchers disagree about that by a factor of 60%. The studies rely on long chains of data, each link of which has much greater uncertainty than 60%. And the final uncertainty in their answer has to be the product of all the individual uncertainties. Yet these research claim they can evaluate the causal effect of eviction moratorium with standard errors of roughly 10% or 20%. And they have 95% confidence in those estimates. Mitten County's banned evictions now researchers from Duke say those places are seeing fewer cases and deaths due to COVID-19. The Duke study was co-authored by a team of academics with prestigious credentials, including a professor of economics with a PhD from Stanford and a quantitative epidemiologist and assistant professor of medicine. In the study, which was published in the National Bureau of Economic Research's working paper series, the authors didn't include the datasets they had used to reach their conclusions and listed just two of their sources of data. So reason contacted the authors and asked to see their math. As the US Department of Health and Human Services Office of Research Integrity states, once a researcher has published the results of an experiment, it is generally expected that all the information about that experiment, including the final data, should be freely available for other researchers to check and use. These guidelines apply to federally funded studies, but are standard practice among academic researchers. But Duke University denied our request on the grounds that the study hasn't been peer reviewed and therefore wasn't considered published work. The Duke paper is what's known as a pre-print, in which researchers make a study publicly available prior to submitting it to an academic journal. And yet the authors gave interviews in which they promoted their findings and the paper was widely cited in the press, appears twice in the Federal Register as part of rulemaking issued by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and was cited in an amicus brief at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals to support legal arguments that eviction moratoriums have spared COVID-19 deaths. Duke also trumpeted the findings in a press release that encouraged members of the media interested in speaking with the authors to get in touch, though apparently not if that meant scrutinizing the actual dataset or code used to generate the paper's claims. The Duke researchers only cite sources for two of the data elements they use and those citations are incomplete. They claim to have gotten county level death data from the COVID tracking project, but that project doesn't have county level data at all. The Duke researchers also won't tell us when they accessed the data or how they matched it up with other data. If someone says they ran a multivariate regression, you want to know the exact code and adjustments they made. This is the only way independent researchers can validate the findings. Even without access to the researcher's data or code, Brown was able to discern a variety of ways in which the study misuses statistical techniques to arrive at faulty conclusions. First, the authors look only at differences within states when one locality had an eviction moratorium in place and another didn't, but they don't compare the COVID rates in entire states that had an eviction moratorium with those that didn't. Brown says it's clear that at the state level, those with moratoriums actually experienced more COVID deaths than states without them. The orange line shows states that always had an eviction moratorium in place. The black line represents states that never banned evictions. This finding, like the Duke study, is a correlation and almost certainly not causal. It doesn't prove that eviction moratoriums cause death. What it does do is put the burden of proof on anyone claiming a dramatic health benefit from eviction moratoriums to explain why it doesn't show up in the aggregate data. In fact, why we see the opposite. The Duke study is arguing that eviction moratoriums caused COVID death rates to decline and dramatically. If that were true, we should see the effect at all levels, both within states and between states. But the latter data doesn't support the author's conclusions, so they ignore it. The authors also ignore the timing of when people died from COVID-19. After states lifted their moratoriums, they had the same death rates as states that kept their bans in place and places that had moratoriums saw a major increase in COVID deaths in the summer of 2020, while in places that never banned evictions, death rates remained low. The other big data problem for the authors is that COVID death rates were higher when eviction moratoriums were in place than when they weren't. They don't make the obvious comparison of one place when it had an eviction moratorium versus when it didn't. All they do is they compare two different places, one of which had an eviction moratorium and one of which didn't. These two statistical manipulations allow the authors to get rid of the obvious objections to their study. All we can say is we have no idea from the data whether there's any causal effect one way or the other. Did eviction moratoriums increase COVID death rates, decrease them, or have no effect at all? We don't know. A new UCLA paper out this week directly links evictions to the spread of COVID-19. The study is a waiting peer review, but we wanted to make sure that policymakers had these numbers in hand as they're making decisions. Another widely cited study, which also hasn't been peer reviewed or appeared in an academic journal, looks at a period in which the CDC eviction moratorium wasn't in place during which evictions were partly allowed in 27 states. It argues that there were between 8,988 and 12,470 excess deaths caused by evictions in those states during this period. It also claims a 95% confidence interval for that finding. This study, written by an interdisciplinary team of researchers from several premier American universities, was cited by the CDC in its March 31 order extending the federal eviction moratorium. Like the Duke study, it was cited in the federal register and in the amicus brief to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The study's lead author, postdoctoral researcher Catherine Lifehite of the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, promoted the paper's conclusions in interviews with NPR, Vox, CNBC, ABC, and other outlets. Whenever you see numbers like 430,000 cases, 10,000 deaths, these are deaths that could have been prevented had the states maintained their moratoriums. It really is a human tragedy, not just numbers. But one reason reached out to her for an interview and said we were working with a statistician to examine the underlying data. She didn't reply to our query. This study is a model of transparent scientific reporting. The authors tell you exactly where they got their data and exactly what they did with it. I can duplicate their study. That also means I can pinpoint exactly what they did wrong. This study gets around the problem of the shoddy data on evictions by comparing death rates at times when moratoriums were in force versus times when they were not in force. Like the Duke study, it's looking to tease out the effect of a policy through correlation. The researchers note in some places when eviction moratoriums were listed COVID death rates went up. What they don't tell you is that in most places the opposite happened and in the aggregate the opposite happened. More than half the study's total of extra deaths they attribute to lifting eviction moratoriums come from Texas and South Carolina. If this were a genuine causal effect you'd expect to see it in every state or at least in most states and you'd expect to see it when the federal eviction ban were put in place. The fact that the authors can find a strong effect in only two out of 50 states shows this cannot possibly be a causal effect. Further complicating the study's results while it's true that in South Carolina and Texas there were no statewide eviction moratoriums during the study period major cities and counties within Texas had some type of ban and in South Carolina the state supreme court ordered strong restrictions on evictions statewide and nationwide many jurisdictions that didn't have explicit moratoriums still effectively halted evictions for months at a time as courts were shut down by social distancing directives. Others layered on emergency tenant protections subsidized housing costs or abated eviction proceedings for a period of weeks to months. All of these places are counted as having no eviction moratoriums at all. When Brown adjusts the authors analysis to account for local moratoriums and effective bans on eviction the authors effect goes away. Whether or not they did so knowingly Brown says the authors ended up manipulating the data to produce results that don't pass the sniff test. The elephant in the room as the last couple of decades have seen a floods of misconduct including fraudulent data no data and radically misrepresented data. We see it in the top institutions the top researchers top scientists. And the most discouraging part is institutions and journals circle the wagons to protect wrongdoers and slander anyone who questions the results. Duke had one of the most expensive and prominent examples of this when over a decade the university protected a medical researcher publishing false medical data. The university promised this would not happen again but the next chance they got when researchers were promoting dramatic public health claims but refusing to release their data the university closed ranks while at the same time pushing the findings out to any global reporter or policymaker they could find. The document Catherine Leifheit has compiled is dense. There are states, percentages, graphs and numbers lots of numbers. The study is still in pre-print that means it has not been peer reviewed yet. Normally we wouldn't cover a study like that. Thanks to journalists like you it is getting a fair amount of attention. Cancel the rent activists may have other reasons for wanting to make eviction bans permanent but they've seized on the results from these studies to pressure lawmakers and to push for a large expansion of the federal government's role in the housing market. An eviction crisis is looming. The moratorium is about to expire. Millions will be faced with evictions unless congress acts. I'm hearing numbers as many as 30 million people could be affected is that right? So that's one number that's been cited for sure. To the extent we're going to involve scientific research and policy discussions we should focus on the issues that have been studied by many people. Validated, sharing data argued back and forth. These shoddy one-off studies are just ammunition for people who want to put a link saying studies prove in an otherwise purely speculative article.