Biparjoy, which means “calamity” in Bengali, hit the state of Gujarat with speeds of up to 125 km per hour (78 mph), blowing roofs off houses and uprooting trees and electricity poles.

Yet the only deaths recorded were those of two shepherds who died while trying to prevent their cattle from being swept away hours before the cyclone made landfall.

In 1998, a major storm in Gujarat killed about 4,000 people, according to local media, while in 2021, close to 100 people died in an ‘extremely severe cyclone’ named Tauktae.

“Early identification of areas that were likely to be impacted by the cyclone and timely evacuation of people living within 10 km of the coasts are the biggest reasons” for low casualties, said Kamal Dayani, a senior Gujarat official.

“Our focus from the beginning was on preventing loss of lives, not just human lives but even animals.”

More than 100,000 people were evacuated from eight coastal districts and moved to shelters in school auditoriums and other government buildings a day before the cyclone struck.

Authorities also suspended fishing, shut schools and closed beaches. Many offshore oil installations and major ports suspended operations days earlier.

In addition, 30 teams of national and state disaster responders were deployed.

“We overprepared,” said Atul Karwal, chief of the National Disaster Response Force.

The storm hitting the sparsely populated parts of the desert district of Kutch also helped, Dayani said.

While the death toll was low, more than 5,100 electricity poles were toppled disrupting power supply to over 4,600 villages.

“We will study what we have done right and also identify the areas we can do better in the future,” Dayani said. – Rappler.com

Dorsey, who quit as Twitter CEO in 2021, said on Monday, June 12, that India also threatened the company with raids on employees if it did not comply with government requests to take down certain posts.

“It manifested in ways such as: ‘We will shut Twitter down in India’, which is a very large market for us; ‘we will raid the homes of your employees’, which they did; And this is India, a democratic country,” Dorsey said in an interview with YouTube news show Breaking Points.

Deputy Minister for Information Technology Rajeev Chandrasekhar, a top ranking official in Modi’s government, lashed out against Dorsey in response, calling his assertions an “outright lie”.

“No one went to jail nor was Twitter ‘shut down’. Dorsey’s Twitter regime had a problem accepting the sovereignty of Indian law,” he said in a post on Twitter.

Dorsey’s comments again put the spotlight on the struggles faced by foreign technology giants operating under Modi’s rule. His government has often criticized Google, Facebook and Twitter for not doing enough to tackle fake or “anti-India” content on their platforms, or for not complying with rules.

The former Twitter CEO’s comments drew widespread attention as it is unusual for global companies operating in India to publicly criticize the government. Last year, Xiaomi in a court filing said India’s financial crime agency threatened its executives with “physical violence” and coercion, an allegation which the agency denied.

Dorsey also mentioned similar pressure from governments in Turkey and Nigeria, which had restricted the platform in their nations at different points over the years before lifting those bans.

Twitter was bought by Elon Musk in a $44 billion deal last year.

Chandrasekhar said Twitter under Dorsey and his team had repeatedly violated Indian law. He didn’t name Musk, but added Twitter had been in compliance since June 2022.

Big Tech vs Modi

Modi and his ministers are prolific users of Twitter, but free speech activists say his administration resorts to excessive censorship of content it thinks is critical of its working. India maintains its content removal orders are aimed at protecting users and sovereignty of the state.

The public spat with Twitter during 2021 saw Modi’s government seeking an “emergency blocking” of the “provocative” Twitter hashtag “#ModiPlanningFarmerGenocide” and dozens of accounts. Farmers’ groups had been protesting against new agriculture laws at the time, one of the biggest challenges faced by the Modi government.

The government later gave in to the farmers’ demands.

Twitter initially complied with the government requests but later restored most of the accounts, citing “insufficient justification”, leading to officials threatening legal consequences.

In subsequent weeks, police visited a Twitter office as part of another probe linked to tagging of some ruling party posts as manipulated. Twitter at the time said it was worried about staff safety.

Dorsey in his interview said many India content take down requests during the farmer protests were “around particular journalists that were critical of the government.”

Since Modi took office in 2014, India has slid from 140th in World Press Freedom Index to 161 this year, out of 180 countries, its lowest ranking ever. – Rappler.com

The Commission of Railway Safety (CRS) investigators suspect the bypass was done by railway workers to get around signaling hurdles that arose from a malfunctioning barrier used to stop road traffic at a nearby rail-road intersection, two of the three sources said.

The sources did not want to be identified as they are not authorised to speak to the media.

The June 2 crash at Bahanaga Bazar station, in the Balasore district of the eastern Indian state of Odisha, killed at least 288 people and injured more than 1,000. It was India’s worst rail crash in two decades.

Indian and international media have previously reported that a possible malfunction in the automated signalling system may have led to the crash.

However, details of the frequent malfunctions at the nearby rail-road barrier and its possible connection to a manual bypass of the signalling system are reported by Reuters for the first time.

The CRS, which is India’s rail safety authority, did not respond to a request for comment.

‘Erratic barrier’

Indian Railways, the fourth largest train network in the world, is a state monopoly run by the Railway Board. The board reports to the Railways Ministry.

A spokesman for Indian Railways said “repair works keep happening as per requirements” but tampering with the automated system is not allowed. He declined to elaborate further on the causes of the crash, saying: “the investigation is on”.

Amitabh Sharma, chief information officer at the Railways Ministry, said the cause of the accident was still under investigation. Asked about investigators’ suspicions that the electronic system may have been manually bypassed, Sharma said: “These are all speculations which we cannot confirm at this juncture.”

A spokesman for the federal police’s Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which has opened a separate probe into possible criminal negligence, did not respond to a request for comment.

Reuters spoke to five residents of Bahanaga village who said the barrier at the railway crossing had been faulty for nearly three months and had been repaired frequently.

When there was a fault, the barrier would remain stuck in the closed position and had to be manually opened by railway workers, the residents said.

If the barrier was open, the automated signal system would not allow a train to go past the rail-road crossing, one retired Indian Railways official said. The official did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the crash investigation.

“The electric barrier would sometimes go up and sometimes it wouldn’t,” said Soubhagya Ranjan Sarangi, 25, a pharmacist with a shop close to the railway crossing.

Niranjan Sarangi, a 66-year-old retired school teacher who spends many evenings sitting near the crossing with friends, was there at the time of the crash. He said the barrier seemed to be functioning fine at the time.

“The barrier would malfunction sometimes. People from the department would come and fix it,” he said.

System ‘changed manually’

One of the three Indian Railways sources – all of whom had knowledge of the ongoing CRS probe – said initial investigation suggests the automatic electronic signalling system was “changed manually, for which the software has to be tampered with”.

“(Indian) Railways believes the system was tampered with,” said the second source, who has access to briefings on the investigation. “It is yet to be ascertained whether the intervention was intentional or by mistake or whether due to ongoing work near the signal.”

The third source said the preliminary probe suggested that the signalling system was bypassed because the repair workers were trying to fix the malfunctioning barrier.

India’s rail network is undergoing a $30 billion transformation with gleaming new trains and modern stations under Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s push to boost infrastructure and connectivity.

The June 2 crash has raised questions about whether safety is getting enough attention. The government has said safety indicators have improved over the years, accident rates have fallen and safety is getting adequate funds.

The crash happened when the Coromandel Express, heading to the southern city of Chennai from the eastern city of Kolkata, wrongly entered a side track of the station at a speed of 128 kph (80 mph), and rammed into a stationary iron ore freight train.

The Coromandel Express jumped off the tracks and toppled after impact. Some of its coaches hit another express train passing on a parallel track in the opposite direction, causing that one to also jump off the tracks and result in a massive wreck.

Two days after the crash, Jaya Varma Sinha, a Railway Board member, told reporters that it appeared that the electronic signalling system, called the “interlocking system”, had sent the Coromandel Express on the wrong track by giving it a green signal.

The CRS findings now suggest that the system, which Sinha said is supposed to be “fail-safe”, had been compromised by workers trying to find a workaround, the third Indian Railways source said.

Sinha did not respond to a Reuters request for an update on the investigation.

Sandeep Mathur, Indian Railways’ principal executive director for signalling, the top official responsible for signalling, did not respond to Reuters requests for information about the supplier of the interlocking system.

Reuters could not independently establish the identity of the supplier or verify Sinha’s claim that it is fail-safe.

‘Manual interference not unusual’

The interlocking system coordinates between the signal, track route and track occupancy, and ensures they all work in tandem to take a train safely through a station, Mathur told reporters two days after the crash.

He did not respond to Reuters’ subsequent requests for more details.

The third railways source, as well as a retired railways official and a senior police officer who worked in the railway police in Odisha, told Reuters that railway workers sometimes manually interfere with the system to change the signal so that rail traffic is not slowed or stopped while they do any repair and maintenance work, especially on busy routes.

The retired official and the police officer did not want to be identified due to the sensitivity of the crash investigation.

The manual workaround is allowed under railway protocols if it is authorised by an empowered senior official and all precautions are in place, said Sudhanshu Mishra, another retired railways official who worked in the safety department.

The Indian Railways spokesman did not directly address the authorisation issue and only said it is not allowed under Indian Railways rules.

Reuters could not independently determine if the suspected workaround on the evening of the crash was authorised or not.

A June 8 Railway Board circular on “safety of track” sent to all general managers of Indian Railways, seen by Reuters, said workers “should be counseled and guided for not adopting any shortcuts while carrying out the work”.

Controls of the interlocking system are located inside a small railways building at the Bahanaga Bazar station and access is restricted to authorised railways workers and officials.

The second source said records showed that the Bahanaga system control room had been accessed two times that evening the first time for authorised operational work, while the reason for the second visit is yet to be established.

Reuters was unable to access those records.

All railway employees at the station, including those involved in the barrier repair work, have been questioned by the railways investigators and will also be questioned by the CBI, the second and the third source said.

They declined to name them as this is an ongoing investigation. Reuters could not independently establish how many workers are under investigation or their identities. – Rappler.com

The death toll from Friday evening’s crash was revised down from 288 after it was found that some bodies had been counted twice, said Pradeep Jena, chief secretary of the eastern state of Odisha.

The tally is unlikely to rise, he told reporters. “Now the rescue operation is complete.”

But nearly 1,200 were injured when a passenger train hit a stationary freight train, went off the tracks, and hit another passenger train passing in the opposite direction near the district of Balasore.

State-run Indian Railways, which says it transports more than 13 million people every day, has been working to improve its patchy safety record, blamed on aging infrastructure.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who faces an election due next year, visited the scene on Saturday, June 3, to talk to rescue workers, inspect the wreckage and meet some of the injured.

“Those found guilty will be punished stringently,” Modi said.

Preliminary investigation

A preliminary investigation indicated the Coromandel Express, heading to Chennai from Kolkata, moved out of the main track and entered a loop track – a side track used to park trains – at 128 kilometers per hour, crashing into the freight train parked on the loop track, said Railway Board member Jaya Varma Sinha.

That crash caused the engine and first four or five coaches of the Coromandel Express to jump the tracks, topple and hit the last two coaches of the Yeshwantpur-Howrah train heading in the opposite direction at 126 kilometers per hour on the second main track, she told reporters.

This caused those two coaches to jump the tracks and result in the massive wreckage, Sinha said.

The drivers of both passenger trains were injured but survived, she said.

Restoration

Workers with heavy machinery were clearing the damaged track, wrecked trains and electric cables, as distraught relatives looked on.

More than 1,000 people were involved in the rescue, the Railway Ministry said on Twitter.

“The target is by Wednesday morning the entire restoration work is complete and tracks should be working,” said Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw.

At a business centre where bodies were being taken for identification, dozens of relatives waited, many weeping and clutching identification cards and pictures of missing loved ones.

Kanchan Choudhury, 49, was searching for her husband at the centre. Five people from her village were on the train, four of them being treated at the hospital for injuries. Her husband was found dead, she said, weeping as she waited to claim compensation, carrying her and her husband’s identity cards.

Families of the dead will get 1 million rupees ($12,000) in compensation, while the seriously injured will get 200,000 rupees, with 50,000 rupees for minor injuries, Vaishnaw said on Saturday.

Pope Francis, US President Joe Biden, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and French President Emmanuel Macron have expressed condolences. – Rappler.com

One train in Friday’s accident also hit a freight train parked nearby in the district of Balasore in Odisha state, leaving a tangled mess of smashed rail cars and injuring 1,000.

A possible signal error led to the tragedy, according to an initial government report seen by Reuters.

The death toll has reached 261, said KS Anand, chief public relations officer of South Eastern Railway. The AFP news agency had earlier quoted an official as saying 288 people had died.

Surviving passenger Anubha Das said he would never forget the scene. “Families crushed away, limbless bodies and a bloodbath on the tracks,” he said.

Video footage showed derailed train coaches and damaged tracks, with rescue teams searching the mangled carriages to pull the survivors out and rush them to hospital.

People were seen searching for their relatives at the site and nearby hospitals.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi reached the scene, talked to the rescue workers and inspected the wreckage. He is likely to visit hospitals and see the survivors.

A witness involved in rescue operations said the screams and wails of the injured and the relatives of those killed were chilling. “It was horrific and heart-wrenching,” he said.

Families of the dead will receive 1 million rupees ($12,000), while the seriously injured will get 200,000 rupees, with 50,000 rupees for minor injuries, Railway Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw said. Some state governments have also announced compensation.

“It’s a big, tragic accident,” Vaishnaw told reporters after inspecting the accident site. “Our complete focus is on the rescue and relief operation, and we are trying to ensure that those injured get the best possible treatment.”

Early on Saturday morning, Reuters video footage showed police officials moving bodies covered in white cloths off the railway tracks.

Dismembered bodies

“I was asleep,” an unidentified male survivor told NDTV news. “I was woken up by the noise of the train derailing. Suddenly I saw 10-15 people dead. I managed to come out of the coach, and then I saw a lot of dismembered bodies.”

Video footage from Friday showed rescuers climbing up one of the mangled trains to find survivors, while passengers called for help and sobbed next to the wreckage.

The collision occurred around 7 pm (1330 GMT) on Friday when the Howrah Superfast Express from Bengaluru to Howrah in West Bengal collided with the Coromandel Express from Kolkata to Chennai.

After an extensive search-and-rescue involving hundreds of fire department personnel, police officers, and National Disaster Response Force teams as well as sniffer dogs – authorities have ended the rescue operation. Workers have started clearing debris to restore rail traffic.

On Friday, hundreds of young people lined up outside a government hospital in Odisha’s Soro to donate blood.

According to Indian Railways, its network transports more than 13 million people every day. But the state-run monopoly has had a patchy safety record because of ageing infrastructure.

Odisha Chief Minister Naveen Patnaik described the crash as “extremely tragic.” The state has declared Saturday a day of mourning as a mark of respect to the victims.

Opposition Congress party leader Jairam Ramesh said the accident reinforced why safety should always be the foremost priority of the rail network.

Modi’s administration has launched high-speed trains as part of plans to modernise the network, but critics say it has not focused enough on safety and upgrading ageing infrastructure.

India’s deadliest railway accident was in 1981 when a train plunged off a bridge into a river in Bihar state, killing an estimated 800 people.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, and French President Emmanuel Macron expressed condolences over the accident. – Rappler.com

($1 = 82.4000 Indian rupees)

Dark clouds gather overhead; there is no shelter for miles. “The weather has become increasingly erratic here,” says our trek guide Nawang. “It rarely rains in October, but this year we have seen unprecedented wet weather, which has caused these gullies to fill and deepen.”

We make haste to our campsite, passing several gullies with frozen water. Soon after we reach the warmth of our camp, it begins to snow, at least a month too early for this elevation. This is the last day of our trek.

Endeavors to shield nature from such assaults can bring their problems, from economically painful tourism bans to brute-force concrete berms that do harm themselves. What if Uttarakhand officials could find a way to protect the environment, the economy, and the local communities all at once?

“When I first set eyes on this spectacular meadow, I was struck by the different human stressors as well as natural climatic factors endangering it,” says Sandeep Kumar, the divisional forest officer of the area between 2018 and 2021.

“Nomadic shepherds traditionally camped there with their livestock, unattended cattle of the adjacent villages grazed there, and it had become one of Uttarakhand’s most popular trekking destinations because of its beautiful expanse of grassy meadows and easy accessibility.”

Over the last five years, however, the number of tourists visiting the local meadow of Dayara Bugyal has increased by 186 percent, to about 2,850 visitors per year. 

Kumar also found that overgrazing resulted in denudation and trampling of the grasses. Gullies formed by erosion widened and deepened in every monsoon. This funneled the rainwater, silt, and debris downhill at great speed, increasing the risk of flash floods, landslides, and rockfalls in the heavily populated lower elevations. 

“The government and forest department wanted us to come up with a solution after the state High Court acknowledged the urgent need to restore meadows in Uttarakhand,” Kumar recalls. “Given how ecologically fragile they were, building concrete check dams would have been folly. Imagine the cost of ferrying the heavy materials up, and the environmental havoc all that cement would wreak on these meadows.” 

Bioengineering presented a viable solution.

Kumar and his team at the Uttarkashi forest division began training women from the village of Raithal to stitch coir, a biodegradable fiber obtained from the husk of coconuts, into logs. The logs were then filled with waste pine needles, locally called pirul.

“In an area of 6,600 square meters, we filled every gully with these logs and tethered them with bamboo pegs,” Kumar says.

They also constructed check dams using the same logs to further reduce the speed of water and collect the topsoil being carried away by rainwater. 

When Kumar and his team visited the restoration sites during the flowering season, they observed that the coir matting and trapped silt had optimized the temperature and soil conditions for germination. “We found that not only had the seeds we’d sown taken root, but many other species had also germinated because their seeds were in the topsoil trapped in the logs,” he says. 

“I remember a particularly intense spell of rain barely months after we built these check dams,” Kumar says. “I trekked up to Dayara worried that much of our hard work had been destroyed.”

Instead, the bioengineered check dams were intact and had in fact slowed down the flow of water from the meadow to the waterfalls and streams below. He reckons it will take between three and four years for the coir and pine needles to decompose into mulch. By then, the gradual buildup of silt and organic material will allow these restored patches to blend seamlessly with the natural meadows.

Repairing the damage was only half the battle, however. Kumar and the forest department had to simultaneously figure out how to regulate the human and cattle activity that had contributed to the denudation of Dayara Bugyal in the first place. 

“Initially when the residents of Raithal village heard about the plan to restore Dayara Bugyal, we worried about access to our grazing grounds,” Rawat says. “Our animals needed to eat, too!” 

Regular meetings in 2018 explained that the restoration of Dayara planned to divert and reduce, and not take away, their grazing rights. “We also realized that this would provide us employment, rare to find in villages like ours,” Rawat says.

The villagers created a group of about 70 members who stitched coir logs and filled them with pine needles. Local mule owners carried the logs, bamboo, and other material up to the meadow, where other group members built the check dams and filled the gullies.

Mohan Lal, a marginal farmer (meaning, owning up to one hectare) and orchard owner, was one of them. “In the two months it took for the project to be implemented, each member earned between $300 USD and $370” he says. “That’s very good money for a village with few livelihood opportunities.” 

Additionally, the forest department developed an alternate grazing ground to reduce the pressure on Dayara. Kuniyal assesses that this, along with the regular meetings to sensitize local communities, has reduced the number of animals who graze there.

“The use of locally made coir logs filled with locally available organic materials has helped reduce the project cost by at least 20 percent and also generated direct and alternate livelihood opportunities for 700 households,” he says. “I feel that perhaps the project cost could further be reduced if one is able to find a locally available material to replace the coir, which comes from at least 1,500 miles away.”

Environmentalists have used several techniques to restore alpine and subalpine meadows the world over, including using snowmelt to recharge groundwater in California’s Yosemite National Park and regulating grazing practices in Western Himalayan alpine paddocks and China. However, the Dayara Bugyal project stands out for its replicability: it is low cost, involves the community, and the logs can be made with locally available fibers and biomass.

“It took two months and cost about Rs 27 lakh (approximately $33,110 USD) to execute this project,” Kumar says. “And by enlisting local community help, we ensured its continuity without compromising their socio-economic needs.” 

The Dayara Bugyal model has been recognized by the Uttarakhand government as one of the most suitable ways to restore Himalayan meadows with significant gully erosion. It is in the process of being replicated across the state and in other parts of the country, too.

The technique can also be used to bioengineer repairs in the Himalayas and other ecologically fragile landscapes. “For example, it can be used to support terraces on mountain slopes, on which subsistence farmers grow their crops. It can also be used to anchor fragile slopes that have become prone to landslides and rock falls,” Kumar says. 

Meanwhile, Rajbir Rawat is optimistic that Dayara Bugyal could soon return to its former, magical glory. “Raithal would benefit from the increase in tourist arrivals,” he says, “and I might just see the flowers and herbs of my childhood once again.” – Rappler.com

This story was originally published on Reasons to be Cheerful and is republished within the Human Journalism Network program, supported by the ICFJ, International Center for Journalists.

Over the last two decades, Geetanjali Krishna has traveled across India to report on the environment, climate change and global health. She co-founded The India Story Agency, a cross-border media collaborative with London-based journalist Sally Howard in 2020.

The Indian central bank announced on Friday, May 19, the country’s largest denomination note will be withdrawn from circulation by the end of September. While it did not specify the reason for the move, it comes ahead of state and general elections in the country when, analysts said, cash usage typically spikes, often in unaccounted deals.

The currency exchange is expected to be far less disruptive than a 2016 move to demonetize 86% of the country’s currency in circulation overnight.

Since the weekend, people have thronged outlets to spend using the 2,000-rupee note to avoid the hassle of queuing up at banks to exchange them or invite scrutiny from the tax department by depositing large sums.

Indian shops, for their part, eagerly accepted the note, using it as an opportunity to increase sales, several of them said on Tuesday, May 23, the first day the exchange was allowed.

“A lot of people are using 2,000-rupee notes to pay for mangoes since Saturday,” said Mohammad Azhar, 30, a mango seller near the Crawford Market area in India’s financial capital of Mumbai.

“On a daily basis, I get 8 to 10 notes now. I accept it. I have no option, it’s my business. I will deposit everything at once before September 30. There is no fear since the note is valid.”

Michael Martis, store manager at a Rado store in a mall in central Mumbai, said his store had seen a 60% to 70% increase in 2,000-rupee notes since the withdrawal was announced.

“That has increased our watch sales to 3 to 4 pieces per day from 1 to 2 previously,” said Martis.

Food-delivery firm Zomato said on its Twitter account on Monday, May 22, that 72% of the “cash on delivery” orders have been paid in 2,000-rupee notes since Friday.

However, not all shop owners were as receptive of the notes.

“I don’t accept; I won’t accept. I don’t want to get into the trouble of depositing it with my bank,” said a restaurant owner in South Mumbai.

Unlike in 2016, when customers rushed to banks to exchange the scrapped currency notes, bank branches in Mumbai and New Delhi were mostly quiet with a handful of people standing in queues.

Maximum crowds were seen at counters of India’s largest lender, State Bank of India, as the bank chose not to ask for any documentation for exchange of up to the maximum allowed 20,000 rupees at one time. – Rappler.com

$1 = 81.7800 Indian rupees

In his opening remarks to the summit, PNG Prime Minister James Marape said India was the leader of the Global South, a term used to refer to some low and middle income countries, adding “our people have been left behind”.

Modi told the 14 leaders of the Forum for India-Pacific Islands Cooperation that India would be a reliable partner to small island states amid difficulties caused by supply chain disruptions and climate change. India was committed to a free and open Indo Pacific, he said.

Earlier, Modi wrote on social media he had discussed “ways to augment cooperation in commerce, technology, healthcare and in addressing climate change” with PNG in a bilateral meeting with Marape on Monday.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken is expected to sign a Defense Cooperation Agreement between the United States and PNG, and also hold a Pacific Island leaders meeting in the afternoon.

Washington would provide $45 million in new funds as it partnered with PNG to strengthen economic and security cooperation, including protective equipment for the PNG defense force, climate change mitigation and tackling transnational crime and HIV/AIDS, the US State Department said.

The United States Commander for the Indo-Pacific Command, Admiral John Aquino, on Monday attended a ceremony at PNG’s Murray Barracks to present personal protective equipment to PNG’s defense force, the PNG Post Courier reported.

Marape told media on Sunday the defense agreement would also see an increase in the US military presence over the next decade.

Police Commissioner David Manning said there was a heavy police and military presence around the capital Port Moresby with roads blocked, and defence patrol boats in the water around the meeting venue, for the biggest assembly of international leaders in the country since a 2018 APEC summit.

Several universities held protests at campuses against the signing of the Defense Cooperation Agreement, amid concern it would upset China. Marape has denied it would stop PNG working with China, an important trade partner.

China, a major provider of infrastructure to the Pacific Islands in recent years, signed a security pact with Solomon Islands last year, prompting concern from the United States and its allies over Beijing’s intentions in a region covering vital sea lanes.

The US defense agreement would boost PNG’s defense infrastructure and capability after decades of neglect, the PNG government said earlier.

New Zealand Prime Minister Chris Hipkins told reporters in Port Moresby the defense agreement between the United States and PNG was “an extension of an existing relationship and it isn’t just about military presence but it’s also about development”.

Blinken will also sign a Ship Riders Pact, allowing US Coast Guard vessels with PNG officials aboard to patrol its exclusive economic zone, PNG’s government said in a statement on Monday. – Rappler.com

When the heat rises, the metal blackens. Plastic pearls become unglued.

“The color of the jewel starts to fade as it becomes hotter, making it worthless and akin to junk,” said the 56-year-old mother of four, on a late April day when temperatures simmered around 38 Celsius (100F) in the western city of Ahmedabad.

Climate change drove heat in the city to a record-breaking 48ºC (118F) in 2016. Last year, it peaked at nearly 46ºC (114.8F).

Such high temperatures could mean a hit to business. But Patni is now among 21,000 self-employed women in Gujarat state enrolled in one of the world’s first insurance schemes for extreme heat, launched this month by nonprofit Arsht-Rock Foundation Resilience Center in partnership with microinsurance startup Blue Marble and a trade union.

If temperatures climb high enough above historical averages and linger there for three days, she’ll receive a small payout to help cope and compensate lost income.

While traditional insurance can take months to pay, with so-called “parametric” insurance there is no need to prove losses. It can pay within days of a trigger being reached – a predetermined threshold beyond which conditions are considered extreme. Payments can be set to things like wind speeds or rainfall.

This form of disaster assistance is on the rise across the developing world, as vulnerable communities are hammered by worsening drought, storms and heatwaves.

But with climate change happening faster and causing more damage than scientists had predicted – and too little money being spent on protecting populations – such projects could struggle over the longer-term, according to more than 20 industry experts consulted by Reuters.

Reinsurer Swiss RE reported that sales of parametric product jumped 40% between 2021 and August 2022. Insurance analysts at Allied Market Research estimate the market, valued at $11.7 billion in 2021, could reach $29.3 billion by 2031.

At annual climate talks in Egypt last year, nonprofits urged richer nations to help finance parametric insurance as a way of compensating victims of worsening weather extremes.

It is still somewhat niche “but it’s growing,” said Ekhosuehi Iyahen, secretary general of the Insurance Development Forum, an industry-led group that promotes insurance for non-traditional markets.

The past year has seen new products rolled out across Latin America, Africa, and Asia-Pacific. The UN Capital Development Fund, for example, recently developed parametric policies for Vanuatu, Tonga, and Fiji covering cyclone damage.

Limits

While parametric insurance has been around since the 1990s, recent advances in satellite technologies have opened up areas that were previously difficult to assess for damage, such as distant islands or mountain communities.

However, some industry experts question whether the products will be financially viable in the long-run, in part because of too-frequent payouts due to climate risks escalating faster than predicted less than a decade ago. This could drive up premiums.

Some schemes have already fizzled. The Kenya Livestock Insurance Program, for example, supported pastoralists hit by drought with 1.2 billion Kenyan shillings ($8.8 million) in payouts between 2015 and 2021. But with just 1.1 billion ($8.1 million) shillings collected in premiums, the scheme operated at a loss and was replaced this year with another that offers other financial savings products alongside insurance.

At the moment, insurance schemes in the developing world are largely subsidized by nonprofit groups, national governments, or wealthy countries.

Many of the programs aspire to have policyholders eventually cover more if not all of the premium. But worsening extremes could make that difficult, said resilience researcher Viktor Roezer of the London School of Economics, noting the programs could just become a “different channel for aid.”

Interviews with more than a dozen groups involved in such insurance found that most products launched in the last five years had already paid out.

The products need to “geographically diversify – we have to have schemes spread out in different areas” to dilute the risk, said Jaime de Pinies, CEO of the Blue Marble group that developed the Gujarat heat program, as well as others in Colombia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.

Adapt

One way of avoiding constant payouts, industry analysts say, is for governments to implement better strategies to defend against weather extremes, for example by planting crops more resilient to drought or building cooler homes to protect against rising heat, thus slashing losses. This could allow insurers to set triggers higher.

“The beauty of the parametric is that it pays so quickly and it’s incredibly flexible,” said Kathy Baughman McLeod, director of the Arsht-Rock Foundation Resilience Center which is covering the $10.30 per person premium in Gujarat.

“But it needs to be paired with actions or tools that reduce the risk.”

Investment in boosting resilience remains marginal in most developing economies, with financing promised by richer countries not yet fully materializing.

Donor nations mobilized just $29 billion in 2020 to help poorer countries adapt to a warmer world — far below the $340 billion estimated by the UN Environment Programme to be needed each year by 2030.

“In most cases, there is zero adaptation spend,” said CEO Jonathan Gonzales of parametric start-up Raincoat, which has deployed five projects in Colombia, Mexico, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

Heat impacts

Across the world, heatwaves that once had a 1-in-10 chance of occurring in any given year prior to the industrial revolution are now nearly three times as likely, and 1.2ºC (2.2F) hotter, according to a 2022 study in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Scientists expect things to get worse, with such heatwaves becoming nearly six times as likely if greenhouse gas emissions continue unabated and the world reaches 2ºC (3.6F) of warming, the study found.

In the case of the Gujarat heat scheme, insured by ICICI Bank with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) as the group policyholder, the calculation determining the trigger varies across five districts. It is based on temperature expectations from historical trends over six 10-day assessment cycles.

In Ahmedabad, for example, payouts occur when temperatures add up to between 134ºC (273ºF) and 138ºC (280ºF) over the course of three days, assessed using satellite data. The policy can pay out multiple times, to a maximum of $85.

“For vulnerable women on the margins, enduring extreme temperatures for three days directly amplifies the chances of sickness or death,” said Sahil Hebbar, a physician attending to the women in SEWA who work jobs in construction, trash collecting and shipbreaking.

Insurance payouts allow them to buy things like gloves to protect their hands from scorching hot metal tools, or fans to stay cool and avoid heat exhaustion.

Had the insurance scheme been in place last year, it would have led to averaged payouts of $28 per person, said Blue Marble’s de Pinies.

Sitting with her jewel in the market, Patni said if temperatures climbed higher she would put payout money toward medicine to help with heat-related headaches.

“I spend 15 hours at the stall everyday…in summers it becomes difficult to stay here,” she said.

Across the city, Heena Kamlesh Parmar, 26, works as a daily wage laborer at a construction site where she is building a high-rise residential complex, earning 350 rupees ($4.25) per day.

The heat makes her want to take a break from hauling bricks to rest in shade, she said, but she fears that could lead to a pay cut.

If she receives a payout, Parmar says, she’ll “use it to buy things for my house, things to eat.” – Rappler.com

The distant-water fishing vessel “Lupeng Yuanyu 028”, owned by Penglai Jinglu Fishery Co Ltd based in Shandong province, capsized early on Tuesday.

“Indian Navy’s P8I aircraft undertook extensive search in the area and located the capsized fishing vessel on 18 May,” a statement said.

It said the position of the capsized boat was relayed to the Chinese navy, adding that “subsequently, P8I also sighted the fishing vessel’s life-raft and guided fishing vessel Lu Peng Yuan Yu 017 towards it”.

The Indian navy is on standby to provide any additional assistance to the ongoing search-and-rescue efforts, it added.

Chinese state media had reported that the 39 people on board – 17 Chinese crew members, 17 Indonesians and five from the Philippines – were missing.

The Indian navy statement did not refer to them.

Chinese President Xi Jinping had ordered all efforts be made to search for survivors.

China’s maritime search and rescue centre had informed relevant countries of the accident and the foreign ministry had told its missions in Australia, Sri Lanka, Maldives, Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries to coordinate search and rescue operations. – Rappler.com