Table of Contents

Effect of high temperatures, low productivity on India’s growth prospects

NEWS IN SHORT

During hot spells, people were less productive at work and more likely to be absent. At an individual level, this is not surprising but aggregated together, factories produced about two per cent less revenue for every degree rise in annual temperature.
In the middle of the most devastating pandemic India has seen in a century, it can be hard to think of the other challenges that lie ahead of us.
high temperatures consistently hurt economic output by reducing the productivity of human labour.

SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

Marx and Engels were convinced that capitalism was to blame for these events that eventually led to a bad state for the whole society.
They wanted to make the gap between nature and people smaller and reinstate the bond between them, but did not know how to establish it.
Marx talked about the “humanization of nature” which he said will give humans a better understanding of nature and how we can co-exist in a way that benefits both the environment and us. He even pointed out specific environmental issues and saw the importance of ecological sustainability.
Both Marx and Engels were pro-organic agriculture since they saw the danger in taking away all the nutrients in the soil and using chemicals to get more crops. They suggested that to stop pollution from fertilizers, farmers could use recycled human waste from the city instead.
None of these three founders—Durkheim, Weber and Marx—spoke directly about environmental sociology, but they were all talking about it indirectly, as they were talking about humans and nature.
One challenge in today’s society is the correlation between social and environmental vulnerability. This gives different countries different capabilities to cope with environmental disasters depending on economic and political factors.