MPSC 2021 Prelims Paper-I · Question 90 of 100

Correct — option (2), Anthropocene. The answer is in the title of the report itself. The Human Development Report 2020, published by the United Nations Development Programme and released on 15 December 2020, is called 'The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene', and its whole argument is that human development can no longer be measured or pursued as though the planet were an unlimited backdrop to it. The report's claim is that humanity has become a geological force — changing the climate, the composition of the atmosphere, the chemistry of the oceans and the distribution of species on a scale previously produced only by natural processes — and that the pressures this creates now feed back into human development itself, through heat, disease, water stress and the loss of the ecosystems that poor people depend on most directly. To make the point measurable the report introduced, for the first time, an experimental companion to the Human Development Index called the planetary pressures-adjusted HDI. It takes a country's HDI and discounts it by two measures of the burden that country places on the earth: carbon dioxide emissions per person, counted on a production basis, and material footprint per person. Countries with high human development and high consumption fall sharply when the adjustment is applied, while countries with lower emissions rise. India, ranked 131st of 189 countries on the HDI for that report with a value of 0.645, moved up eight places to 123rd on the adjusted measure with a value of 0.626, its per-person carbon emissions and material footprint both being well below the global average. The adjusted index is deliberately experimental and does not replace the HDI. But the word the blank in this stem wants is the one the report put in its own title, and that word is Anthropocene. Note also that the paper prints 'Human Development report 2020' with a lower-case r; it is reproduced as printed.

• (1)Holocene — The Holocene is the epoch we are formally still in, and it is exactly what the term Anthropocene was coined to displace. It began roughly eleven thousand seven hundred years ago at the end of the last glacial period, and it covers the whole of settled human history — the beginnings of agriculture, the first cities, every civilisation on record. That is why it is the strongest of the three wrong options: a candidate who knows the geological time scale but has not read the report will pick the epoch that is actually current and be defeated by the report's argument, which is that the Holocene's stable conditions have ended and something new has begun. Keeping the pair straight is the point of the question: Holocene is the ratified epoch of the last eleven millennia, Anthropocene the proposed epoch of human dominance that the report takes its title from.
• (3)Miocene — The Miocene is far too early to have any bearing on human development. It is an epoch of the Neogene period, running roughly from twenty-three million to about five million years ago, long before the appearance of the human genus; it is a period studied for the spread of grasslands and the diversification of apes, not for anything a development agency would report on. The option is present as one of two 'cene' names offered to a candidate who recognises the suffix without knowing the order of the epochs. The Cenozoic sequence is worth memorising once and for all — Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene, Holocene — because once the order is fixed, distractors of this kind become visible at a glance.
• (4)Eocene — The Eocene is earlier still, the second epoch of the Paleogene period, running from about fifty-six million to about thirty-four million years ago. It is best known for a warm global climate and for the early radiation of modern mammal orders, and it has no connection to any question about contemporary human development. Like the Miocene it is offered to catch a candidate matching on the shape of the word. The way to be certain here is to work from the report rather than from geology at all: the Human Development Report of 2020 is titled 'The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene', and a candidate who knows the title does not need the geological time scale to answer, while a candidate who knows only the time scale cannot answer at all.

Two ideas meet in this question. The first is the Anthropocene. The term was proposed in 2000 by the atmospheric chemist Paul J. Crutzen together with Eugene F. Stoermer to describe a new geological epoch in which human activity is the dominant influence on the earth's systems, and they suggested the latter part of the eighteenth century as its beginning. It has been widely adopted in environmental science, in policy documents and in ordinary discussion, but it has not been formally ratified as a unit of the geological time scale, so the current epoch remains officially the Holocene. The second idea is the Human Development Index, devised for the first Human Development Report in 1990 under the influence of Mahbub ul Haq and Amartya Sen as a deliberate alternative to judging countries by national income alone. It is a composite of three dimensions — a long and healthy life, measured by life expectancy at birth; knowledge, measured by mean years of schooling for adults and expected years of schooling for children; and a decent standard of living, measured by gross national income per person at purchasing power parity — combined as a geometric mean and expressed between zero and one. The UNDP has since built a family of related measures around it: the inequality-adjusted HDI, the Gender Development Index, the Gender Inequality Index, the Multidimensional Poverty Index and, from the 2020 report, the planetary pressures-adjusted HDI. The 2020 report's contribution is to join the two ideas — to ask what human development means once humanity has become a geological force, and to propose a way of measuring development that carries the cost to the planet inside it.

MPSC's environment and current-affairs questions lean heavily on the annual reports of international organisations, and the pattern is stable enough to prepare for directly. The Human Development Report comes from the UNDP; the World Development Report from the World Bank; the World Economic Outlook from the International Monetary Fund; the Global Hunger Index from Concern Worldwide and Welthungerhilfe; the Emissions Gap Report from the UN Environment Programme; the State of the World's Children from UNICEF. For each of them the examinable facts are the same four: which body publishes it, what the current edition is called, what the headline finding or new measure is, and where India stands. This question is unusually pure, because it asks only for the theme announced in the title, but the harder version is easy to imagine and easy to prepare for — India's rank, the new index, the three dimensions of the HDI, the year the first report appeared. Note too how the paper has built the option set: three real geological epochs and one proposed one, all sharing a suffix, so that a candidate who half-remembers the word cannot recover the answer by elimination. That construction is used repeatedly in this paper, and the defence against it is exact recall rather than partial recognition.

• The Human Development Report 2020, published by the United Nations Development Programme and released on 15 December 2020, is titled 'The Next Frontier: Human Development and the Anthropocene'.
• It introduced for the first time an experimental planetary pressures-adjusted Human Development Index, which discounts a country's HDI by its carbon dioxide emissions per person, counted on a production basis, and its material footprint per person; it does not replace the HDI.
• India was ranked 131st among 189 countries on the HDI in that report with a value of 0.645, and rose eight places to 123rd on the adjusted index with a value of 0.626, because its per-person emissions and material footprint are well below the global average.
• The term 'Anthropocene' was proposed in 2000 by Paul J. Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer for an epoch in which human activity dominates the earth's systems; it is widely used but has not been formally ratified into the geological time scale, and the current epoch remains officially the Holocene, which began about eleven thousand seven hundred years ago.
• The Human Development Index dates from the first Human Development Report of 1990 and combines life expectancy at birth, mean and expected years of schooling, and gross national income per person at purchasing power parity, as a geometric mean expressed between zero and one.

• Answering 'Holocene' because it is the epoch we are formally in. The report's title and its whole argument turn on the Anthropocene, which is the proposed successor
• Treating the Anthropocene as an officially recognised division of geological time. It is widely used and was proposed in 2000, but it has not been ratified into the time scale
• Confusing the planetary pressures-adjusted HDI with the HDI itself. The adjusted index is experimental, was introduced only in the 2020 report, and does not replace the headline measure
• Quoting an India rank without the year and the number of countries attached. The rank changes with each edition and is meaningless without both

Reports and indices are asked in a narrow and predictable set of ways, and a candidate who prepares them as a table rather than as reading will answer almost all of them. The commonest form gives the report and asks for the publishing body, or gives the body and asks for the report. The next gives the year and asks for the theme or title, as this question does, and it is easy for anybody who noted the title once. Beyond that come India's rank, the number of countries covered, the components of the index and any new measure introduced in that edition, which is where the planetary pressures-adjusted HDI belongs. MPSC also likes to place such a question next to a related one elsewhere in the paper — this very paper asks about the Anthropocene again a few questions later, through the man who coined the term — so a theme that appears once is worth reading around rather than merely noting.

No directly related past PYQ was found.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  The planetary pressures-adjusted Human Development Index, introduced in the Human Development Report 2020, adjusts a country's HDI for which of the following ?

  • (a)Income inequality and gender inequality
  • (b)Carbon dioxide emissions per person and material footprint per person
  • (c)Forest cover and renewable energy capacity
  • (d)Population density and urbanisation

  Answer(b) Carbon dioxide emissions per person and material footprint per person. The adjusted index discounts the HDI by those two measures of the burden a country places on the earth, so highly developed and high-consuming countries fall while lower-emitting countries rise; India moved up eight places, from 131st to 123rd, when the adjustment was applied. It is an experimental measure introduced in the 2020 report and does not replace the HDI. Adjusting for inequality is a different measure altogether, the inequality-adjusted HDI.

• practice — not a real PYQ

  Which of the following is the correct sequence of geological epochs, from the earliest to the most recent ?

  • (a)Miocene, Eocene, Holocene, Pleistocene
  • (b)Eocene, Miocene, Pleistocene, Holocene
  • (c)Holocene, Pleistocene, Miocene, Eocene
  • (d)Eocene, Pleistocene, Miocene, Holocene

  Answer(b) Eocene, Miocene, Pleistocene, Holocene. The Cenozoic epochs run Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pliocene, Pleistocene and Holocene, so the Eocene is the oldest of the four named here, at roughly fifty-six to thirty-four million years ago, and the Holocene the youngest, beginning about eleven thousand seven hundred years ago at the end of the last glacial period. The Anthropocene has been proposed as a further epoch following the Holocene but has not been formally ratified.