Human Development report 2020 (Published by UNDP) emphasises the relations between Human Development and _________.

Question

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

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.

Why the other options are wrong — (a) 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.  (c) 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.  (d) 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.

Concept: 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.

State PCS 2021 Q90 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2021 Q90 — Current Affairs PYQ with Answer