A Green City with AQI over 400 Today

New Delhi is considered one of the greenest cities in India. In June 2023, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal announced that "At 23 per cent, Delhi's green cover is higher than cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, and Bengaluru as well as London and New York" (The Pioneer). At the start of 2023, the Delhi government embarked on a mission to plant 5.2 million trees and shrubs, labelled a mega planting drive. But by the end of the year, Delhi recorded the most polluted December in the last five years (Business Standard). It was reported that Delhi's average air quality index (AQI) in the month was 348, the worst since 2018 when it was 360; In 2022, it was 319.

No doubt planting trees makes the city more attractive, made even greener with the massive effort to prepare for the G20 meetings in September. The debate over planting trees has reached the global stage between techno-centric versus eco-centric camps (The New York Times). It all started in 2020 at Davos, the global economic summit, when billionaire Marc Benioff, co-founder of technology company Salesforce, announced that he was going to help the Trump administration plant a trillion trees. Meanwhile, on the opposite side of the debate, Bill Gates' response to the theory that planting a lot of trees will offset the emissions caused by burning fossil fuels is "Are we the science people or are we the idiots?" Techno-optimists, like Gates, believe that a trillion trees will not help solve the problems, but rather technology such as clean energy and carbon capture will lead both adaptation and mitigation efforts to address the climate crisis.

This might explain why even 5.2 million new trees and shrubs in Delhi will not help us see the treetops shrouded by smog this winter.