This month’s PPIA Praxis seminar featured noted public health professional and natural historian Pranay Lal, who delivered a keynote on Unseen Pathways in Climate Mitigation. Drawing from geology, ecology, and microbiology, Lal challenged mainstream climate narratives centered on tree planting and carbon credits, instead spotlighting nature’s own hidden systems of carbon capture and burial rivers, soils, deserts, oceans, and microbes. His lecture invited fellows and practitioners to rethink climate action through a lens of permanence, resilience, and grounded ecological knowledge.

Insights from Pranay Lal at the PPIA Praxis Seminar

The session delved into pressing questions: How is carbon stored in nature? Why have human interventions disrupted the delicate balance of the carbon cycle? And most importantly, what “unseen” or underexplored pathways exist for mitigating climate change?

Fossil Fuels: Millions of Years in the Making, Minutes to Burn

Pranay Lal began by reminding us that coal, lignite, and anthracite are not just energy sources but compressed forests from 260–50 million years ago. While it took nature millions of years to capture and store that carbon underground, humans extract and burn it in a matter of days, releasing in minutes what was locked for millennia. This imbalance, he argued, lies at the heart of the climate crisis.

The Carbon Cycle and Its Disruptions

While we often think only of photosynthesis and trees as carbon sinks, Pranay Lal emphasized that the real challenge is not capture alone but carbon burial. Unless carbon is locked deep into the earth or sediments for thousands of years, it re-enters the atmosphere through decomposition or fires.

He posed three critical questions for any carbon strategy:

1. Where is the carbon going to be buried?
2. How will it be transported there?
3. What is the residence time 50 years, 10,000 years, or a million years?

He cautioned, many carbon capture promises remain hollow.

Learning from Rivers: The Example of the Ganga

One of Pranay Lal’s most fascinating insights was about the Ganga River. He explained how rainfall, slightly acidic from dissolved CO₂, reacts with granite in the young Himalayas to sequester carbon in mineral form. This process, unique to the Ganga basin, helps explain why Ganga water was historically believed to remain “pure.”

More importantly, floods, often viewed as disasters, play a vital ecological role by carrying sediments (and carbon) downstream into deltas, effectively burying it. This turns floods into a climate service, not just a hazard.

The Role of Deserts and Dust

The speaker challenged myths about deserts. Far from being “wastelands,” deserts like the Sahara fertilize ecosystems thousands of kilometers away. Dust storms from the Sahara carry iron and potassium, nourishing the Amazon rainforest and Caribbean coral reefs. Similarly, India’s Western Ghats receive vital dust inputs from Oman and East Africa.

Oceans: The Hidden Carbon Superpower

Oceans, Pranay Lal stressed, are the true champions of carbon burial, outperforming all forests combined. Microorganisms like Prochlorococcus and Synechococcus tiny cyanobacteria floating in the ocean’s top 80 meters capture an estimated 22% of the world’s carbon. Once they die, they sink, burying carbon deep in ocean sediments.

Supporting this cycle are creatures like the lantern fish, the most abundant vertebrate on Earth, which migrate daily between the ocean surface and depths, transporting carbon with them. Even whales, once hunted nearly to extinction, play a vital role in oceanic nutrient and carbon cycles.

Questioning Current Solutions

The speaker was deeply sceptical of over-simplified solutions:

• Tree planting: “Had we done it till the 1970s, it might have worked. Now, planting trees alone is insufficient.”
• Carbon credits: “Without clarity on burial, transport, and residence time, carbon credits risk becoming a false economy.”
• Technological fixes: From biochar to enhanced rock weathering, most lack field trials and ignore local soil, water, and climate conditions.

For him, soil and sediment conservation remain the most reliable pathways, since 40–45% of permanent carbon storage happens in soil, not trees.

Field Voices: Reflections and Realities

The Q&A enriched the seminar, bringing district perspectives into dialogue with global science.

• Avdhesh (Gumla, Jharkhand) asked about carbon credits and plantation programs being introduced by companies. Lal responded: “Trees improve microclimate and reduce runoff, yes. But the real capture lies in soil. Unless leaf litter is buried and carbon is stored underground, plantations remain temporary fixes. Ask them: What additional measures are they taking to ensure burial and permanence?”
  
  
• Sanchit (Madhya Pradesh) raised concerns about dams. Lal pointed to “blue methane”—the methane released by decomposing vegetation in dam reservoirs. He argued that dams often turn into carbon sources rather than sinks, challenging the narrative that hydropower is always “green.”
  
  
• Other learners asked about Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) machines. Lal cautioned that while machines can trap carbon, the bigger question is where and for how long will it be stored? Without addressing permanence, CCS risks becoming another short-term technological fix.

The Q&A underscored a central message: mitigation strategies must be judged not just by capture, but by burial, transport, and permanence.

Reflections and Conclusion

Listening to Pranay Lal’s lecture was like being guided through the hidden ecologies of Earth’s climate system from granite rocks in the Himalayas to microbes in the ocean, from Saharan dust to lantern fish migrations.

What struck me most was his insistence that nature has already devised elegant systems of carbon capture and burial, but human actions deforestation, overfishing, damming, and fossil fuel extraction have disrupted them.

For practitioners like us working in resource-challenged districts, his message has profound implications:

• Plantation drives alone are not enough. Soil health, groundwater, and sediment flows must be central to climate-sensitive planning.
• Carbon credits should be approached critically. Communities must not be misled into projects that promise benefits without guaranteeing permanence.
• Local knowledge and natural history matter. Rivers, deserts, oceans, and microbes all hold lessons for climate action that global narratives often overlook.

In conclusion, Pranay Lal reminded us that climate mitigation is not only about new technologies or international frameworks. It is about relearning how Earth itself manages carbon and ensuring our interventions strengthen, rather than disrupt, these unseen pathways.

The seminar left me with a renewed sense of curiosity, but also responsibility to view my administrative and development work through a climate-sensitive lens, grounded in natural history and attentive to the hidden processes that sustain life on our planet.

(This lecture note was authored by Ena Ray Chowdhury, a Praxis Learner from the 2024–2026 cohort, currently placed in Palamu, Jharkhand.)