By 2050, 35 million Indians living in coastal areas could face the risk of annual flooding, the latest data on sea-level rise suggest. By the turn of the century, this number could go up to 51 million if global carbon emissions continue unabated. Source: Study (https://go.nature.com/2MZaKOW) on sea-level rise published in the journal Nature Communications on October 29, 2019.

Across India, an estimated 31 million people live in coastal areas at risk of annual flooding, a number that could go up to 35 million by mid-century and rise further to 51 million by the year 2100. These projections are based on extreme-case scenarios if global carbon emissions continue to rise unabated. At the moment, 250 million people around the globe live in areas at risk of annual coastal floods.

“This research means that the stakes are even higher than we thought,” said Benjamin H. Strauss, CEO and chief scientist at Climate Central, where the study was conducted.

Key findings

The study was led by scientists Scott A. Kulp and Benjamin H. Strauss of Climate Central, an independent organisation of scientists, journalists and researchers working on climate breakdown. The study builds on the global elevation dataset by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), produced in the year 2000, and known to have some errors. Kulp and Strauss have used artificial intelligence to reduce those errors and come up with the latest estimates that show the global coastline is three times more exposed to extreme coastal water levels than previously thought.

Global sea levels have risen by 11-16 cm or half the height of a 500 ml coke bottle in the 20th century, compared to the pre-industrial era, generally taken to be the year 1850. Even if the world drastically cuts down its annual carbon emissions, sea levels would rise half a metre by 2050 or roughly the height of two 500 ml coke bottles stacked up. In the most extreme scenario the sea level would rise 2 m by the turn of the century, or equivalent to the height of nearly nine such bottles stacked on top of each other.

“The one silver lining of our analysis is while we do predict three times more coastal water levels as previously thought, what that also means is the benefits of sharply reducing carbon emissions are also three times more than previously thought,” said Kulp, who is the lead author of the study, speaking to IndiaSpend over Skype.

As many as 70% of those living in low-lying areas are in eight Asian countries: China, India, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand, the Philippines and Japan.

Most endangered

Rising global temperatures due to carbon emissions are leading the ice at the poles to melt, driving up global sea levels. China is currently the largest emitter of carbon followed by the US, the European Union and India, as IndiaSpend reported in September 2019. When looking at per capita emissions, Canada tops the list, followed by the US, Russia and Japan. India has one of the lowest per capita carbon emissions in the world, and the latest science suggests the country is set to face a rise in flooding, erratic rainfall and storms as the planet heats at a record pace.

The UN Secretary General Antonio Gueterres has asked for a 45% cut in global carbon emissions by 2030. The remaining emissions must be soaked up by “carbon sinks” such as forests, oceans and soil, and reduced to what is called “net-zero” by 2050 to contain global temperature rise to 1.5 deg C.

Many of the island nations most affected by sea level rise have contributed negligible amounts to global carbon emissions and are already on their way to becoming carbon neutral. But large amounts of carbon already released into the atmosphere means, “even if we went carbon neutral today there will still be substantial dangers to coastal populations”, said Kulp.

Fight For Survival: Mumbai, Surat, Kolkata & Chennai

Projections based on latest data show large parts of coastal cities including Mumbai and the coastal areas of Odisha and the north-east will be inundated by mid-century.
Source: Coastal Risk Screening Tool by Climate Central

The global temperature rise has set in motion melting that will continue for some time even if the carbon emissions were drastically reduced today. When an ice cube is put on a table it does not melt immediately, it takes some time. Scientists say something similar is happening to the glaciers in the Arctic and the Antarctic region. “Unfortunately, the glaciers and the ice sheets of the world, they haven’t caught up with the warming that we have already caused,” said Strauss, co-author of the study.

“The amount of emissions we make does not make a lot of difference (to sea level rise) between now and mid-century, but it makes a much greater difference at the end of the century and even beyond that,” said Strauss. By continuing to pollute we increase the chance of the worst-case scenario, he said.

The study did not take into account flooding due to erratic monsoons in India but scientists said that it could push up the numbers of those likely to be affected by flooding.

Climate refugees

India has a 7,500-km coastline and the second largest coastal population at risk due to sea level rise after China’s current 81 million. “The impact of the warming oceans will increase climatic events such as cyclones,” said Anjal Prakash, associate professor, Regional Water Studies, TERI School of Advanced Studies. “These events are predicted to be on the rise and will be more severe in future decades.” Prakash, who was the coordinating lead author of a recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, the UN body to assess the science on climate change), added that “shifting rainfall patterns of Indian monsoon will also have a bearing for people living in coastal areas”.

Together, these factors are likely to push up migration.

As salt water from the seas enters inland, it renders fields unfit for cultivation, as IndiaSpend reported from Odisha and West Bengal on the rise in undocumented internal migration in the country. With large parts of Bangladesh set to become more saline or be inundated, international migration is also set to rise, evidence suggests.

But across the world, many are choosing to stay back, and governments are directing resources to building coastal walls to allow communities to remain where they are even as sea levels rise.

Mitigation, adaptation

Globally, around 110 million people are already living in areas below high-tide levels; in India this number stands at 17 million. “That would suggest that there are sea walls in various places that would allow habitation of certain neighbourhoods that would otherwise be below the high tide line,” said Strauss from Climate Central. “But what happens in neighbourhoods when it rains is that the water has a hard time getting out.”
The number of people already living in areas below high-tide line suggests that it is possible to defend a very large number of people but it would get increasingly expensive to do so, said scientists.

“One of the key considerations in mitigation strategies and how aggressively to mitigate is how much risk are you willing to tolerate of this really drastic scenario of rapid sea level rise,” said Strauss.

(Shetty is a reporting fellow with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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These are some of the predictions made for India by experts interpreting the findings of the latest climate-change report, released on September 25, 2019, by the Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), the United Nations (UN) body that assesses the science related to global warming.

Titled, “The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”, the IPCC report evaluates climate change on the oceans, which blanket 71% of the earth’s surface, and the cryosphere–frozen areas, such as glaciers and ice sheets, which cover 10% of the planet.

For India, the major impact will come from the melting of ice in the Hindu Kush region of the Himalayas, which holds the largest reserves of water, in the form of ice and snow, outside the polar regions and is the source of 10 of the largest rivers in Asia. 

“These systems, therefore, are the economic engines of the region, especially due to the large freshwater reserve, biodiversity and natural resource support that it provides for the billions of people living downstream,” Anjal Prakash, coordinating lead author of the report and associate professor, Regional Water Studies, TERI School of Advanced Studies, told IndiaSpend. “What happens to Himalayan glaciers is directly connected to what happens to over 2 billion people living in Asia.”

Since the beginning of the industrial era (1850), the world’s temperature has risen by 1.1 deg C. If emissions continue at the current rate, then the earth is headed for a 3 deg C temperature rise.

The UN Secretary General Antonio Gueterres has asked for a 45% cut in global carbon emissions by 2030. The remaining emissions must be soaked up by “carbon sinks” such as forests, oceans and soil, and reduced to what is called “net-zero” by 2050 to contain global temperature rise to 1.5 deg C.

The IPCC report said climate change is causing glaciers to melt at an “unprecedented” rate, leading to a rise in frequency of cyclones and changing global rainfall patterns.

Close to 670 million people worldwide live in coastal areas and 65 million in small-island nations. Another 670 million people live in high mountains. The impact of the changes in oceans and glaciers is likely to affect one in every five persons living on the planet.  

The IPCC report has been ratified by 195 countries which means that it represents global consensus, but experts said this makes it a conservative estimate. The actual impact of climate change could be worse.

Indian lives, livelihoods at risk
India’s 7,500-km long coastline is dotted with major cities, such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai, all at risk of flooding. Those living along the coastline are already moving away, as sea level rises, as IndiaSpend reported from the Sundarbans in West Bengal and Honnavar in Karnataka.

Stray adaptation is evident, but that must become government policy, if livelihoods and lives are to be saved, experts said. 

“In Odisha many cyclone events are occurring but the states have geared to evacuate people,” said Prakash. “It is one of the good examples where the state has worked really well to adapting to the changing climate patterns. But imagine all cities and all the coastal states will have to keep doing this in the future and (imagine) how much it will cost the state exchequer to manage these events.”

The rising seas will move inland, make fields unfit for agriculture and drinking water sources along the coastline saline, something that is already happening, as IndiaSpend reported from Odisha in February 2019.

The annual south-east monsoons, on which more than half of India’s farms depend because they are unirrigated, are likely to become more erratic than they already are. That is because of changing global weather patterns, such as the periodic Pacific-warming phenomenon known as the El Nino, which is likely to double in frequency over the century.

“For India, which depends on the monsoon rains, a moderate El Niño in itself can result in a deficit and erratic monsoon,” another IPCC-report co-author Mathew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), told IndiaSpend. “So, when an extreme El Niño hit the world in 2015-16, India reeled under back-to-back droughts. Ethiopia and South Africa had one of the worst droughts in 50 years and severe heatwaves, resulting in a 9-million-tonne cereal deficit, leaving more than 28 million in need of humanitarian aid.”

These extreme El Niños are likely to increase from one event every 20 years, as scientists  recorded over 99 years to 1990, to one every 10 years by the turn of the century, which means the monsoons may witness large-scale fluctuations.

The fate of the oceans is linked to the great ice sheets that cover the poles. 

As more ice melts, sea levels rise
Between 2006 and 2015, the Greenland ice sheet lost ice at an average rate of 278 gigatonne (Gt) every year, enough to cause sea levels to rise by 0.7 mm, said the IPCC report.

Over 52 years to 2019, the June snow cover on land in the Arctic declined by 13.4% per decade. Between 1979 and 2018, sea ice in the Arctic decreased by 12.8% per decade, a change not seen for at least 1,000 years.

This melting of ice is pushing up sea levels. Sea levels rose 15 cm, or roughly the size of a 500 ml coke bottle, over the 20thcentury alone. Currently, the seas are rising twice as fast–3.6 mm per year–and increasing.

By the turn of the century sea levels could rise up to 60 cm, or equivalent to four 500 ml bottles of coke atop each other, if global temperature rise is restricted to 2 deg C. It could be higher if global warming goes beyond that, the IPCC report said. 

Not only are the seas rising, they are warming, and that has a range of consequences.

Rise in sea temperatures

“The global ocean has warmed unabated since 1970 and has taken up more than 90% of the excess heat in the climate system,” the IPCC report said. While the global air temperature has risen by 1.1 deg C since the pre-industrial era (1850), ocean temperatures have risen by 0.8 deg C. 

Since 1993, the rate of ocean-warming has doubled. Marine heatwaves have doubled in frequency since 1982 and are increasing in intensity.
Marine heat waves can devastate sea life.

“Coral reefs occupy only 0.1% of the planet’s surface, but are home to 25% of all the animals found in the ocean,” said Koll of the IITM. “Corals have a specific range of temperatures that they can survive in, and the frequent occurrence of marine heat waves are killing them and the ecosystem around them.” This shift in temperatures is likely to affect fishing communities. 

“Reducing other pressures, such as pollution, will further help marine life deal with changes in their environment, while enabling a more resilient ocean,” said Hans-Otto Pörtner, co-chair of IPCC Working Group II.

The warming of the oceans also brings with it the possibility of more severe cyclonic storms.

“With a rapidly warming Indian Ocean, these severe cyclones are projected to increase in number, and we cannot neglect the possibility of these cyclones making landfall over the west coast of India,” said Koll.

Cooling and adaptation
The planet can address global warming by reducing global emissions to rein in rising temperatures and help local communities adapt better. 
“We will only be able to keep global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels if we effect unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society, including energy, land and ecosystems, urban and infrastructure as well as industry,” said Debra Roberts, Co-Chair of IPCC Working Group II. “The ambitious climate policies and emissions reductions required to deliver the Paris Agreement will also protect the ocean and cryosphere–and ultimately sustain all life on Earth.”

“If one country takes measures it won’t solve the problem,” said Prakash of the TERI School of Advanced Studies. “Countries have to collaborate and coordinate for climate action. They have to come together at a global level to flight the unprecedented climate crisis in the history of humanity.”

(Shetty is a reporting fellow with IndiaSpend and reporting from the United Nations on a Reham al-Farra Memorial Journalism Fellowship.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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On September 20, over a million students skipped school in New York to demand climate action. The youth have emerged as a key voice urging climate action.

Pandey, 11, is from Haridwar in Uttarakhand, and had, in 2017, filed a case against the Indian government at the National Green Tribunal for failing to take action against climate change.

As countries reiterated old promises to control climate change, the youth, led by 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg, emerged as climate leaders. “I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” said Thunberg.

Every country, except the United States, has ratified the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Of those countries, 45 have agreed to an additional protocol that allows children to petition the UN directly about treaty violations.

Within that group of 45, Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey are some of the biggest emitters of the pollution that causes climate change. None of the five is on a path needed to keep the planet from heating over 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius by the turn of the century.

The petition by children comes on the heels of the latest report by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) that said global temperature has risen by 1.1 degrees Celsius since systematic record-keeping began in 1850, and by 0.2 degrees Celsius compared to 2011-2015.

“Climate change causes and impacts are increasing rather than slowing down,” said Petteri Taalas, secretary general of the WMO.

Antonio Gueterres, the UN secretary general, has praised Thunberg for her leadership, calling it “absolutely remarkable”. The UN credits the pressure from the youth for pushing climate action across countries.

“I should be back in school on the other side of the ocean. Yet you come to us young people for hope. How dare you?” said 16-year-old Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg at the United Nations Climate Action Summit 2019 in New York. 

Closer home, 600 million people living in the Indo-Gangetic plain stand to be affected, as global warming causes Himalayan glaciers to melt, threatening the steady flow of water to the Ganga and its tributaries, according to World Bank estimates.

Nearly 148 million Indians live in areas that are “severe hotspots” of climate change and are already witnessing large-scale changes, as a special IndiaSpend reporting project has chronicled. Climate change has led to a rise in extreme events like floods and heatwaves. It threatens India’s water security and could widen inequality.

Yet, at the summit, India only reiterated commitments already made several years ago.

India’s plan

Despite efforts, CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions continue to rise at a 2% growth rate. Currently China is the highest emitter of earth warming greenhouse gases (GHGs), followed by the United States (US), the European Union (EU) and India. 

Prime Minister Narendra Modi was one of more than 90 speakers at the climate summit. India will scale up renewable energy to 175 gigawatt (GW) by 2022 and to 450 GW in the coming years, he said, without giving a specific deadline. He also said that India was focussing on increasing the use of bio-fuels and was successful in providing 150 million families with clean cooking gas. He reaffirmed India’s commitment against single-use plastic but said nothing about reducing the use of coal, which has been flagged as a concern in fast-growing India and China. 

India is one of the few countries on track to meet the targets it set itself at the 2015 Paris summit and justifies the platform the UN has given for it to speak at the climate summit, said Leena Srivastava, outgoing vice-chancellor of Delhi-based The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) School of Advanced Studies, and co-chair of the Science Advisory Group of the UN Climate Summit. “If you look at the totality of it and not just one part of it then I think we deserve to be on the platform.” 

Countries need to do more 

China is the highest GHG emitter followed by the United States, European Union and India.
Source: CAIT Climate Data Explorer. 2017. Country Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute

“Science tells us that on our current path, we face at least 3 degrees Celsius of global heating by the end of the century,” said UN Secretary-General Guterres. He had set an ambitious target for those in attendance: reduce carbon emissions by 45% by 2030 and make it net-zero by 2050. 

Policies to lower GHG emissions must triple to meet the 2 degrees Celsius target and increase fivefold to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius target set by the UN, found the latest WMO report released on September 22 in New York.

“We are at risk of crossing several critical tipping points in the country systems,” said Srivastava of TERI. “There is also in the science community a greater recognition of the fact that climate change impacts are hitting harder and sooner than what climate assessments had estimated nearly a decade ago and that is something we need to worry about.” 

So far 66 countries have said they will step up their Nationally Determined Targets or NDCs–targets to reduce carbon emissions that each country sets for itself under the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

The UN had said that only countries with strong plans would be allowed to speak at the New York emergency climate summit, but most countries, including India, as we explained above, only reiterated old promises. 

“While countries were expected to come to the summit to announce that they would enhance their climate ambition, most of the major economies fell woefully short. Their lack of ambition stands in sharp contrast with the growing demand for action around the world,” said Andrew Steer, President & CEO, World Resources Institute (WRI), a global research organisation.

Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan repeated his earlier promise of planting 6 billion new trees.

The US President, Donald Trump, who was invited but had said he would skip the climate summit and send a delegation instead, made a brief appearance as PM Modi took to the stage. The US, one of the largest greenhouse emitters, has pulled out of the Paris Agreement.

New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern spoke of her country’s prior commitment to plant a billion trees by 2028. She reiterated that New Zealand has also stopped issuing permits for offshore oil and gas exploration and aims for 100% renewable electricity generation by 2023. 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel said her country would phase out coal by 2038, an announcement she had made earlier this year. 

Businesses pledge 

Recognising the need to rope in corporations, the UN has made an effort to encourage them to set ambitious targets. Eighty seven major corporations–with a combined market capitalisation of over $2.3 trillion and annual direct emissions equivalent to 73 coal-fired power plants–are taking action to align their businesses with the Paris climate summit targets. 

Banks financing development projects and CEOs of companies said they would stop investing in coal. “Coal is out of the window for funding,” said Peter Hiliges, head, climate change at the German bank KfW that funds development projects. Oliver Bäte, the CEO of Allianz, an insurance company, reiterated their stand of not selling insurance to companies investing in coal. 

In a recorded message, Pope Francis called the post-industrial era the most “irresponsible” and questioned the political will to mitigate the impact of climate change.

No fossil fuel subsidies

The world temperature has increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius since systematic record keeping began in 1850, and by 0.2 degrees Celsius compared to 2011-2015.
Source: United in Science report, WMO, September 2019.

Without climate action, human emissions are expected to peak well beyond 2030, according to the latest WMO report.

The UN has asked governments to end all subsidies to fossil fuel companies by 2020, and incentivise renewables. “After all, is it common sense to give trillions in hard-earned taxpayers’ money to the fossil fuel industry to boost hurricanes, spread tropical diseases, and heighten conflict?” Gueterres asked at the climate summit.

“Fossil fuel companies must pay to clean up the mess they have made. Rich country governments must stop giving handouts to those companies. Instead, they need to support communities on the frontline of the climate emergency rather than those who created the crisis in the first place,” said Harjeet Singh, global lead on climate change at ActionAid, a South Africa based nonprofit.

The UN has also called for no new coal plants from 2020, asking countries to turn to renewable energy instead. India currently gets over 76% of its energy needs from coal, as IndiaSpend reported earlier. Only one-twentieth of its energy comes from renewables, although it is a fast-growing segment. PM Modi was silent on coal during his UN address.

India and China continue to open new coal plants despite the 2020 deadline set by the UN, as these countries have to balance the energy needs of the underserved population while meeting climate targets.

“Yes, there are plans to build coal-fired power plants but we are doing very well in terms of renewable energy expansion,” said Srivastava of TERI on India. 

(Shetty is a reporting fellow with IndiaSpend and reporting from the United Nations on a Reham al-Farra Memorial Journalism Fellowship.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Parts of India have seen a rise in temperature ranging from 1-2 deg C when compared to 1850, the year that is widely accepted to be the beginning of the industrial era. Source: SDG Global Index score, IPCC report, October 2018. (https://bit.ly/32nXTvc)

On top on the agenda will be discussions on ways to limit the damage from climate change, and IndiaSpend will be there to file daily reports and tell you why the summit is important to India. Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, will deliver an address to the summit on September 27, 2019.

Called by UN Secretary-General António Guterres, the summit will be joined by civil society organisations and climate activists, including 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden, whose impassioned appeals for climate action have garnered worldwide attention. 

With winter temperatures in the Arctic already 3 deg C higher than in 1990, climate change has turned both critical and urgent, said experts. Average global temperatures are already 1 deg C higher since systematic record keeping began in 1850, according to an October 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body formed to assess science on climate change.

Closer home, 600 million people living in the Indo-Gangetic plain stand to be affected, as global warming causes Himalayan glaciers to melt, threatening the steady flow of water to the Ganga and its tributaries, according to World Bank estimates.

Nearly 148 million Indians live in areas that are “severe hotspots” of climate change and are already witnessing large-scale changes, as a special IndiaSpend reporting project has chronicled. Climate change has led to a rise in extreme events like floods and heatwaves. It threatens India’s water security and could widen inequality.

We look at what’s at stake for India as world leaders debate and discuss climate action.

India’s greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions

In 2014 China was the top greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter followed by the US, the EU and India.
Source: CAIT Climate Data Explorer, 2017. Country Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute (WRI)

China is the top emitter of GHGs. In 2014, its emissions stood at 12 giga tonne (Gt). India is fourth, with a fourth of China’s emissions at 3.2 Gt.
While the US and the EU are registering either the same levels of emissions or seeing a dip compared to previous years, emissions from developing countries like China and India are rising.

The situation changes when we analyse per capita emissions.

Canada has the highest per capita emission of GHGs. India comes at number 10.
Source: CAIT Climate Data Explorer, 2017. Country Greenhouse Gas Emissions. Washington, DC: World Resources Institute (WRI)

Developed countries, such as Canada and the US, emit the maximum GHGs per capita. China is sixth, and India, home to nearly one in every sixth person on the planet, is tenth.

“India’s position at the climate summit has been one of equity, that the developed countries should take the lead and we will do what we can,” said Chandra Bhushan, deputy director general of Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), a Delhi-based not-for-profit research and advocacy organisation.

For several years, countries squabbled over who would cut emissions and how that might be done.

Getting over 190 nations to agree on a single plan is equivalent to sitting around a restaurant table and getting the 190 people in attendance to decide a menu with just one dish that they would all like to eat.

For a quarter century, there has been, more or less, a deadlock.

 In 2015, led by then US President Barack Obama, a deal was struck. Countries were to try to reduce their emissions and decide their own targets, which were called the nationally determined contributions (NDC). The deal, famously called the Paris Agreement, was a start. In 2017, US President Donald Trump announced that the US, the world’s second largest GHG emitter, would pull out of the agreement.

During global negotiations, rich countries often blame the poor and populous ones for climate change. The data do not back this argument. Africa–the world’s second largest and second most populous continent–contributes close to 2-3% of global carbon emissions, but along with small-island nations, is among those worst hit by climate change.

Countries like Canada, US, Australia and Saudi Arabia generate far more per capita emissions than poorer countries in Asia and Africa.

Heavy reliance on coal

In 2018, 76.42% of India’s electricity came from highly polluting coal, according to a June 2018 report from the ministry of power. Renewables are growing, but they supply only about a twentieth of India’s electricity.

Much of India’s electricity comes from highly polluting coal, only 6.60% from renewables.
Source: Growth of electricity sector in India from 1947-2018, Ministry of Power, June-2018

“From the point of view of electricity generation, we are moving in the right direction,” said Shoibal Chakravarty, a fellow at the Centre for Environment and Development, Ashoka Trust for Ecology and Environment or ATREE, referring to the growing focus on renewables. In the transport sector though India could do better to promote public transit in cities, he added.

Many of the aerosols (suspended solid particles in the air such as dust, sea salt or ash) that cause air pollution also lead to climate change, as IndiaSpend reported in March this year, making climate change and air pollution closely linked issues. “We have to make use of climate change targets to also beat pollution and have to have the right policy for dealing with pollution,” said Chakravarty.

Meanwhile, the impact of climate change is being felt across India.

Changes in Indian monsoon, temperature

Bursts of heavy rainfall are on the rise in India. Extreme rain events over central India tripled between 1950 and 2015, according to a 2017 study. Along with this heavy rainfall the frequency of dry periods where there is little or no rainfall is also on the rise: 85% of India’s annual precipitation comes from the monsoon.

“We have linked these changes clearly to temperature rise over Arabian sea,” said Roxy Matthew Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pune. “Generally all over the Indian ocean temperatures are increasing.”

Global warming is causing both land and water surface temperatures to rise. As ocean temperature rise, more moisture is available for the monsoon winds to carry. “This is leading to large scale fluctuations in the Indian monsoon,” said Koll. 

The other factor is rapid urbanisation. Global factors, such as the El Nino effect, which leads to changes in rainfall patterns, and cyclones, are rising in intensity, he added, reaching “tipping points”, leaving India “vulnerable to climatic extremes”.

Annual average temperatures, too, have steadily risen across India. During the summer of 2019, close to 65% of Indians were affected by a heatwave, as IndiaSpend reported in August 2019. July 2019 was the hottest on record for India and the world.

The stripes show the annual average temperature for India from 1901 (left) to 2018 (right). Changes in the colour from blue to red indicate a rise in temperature.
Source: Berkeley Earth, NOAA, UK Met Office, MeteoSwiss, DWD.

Afforestation is one of the ways that can help keep temperatures down, but across the world, as in India, forests are under attack.

Carbon sinks in India, and a world at risk

In August 2019, a fire gutted large parts of Brazil’s Amazon rainforests, often called “the lungs of the world”.

In 2015, between 380 million to 620 million people lived within areas that experienced desertification between the 1980s and 2000s. The largest number of people thus affected are in South and East Asia, according to the latest UN report on land degradation, published in August 2019. The report said that the frequency of drought has been rising in west Asia, as have the frequency of dust storms.

Closer home in India, an area the size of the states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra put together is already degraded as IndiaSpend reported in September 2019: 2.607 billion tons of CO2 equivalent of GHGs were emitted from all activities (excluding land use, land-use change and forestry] in India, according to the 2018-19 economic survey of India.

Of India’s GHG emissions, the energy sector accounted for 73%, industrial processes and product use 8%, agriculture 16% and waste sector 3%. About 12% of emissions were offset by the carbon sink action of forestland, cropland and settlements.

To counter this imbalance India needs not just to protect the existing carbon sinks, such as forests that absorb and store carbon, but also create new ones.

“The government of India is committed to climate change mitigation,” said Jagdish Krishnaswamy, senior fellow, Suri Sehgal Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, ATREE and a co-author of the UN report on land degradation. “We are also talking about plans for adaptation.

Policies and management on the ground should take into account the vulnerabilities of the eco-systems and ecosystem services to both climatic and non-climatic stressors.”

What’s important to remember is that these issues are interlinked and can’t be dealt in silos. Conservation biologist and chief conservation scientist of Bengaluru’s Centre for Wildlife Studies, Krithi Karanth, said discussions about climate change, poverty alleviation and development often overshadow issues of biodiversity and wildlife.

“In many cases the conversations around biodiversity conservation is an afterthought,” she said. “Protecting tree cover to capture carbon is a great first step, but if the forest is empty and all the wildlife is hunted out then you’re not really succeeding.”

While countries wait for each other to act, the world is running out of time and missing even the climate goals agreed upon during the 2015 Paris Agreement. 

The world is missing its climate goals

Up to 45% of the world’s GHG emissions need to be cut by 2030 for global temperature rise to be restricted to 1.5 deg C, and by the middle of this century, net emissions have to be reduced to zero, according to experts.

If current levels of GHGs continue, emissions are set to rise instead of falling. 

Source: World Resources Institute

Those following the climate change negotiations said for years not much has changed. Unless the US and China, the two largest emitters, make ambitious commitments, the world is not likely to see much progress, experts stressed.

Several European countries too are set to miss their 2020 climate goals. “We can’t afford another 25 years of inaction,” warned Bhushan.

Climate negotiations are more about international diplomacy and trade battles rather than science, said experts. Internationally, India’s climate policy too remains largely the same.

“Between the NDA (National Democratic Alliance) and UPA (United Progressive Alliance), there is no major difference in international climate policy,” said Chandra Bhushan of CSE. He added that the time to wait for other countries to do more is past. “We have a sliver of chance to avoid 1.5-deg-C temperature rise.”

At the summit that begins on Monday, “Only those countries with the boldest action will get the stage,” said the UN special envoy for the 2019 climate change summit Luis Alfonso de Alba, speaking at a press conference in New York on September 18. Over a 100 countries have sent in proposals, of which 15 are expected to get a platform. It is not yet known if India is one of them.

“We will see on Monday what climate leadership looks like,” said Alba. 

IndiaSpend is a part of the international collaboration ‘Covering Climate Now’, which  aims to increase coverage of climate crisis ahead of the climate summit on September 23, 2019, in New York. 

(Shetty is a reporting fellow with IndiaSpend)

Courtesy: India Spend

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About two-thirds of India’s population was exposed to high temperatures (surface measurement) of over 40 deg C in May and June, 2019, up from 52.94% in 2018, according to satellite data. Data: GFS Temperature Estimates, GPWv4, MODIS (LPDAAC – NASA); Processed by Raj Bhagat Palanichamy using Google Earth Engine.

It was only in 2016 that satellite data improved enough to yield such a detailed analysis, according to Palanichamy. But 2015 saw the worst heatwave in India since 1992, striking areas from Delhi to Telangana and killing 2,081 people. It was the fifth deadliest in world history.

On June 25, 2019, temperatures were as much as 5.1 deg C above normal in parts of Jharkhand, Assam and Meghalaya, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD) which classified this as “markedly above normal”. Temperatures were 3.1 deg C above normal in the sub-Himalayan West Bengal and Sikkim or, as IMD put it, “appreciably above normal”.

Global temperature records were broken during the summer of 2019, with the July temperature 1.2 deg C above the pre-industrial era, according to the latest data from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the Copernicus Climate Change Programme, the European Union’s Earth Observation Programme.

As global CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions continue to rise, heatwaves are likely to become more frequent, and more intense, according to the October 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body set up to assess science related to climate change. The consequences will be deadly.

India will see a four-fold rise in heatwaves if global temperature rise is restricted to 1.5 deg C by the turn of this century, according to a November 2018 study by Indian Institute of Technology-Gandhinagar researchers. If the world fails to contain global temperature rise, India could see an eight-fold rise in heatwaves. 

This can lead to a rise in both morbidity and mortality. Heatwaves can cause the body’s core temperature to increase. Limited exposure can lead to dehydration and dizziness but high exposure to heatwaves could lead multiple organs to dysfunction causing death within hours, studies suggest.

Between 2010 and 2018, 6,167 heat-related deaths were reported in India, as IndiaSpend reported in April 2019. The year 2015 reported the most fatalities: 2,081 or 34% of all heat-related deaths in that time period.

In 2019, 94 deaths were reported till June 16, according to a government statement to the Lok Sabha, parliament’s lower house. This number rose to 210 by the end of June, with the most (118) deaths being reported from Bihar.

“A vast majority of deaths during a heatwave period are registered as normal deaths (from cardiorespiratory arrest etc) or might never be medically declared/certified heatwave deaths,” said Gulrez Azhar, an epidemiologist and researcher who studied heatwave deaths in Gujarat for four years while at the Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH), Gandhinagar. “But those deaths would not have happened had it not been so hot.”

Along with day-time temperatures, night-time heat is rising as well.

“Most of the time we are focussed on looking at day-time heatwaves,” said Vimal Mishra, associate professor at IIT-Gandhinagar, who co-authored the study and focuses on climate change research. “Cooler nights give some relief. But think about a scenario where both days and nights are hot.” 

These relentlessly hot days and nights are what his study predicts will become commonplace in coming years.

But India is not an exception.

Record temperatures across the globe and human influence

Global average temperatures for the month of July were close to 1.2 deg C above the pre-industrial level as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, according to the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S).

Geneva, the capital of Switzerland, surrounded by the snow-clad Alps, reported an unusually warm summer this July. Temperatures reached up to 36 deg C, well above the average day-time temperature of 24 deg C for the month, and the Swiss government had to issue a rare level-4 heat alert indicating ‘severe danger’ from the heat.

France’s capital Paris hit 42.6 deg C on July 25, an all-time high compared to the July average of 24 deg C. United Kingdom’s capital London too recorded a temperature of 34 deg C against its July average of 22 deg C. Officials in Belgium issued a warning after the death of a 66-year-old woman was attributed to the heatwave.

The US too is bracing for record high temperatures across the country.

Greenland, a country where ice glaciers cover 82% of surface area, lost over 10 billion tonnes of ice on July 31, 2019. To put it in perspective, 1 billion tonne is equivalent to 400,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools. This also means that global sea levels will go further up.

The average global temperature for the previous month–June 2019–was the highest in recorded history as well. It was 0.1 deg C higher than in June 2016, which had held the record of being the warmest so far.

Human activity to be blamed
The science on the rising frequency and intensity of heatwaves is clear: human activity is to be blamed. Since the first such study in 2004, advances in attribution science have confirmed that human influence has made heatwaves more likely.

But linking a particular extreme weather event to climate change is tricky, said Freja Vamborg, senior scientist, Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S). “To do such studies you need very good observational data for a long time back,” she said. “In some parts of the world such studies could be difficult as the observational data might not be homogenous.”

What is a given, according to Vamborg, is that such heatwaves are likely to be the norm in the coming years.

A heatwave, as we mentioned, is not about crossing a particular temperature level but how much it exceeds the average temperature of a particular place. In northern India, for example, a heatwave would warrant temperatures above 40 deg C but in Switzerland this would be 29 deg C and above.  

However, in places that routinely deal with high temperatures, people develop different kinds of coping mechanism. But in regions used to temperate summers, people are unprepared for heatwaves. France alone has reported five heatwave deaths so far.

But even in India, used to hot summers, some areas could well become unlivable with a further rise in temperature, according to experts.

If CO2 emissions are not contained, then India, Pakistan and Bangladesh would be swept by deadly heatwaves in the next few decades, said a 2017 study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The impact would be especially severe in the Indo-Gangetic plain, the study said.

Upto 37% of Indians were exposed to high temperatures (air temperature) of over 40 deg C for 10 hours or more in a day in 2019, up from 27.42% in 2018, according to satellite data.

Data: GFS Temperature Estimates, GPWv4, MODIS (LPDAAC – NASA); Processed by Raj Bhagat Palanichamy using Google Earth Engine.

The heatwave-climate change link
Globally, CO2 emissions continue to rise and, of this, in 2017 nearly 7% came from India, up from 6% in 2016, according to a December 2018 report from the Global Carbon Project, a collaborative effort between several research institutes to quantify global greenhouse-gas emissions.
Being a greenhouse gas, CO2 traps the sun’s heat, pushing up land surface temperatures. Higher than normal temperatures lead to heatwaves. So, the connection between climate change and heatwave is a direct one.

“We know that all the land surface areas–there are hardly any exceptions–have seen an increase in temperatures over the past 150 years,” said Vamborg. “Some areas warm faster and some areas warm slower.” 

This relationship between rising temperatures and heatwaves is also non-linear. “What it means is this: If without a (global) increase in temperature you have five heatwaves in 10 years then, with a temperature rise of half a deg C you will have seven heatwaves in 10 years,” explained Mishra of IIT-Gandhinagar. “And if the temperature rises by 1 deg C then all of a sudden there could be 20 heatwaves in five years.” 

But the impact of global temperature changes will vary across the globe. And rising humidity levels will be a factor in this.

“Air can hold up to 7% more moisture for every degree celsius rise in temperature,” said Krishna AchutaRao of the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) – Delhi. Thus in coastal cities, where the air tends to be moist, humidity levels will rise with a rise in temperature. “When humidity is high the sweat stays on the body and there is no cooling effect,” said AchutaRao. “That is why the heat during monsoon feels more oppressive.”

While IMD takes into account only temperature rise when declaring a heatwave, scientists suggested a heat index that takes into account both temperature rise and humidity.

Damage from heatwaves
Depending on how much the temperature has risen, for how long and over how much land, a heatwave can impact human life in different ways.

“You may have intense heatwave in one year but it may be very localised as we witnessed in 2015 (in India),” said Mishra of IIT-Gandhinagar. “But this year’s heatwave covered almost two-thirds of the country. So, if the intensity of the heatwave is the same but the area covered is two to three times more, we can expect more damage.” 

If no effort is made to adapt to these heatwaves, they could cause more deaths; but the fatalities would vary across areas, according to a 2018 study of 20 regions across the world published in the health journal PLOS. The highest increase in deaths could be in Colombia, followed by the Philippines and Brazil, the study said. Tropical and subtropical regions, including India, would see a rise in deaths.

Heatwaves have been linked to pre-term births, reduced fertility, increase in mental health issues, increase in farmer suicide rates in India and chronic kidney diseases.

India is among the top 20 countries in the world to have seen the most number of extreme weather events between 1998 and 2017, according to a 2019 report by a German non-profit that tracks climate risk.

While pregnant women, the elderly, and children are particularly vulnerable, those affected will disproportionately be the ones without the means to escape the heat.

“The exposure to heat is related to economic class,” said Shoibal Chakravarty, a fellow at the Centre for Environment and Development, Ashoka Trust for Ecology and Environment or ATREE. “It essentially has to do with who is so poor that you have to continue working in the heat.”
Those working in the informal sector, especially vulnerable daily wagers, are most likely to be affected by heatwaves, according to Chakravarty, who studies equity in the context of climate change. In India, of around 61 million jobs created over 22 years since the liberalisation of the economy in 1991, 92% were informal jobs, according to an IndiaSpend analysis of National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) data for 2011-12, the latest available, released in 2014.

This year 37% of the population was exposed to air temperature of over 40 deg C for 10 hours or more a day, according to the analysis by Palanichamy of WRI for IndiaSpend, highest in the past four years. In 2016, this number stood at 31.79%, rising to 34.19% in 2017 and falling to 27.42% in 2018.

Heatwaves also bring down productivity, according to initial results from an ongoing India-centric study at the Energy Policy Institute of the University of Chicago. Productivity declines by 2-4% with every deg C rise in temperature.

Parts of Greenland has seen temperatures 10 to 15 deg C above normal causing glaciers to melt, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Is air pollution masking impact of heatwaves?
India is experiencing fewer heatwaves than projected by climate models, said a study co-authored by AchutaRao.

As climate change takes hold, the expectation is that extreme temperatures–the maximum temperature on the hottest day of each year in a region–would keep rising.

“In all the studies in the US, Russia and Europe that has happened, but not in India,” said AchutaRao of IIT-Delhi. “But that hasn’t happened in India. They’ve been flat and, in some places, even declined.”

Scientists suspect that this can be traced to two factors: air pollution and irrigation. If India were to clean up its air, thus erasing the elements that block sunlight, heat levels are likely to go up, said AchutaRao. What is unclear is exactly how much the heatwaves will go up once pollution is taken out of the picture.

Air pollution is caused not just by the presence of gases but also aerosols (solid or liquid particles in the air). Some aerosols have a warming effect while others have a cooling one, as explained in an IndiaSpend story in May 2019. This means that depending on the nature of local pollution, humidity levels and surface water bodies, different areas will experience either a rise or fall in heat levels when that pollution clears.

Irrigation tends to have a cooling effect on the land. But this effect is small and localised. “Heatwaves occur in summer and most of the crops are gone by that time,” said Mishra of IIT-Gandhinagar.

The way forward
Preparing for the future will involve two steps: mitigation and adaptation. “In terms of mitigating future heatwaves, the only way that the future heatwaves can be controlled is by controlling CO2 emissions,” said AchutaRao. This would involve a global effort.

Focus on renewables to reduce CO2 emissions and protecting existing forests are other crucial mitigation measures. Adaptation would involve better urban planning with a focus on more tree cover and increasing surface water bodies that tend to have a localised cooling effect.

“An integrated approach to climate change and at least the management of heat and cooling in the country is required,” said Chakravarty from ATREE. Even after all these measures, “heatwaves would still happen but their impact would be reduced”.

(Shetty is a reporting fellow with IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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N H Ravindranath, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Science in Bengaluru, is the lead researcher preparing the first national assessment of the impact of climate change in India. The country, he says, is currently unprepared.

That is the warning delivered by N H Ravindranath, the scientist who is tasked with preparing the first national study on the impacts of climate change, even as he describes how unprepared India is in terms of data and planning.

Climate change is likely to make rainfall erratic, lead to rising seas and make extreme weather events, such as droughts, floods and heat waves–like the one currently sweeping large parts of India–frequent, according to the latest report of the United Nations body to assess climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC).

Communities and livelihoods nationwide have already been affected by climate change, as IndiaSpend reported in a seven-part series from India’s climate-change hotspots.

Yet India, where one in every seventh person on the planet lives, has no national study on the impact of climate change, although about 600 million people are at risk from its effects.

This is set to change over the next few months of 2019. Ravindranath, a climate scientist at the Centre for Sustainable Technologies of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is currently heading a study that will assess the impact of climate change across regions and sectors. His assessment, which is likely to be the bedrock that will inform climate-related policy, will be submitted to the Indian government and the United Nations (UN).

Human activities have already caused warming of one degree Celsius compared to pre-industrial times, according to a 2018 IPCC report. By 2030, or latest by mid-century, global warming is likely to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius.

In March 2019, Ravindranath headed the first study that analysed climate change in  India’s Himalayan Region (IHR). The study found, as IndiaSpend reported, that all 12 Indian states studied–including Assam, Mizoram and Jammu and Kashmir (J&K)–are “highly vulnerable”, with little capacity to resist or cope.

In 2018, Ravindranath, along with other researchers, also helped the government of Meghalaya assess the damage to its forests. Over 16 years to 2016, nearly half of Meghalaya’s forests experienced an “increase in disturbance”, and around a quarter are now “highly vulnerable” to the impact of climate change, the study found.

At his office at the IISc in Bengaluru, Ravindranath spoke to us on the lack of climate data by district and the need to make these data more accessible to farmers, so they can be prepared for what is coming.

Edited excerpts from the interview: 

To frame a policy on climate change, India first needs to have data. Where does the country stand with respect to understanding the impact of climate change across the country?
If you want to look at the impact of climate change, say on agriculture for rice, wheat, maize, millet, pulses, so on and so forth, we still have very limited data. We need good climate models. We need good climate change projections at the district and the block level.

Now let’s take maize for instance; maize is grown in 300 districts in India. We need to run these climate models for 300 districts and see where the decline (in production) will be more or less. That kind of assessment doesn’t exist right now.

In a country like India, where agriculture is the livelihood of a majority of the people, we still do not have a detailed assessment of the impact of climate change on rice, wheat, maize, jowar, finger millet, pulses etc. We have broad studies available on the decline (in overall production).

Take the state of Meghalaya. No study will tell you what is the impact of climate change on rice production, maize, or plantation crops. There are models, but we need some data. Data [are] a problem. Climate change is all about future-based projections that are at least a decade ahead.

You never say climate-change projections for 2020. The trends are for 2020 to 2050 or 2050 to 2080. We need to run the models for different crops with soil data, water data, climate data, crop data for that particular district. That is the kind of analysis that is required, and we do not have it.

To study the changes, one would need historical data. In Sundarbans, for instance, researchers cited the lack of historical data on rainfall and wind speeds, among other variables, on the Indian side. How would you address this problem?
In case of agriculture we have some data. For forests too, there is some data. What we need is district specific data. For eg the practice of growing rice is different in Mangaluru versus Mandya in Karnataka. The way water is managed, soil is prepared – all that data needs to be fed into the models. While we have the required models, we need to get resources.

I would say right now to assess the impact of climate change at the district, block or panchayat level is still a far cry.

What kind of resources would you need to assess the impact of climate change at the panchayat level?
Right now, under the programme called national communication project, we have to assess climate change projections, impacts and adaptations, at a national level. That report has to be completed in the next six months to be submitted to the UN. There we are doing a broad national level trend. For impact of climate change on forests we are taking a national map and mapping how the forests in Kerala, Meghalaya etc have changed. We are looking broadly at districts and grids that are likely to undergo major change.

The data [are] enough to submit a report and for the government to get a broad picture of how climate change impacts the rice production or forests etc. But for actual planning, adaptation projects, development or for helping communities to cope with climate change, you need micro level data at the panchayat or at the block level.

There is no plan to prepare for that.

What does India need to do to ensure scientists have this data?
We have to conduct studies in different districts to see how rice, wheat and pulses, among others, are grown. For each crop data has to be collected from every district.

Would that require a large workforce?
Yes. Climate science is also continuously advancing and climate projections keep changing. For a country like India it is possible to have projections at the district level. There are many institutions and universities that focus on areas like agriculture and forests. The government has to identify institutions and give long-term programmes to make such studies possible.

That hasn’t happened yet.

From my reporting, I gathered that many coastal communities and farmers can already feel the impact of climate change. Do you see a sense of urgency in the government and the policy circles to do something about this?
People know that to tackle this problem (climate change), there is a need to build a network of research institutions throughout India–some in Delhi, some in Assam, some in Gujarat and so on. This networking should be done under a national programme and there is a need to focus on this issue like a mission.

We still do not have that kind of a mission approach.

What are the roadblocks?
The government needs to have a plan. Once that is done they can assess how much money is required. Then they can identify the institutions that will be a part of this network.

Do you think if the pressure comes from the people, the plan might come from the government?
Definitely, if parliament asks the government to do this, they will do it. The districts have to take decisions themselves.

There is some work happening in this area in institutions. In agriculture there is the Central Research Institute for Dryland Agriculture (CRIDA). They are doing some work but it is not at the level where it will help planning, adaptation plans and to develop coping mechanisms. The science is not good enough right now to help with the planning required for the block and district level.

In Meghalaya, the study that the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) undertook in collaboration with the state government found that the average temperature rose 0.031 degree Celsius annually for 32 years until 2012. That is a significant change. Why is it that India has not had many studies focused on the local impact of climate change by Indian researchers?
This cannot be done by all institutions. To study the impact of climate change requires modelling. The modelling capacity is not something every institution has. Very few institutions in India can do this. CRIDA in Hyderabad, Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) in Delhi, IISc in Bengaluru and some individuals have the capacity to do this.

In the northeast there is no institution that can run these climate models. They take the help of people like us. However, it is possible to build capacity. We are trying to organize workshops on vulnerability assessment. There is a method and guidelines to do so. Based on that training from us many states in the north-east like Meghalaya, Manipur and Nagaland recently prepared vulnerability reports themselves and presented it in Delhi. Capacity building requires some effort but it is possible. The project we did was funded by the Swiss government.

While assessing the impact of climate change in a particular area it can get tricky to differentiate between human-made and natural causes. While climate change too is driven by human-made reasons, at the local level is it challenging to shift through the different stressors?
There are limitations. For example, while studying the impact of climate change on the forests, the models do not take into consideration what is the ground reality. Let’s take the Western Ghats for instance. Our model will assume that it is evergreen or deciduous throughout. The impact of climate change is different in a degraded forest or a fragmented forest versus a well maintained, healthy forest. The models are not good enough to make that distinction. The real impact on forest is based on climate and other socio-economic pressures on the forest. The same is true for the crops. We need additional work on these models.

Climate change will soon become very critical. We are not talking about the next 100 years but the next 15 to 20-year timescale. In Europe and the US there are long-term studies on how crop is changing, how pollination is changing. We don’t have such historical evidence in India for agriculture and for forests.

You mentioned your upcoming report will provide broad trends on climate change in India. How can the research go beyond that?
We need to provide access to climate projections available at a micro level to everybody at the district level in the agriculture ministry. I can (in the report) give broadly what is the trend in Karnataka but I can’t give details for Udupi, Kundapura, etc. We need to give access to all the researchers and even farmers. They should know if the rainfall has changed in the past 10-30 years so they can use it in their planning. They will keep this data in mind while building water storage structures. We need to create access to climate data. Information about different crops can be uploaded on the website. Some research institute in Mangalore or Coimbatore wants to use the data, they should have access to it. Not everyone needs to run a model. They can be given access to this data directly.

Within the scientific community, is there a push for interdisciplinary research to study climate change and public health links, for instance?
The kind of networking, team work and long-term planning needed to tackle climate change doesn’t exist.

The National Innovations in Climate Resilient Agriculture (NICRA) is one of the good projects. They have some good work but they too will have to intensify their work. There is nothing in terms of research on the impact of climate change on health, forests and infrastructure. Climate change will impact the railways, dams, coasts, ports and all the structures. Everything will be affected.

In the next five years, how should the government respond to climate change?
The government should have a plan for each sector like agriculture, forests, health and infrastructure. For each of these sectors we have to identify institutions, have a network and give a long-term mandate.

There is a need to identify the key sectors and then to identify key institutions who will oversee the project. The network built should be provided enough resources to continue the work.

(Shetty is a reporting fellow at IndiaSpend.)

Courtesy: India Spend

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Bilasi Urau (left), 32, a worker in Assam’s tea plantations, is afraid to get pregnant. “We all know someone who has died during pregnancy, and the situation makes me feel that it is better not to have children at all,” said the mother of a 10-year-old boy.

The sub-centre that provides primary health care—iron tablets, information about government schemes, immunisation and contraceptives—gets flooded every monsoon. “The mothers are then forced to stay home,” said Das. Over 30 of Assam’s 33 districts are inundated by the Brahmaputra annually, washing away crops and crippling the state’s rural economy.

Das does not remember when the road outside her sub-centre was built, but said it enables access to health care and tetanus injections—which reduces the chances of infection among mothers right after childbirth. “Roads are helping save lives,” Das added.

For every 100,000 live births, 130 women die in India due to pregnancy-related complications, according to Niti Aayog, the think-tank of the government. While Kerala has the lowest maternal mortality rate (MMR) of 46, Assam’s MMR of 237 is double India’s average and is currently higher than Zambia’s (224), according to World Bank data (Poland’s MMR of three is the lowest in the world).

Assam’s current MMR status might overshadow the strides the state has made in maternal healthcare. In just over a decade, Assam has reduced its MMR from 480 to 237–that is a greater than 50% reduction.

Maternal mortality is high where access to skilled and emergency care is either unavailable or limited, said Dileep Mavalankar, director, Indian Institute of Public Health (IIPH) in Gandhinagar. “Wherever that situation has improved, either in the government or the private sector, the mortality rate has gone down.”

(L-R) Arundhati Das, 52, a community health worker at the Bhojkhowa health sub-centre with her colleague Meera Bhuyaa, 31. Das credits the road outside the sub-centre for improved health services in the area.

The 15,000 roads constructed in Assam under the Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana launched in 2000 have helped improve access to health care, according to the health workers and doctors that IndiaSpend spoke to across five villages in Sonitpur district. However, there are issues that Assam needs to address.

Anaemia among pregnant women
Rukiya Begum, 44, is an accredited social health activist (ASHA) in Tengabasti village in Sonitpur district. The sub-centre near her village is being repaired, so for now, health officials are using her one-room brick home. There is a plastic chair and a table covered with green cloth. On it is a box of iron tablets that Rukiya is trained to give pregnant women to prevent anaemia.

Anaemic women are at a higher risk of developing pregnancy-related complications, found a 2016 study that looked at births in five government medical colleges in Assam. Anaemic mothers are more likely to develop infections after childbirth, and their babies tend to be smaller. In Assam, as in the rest of India, nearly half of all pregnant women in the age group of 15-49 year are anaemic.

A pregnant woman with anaemia is twice as likely to die during childbirth, according to a 2018 study published in the medical journal Lancet.
Rukiya talks about her 18-year-old sister-in-law who died during childbirth in 2007. “Since the area was flooded, it took us a few hours to get her to hospital. She bled to death after childbirth,” said Rukiya, who had just become an ASHA worker then, and had limited training.

A woman with anaemia is low on haemoglobin, which reduces her body’s ability to carry oxygen to all the organs. As a severely anaemic woman bleeds after childbirth, her heart has to pump at a higher rate to bring more blood to the organs to make up for the limited concentration of oxygen in the blood, increasing the chances of a cardiac arrest. “The doctor then has very little time to give her blood,” explained Ravikant Singh, a public health expert and founder of Doctors for You, an NGO that works in 12 states across India, including Assam.

Of Assam’s 33 districts, 10 have no blood banks, and if a woman needs blood following a C-section, there is none.

Unsafe abortions

Rukiya Begum is an ASHA worker in Tengabasti village in Sonitpur district of Assam. Responsible for distributing contraceptives to women in the village, she says supplies have not arrived for three months.

As an ASHA worker, Rukiya’s job also involves dispensing contraceptives. She ran out of supplies three months back but said this was the first time it had happened.

A 2006 study established the link between access to contraceptives and maternal deaths. Providing women with options to plan their families would avert 32% of global maternal deaths and 10% of children deaths, it said. Contraceptives allow a woman to avoid an unplanned pregnancy.

In Assam, 22% of women rely on oral contraceptive pills–more than five times the national average. However, the uptake of family planning methods is deficient in Assam. Only 37% of married women in the age group of 15-49 use any new means of family planning. This number stands at 47.8% for the rest of India.

“Oral contraceptives and injections have a high rate of discontinuation as women might forget to take them,” said Roger Rochat, former director of reproductive health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), US, and professor of global health at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health.

To terminate an unwanted pregnancy, the women either opt for over-the-counter abortion pills or turn to a quack. When unskilled practitioners perform abortion in a less than sterile environment, it increases the chances of infection.

“A few months back a woman in a neighbouring village died after taking abortion pills,” said Rukiya.

Is it easy to get these pills?

“Yes, the medical shops stock them, but I do not know about them,” she said, unwilling to provide more details.

In rural areas such as Tengabasti, in the absence of enough diagnostic labs, it can be a while before a woman finds out she is pregnant. Once the pregnancy is older than 20 weeks, a doctor cannot terminate it legally. Desperate, women often turn to quacks or private practitioners.

“Even in the best healthcare facility abortion can be risky, and death may occur,” said Ajit Virkud, a Mumbai-based obstetrician and gynaecologist and author of several medical textbooks. “In rural areas, most abortions are unsafe, specifically those done by people who are not qualified.” These deaths might never be reported as the procedures are illegal. .

One of the solutions to the problem is to provide contraceptive options (injections and intrauterine device or IUD) that are acceptable to people, said Rochat. “Another is to provide skilled practitioners to conduct abortion services.”

Maternal deaths that occur in the first three months of pregnancy are a significant contributor to MMR.
 
Neglect of tea garden workers
The most significant blind spot in Assam’s maternal health is the neglect of women working in its tea estates–803 spread across 27 districts–that report a disproportionately high number of maternal deaths. It was found that in the tea gardens of Assam, anaemia among women was almost universal, IndiaSpend reported in April 2017.

It was a pleasant May afternoon in the Durrung tea estate, one of the oldest in Assam. Rain comes early here, and the temperature is in the mid-20 degrees Celsius. A group of women wearing Assam’s traditional mekhela chador (a kind of saree) spread out plastic sheets on a mud road skirting the tea plantation. Some have young babies clinging to them, others have toddlers running around. The women are taking a break for the first time since 8 am.

In Assam’s tea gardens, it is the women who pluck the tea leaves–a painstaking process. The men water the plants and spray pesticides.
Bilasi Urau, 32, has grown up in the tea estate, as have all the other women sitting to have lunch with her. They live in villages spread across hundreds of acres of the estate. All the women know someone in their village who died during pregnancy.

Do women have access to healthcare?

“Yes, if we need anything, we have to inform the sardar [supervisor]. He will take us out [to hospital or to a doctor],” Urau said.

Can they not go out without permission?

“We can. However, there is no guarantee we will be allowed to return, so we do not. When we do go out we have to provide the address of the place we are visiting,” Urau said.

Construction of roads that improve access to health centres, contraceptives and tetanus injections are some of the basics helping save mothers in flood-prone Assam. The gains, though, are yet to reach its tea-garden workers.

The supervisor was cycling around to make sure the women did not rest when IndiaSpend visited.

Maternal deaths are disproportionately high among tea estate workers, found a study published in February this year. Researchers who investigated 150 maternal deaths discovered that 69% of all deaths were among the tea garden community. Half of the deaths were among first-time mothers, and more than half of those who died had husbands who were temporary workers.

A high rate of mortality among pregnant tea-garden workers (mainly Adivasis–indigenous tribal peoples) was also highlighted in a 2018 report by Nazdeek, a legal empowerment organisation.

Most of the workers in the tea gardens are from marginalised communities from central India. They were brought to Assam in the early 1900s under British colonial rule. These communities continue to earn lower than the state’s minimum wage, and 60-70% of the workers are hired-at-will with few or no benefits, according to Nazdeek’s report.

“The women have to depend on someone to take them out of the tea garden if they go into labour. In complicated cases, such delays could lead to death. The high rate of anaemia is another reason for the deaths,” said Pranti Dutta, who studied maternal deaths in four districts of Assam for her PhD thesis at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

As this reporter and her translator prepared to leave, the women began eating–rice and what looked like green chilli chutney, the only meal the women will have between 8 am and 4 pm. “Malnutrition is certainly a problem in the tea estates not just because of the poor economic conditions but also because of the unavailability of nutritious food,” admitted Purnananda Khaund, chief medical officer of Amalgamated Plantations Pvt. Ltd–the enterprise carved out of the erstwhile Tata Tea Ltd.

Last year, the Assam government launched the Wage Compensation Scheme for Pregnant Women in tea gardens, reported India Today on October 2, 2018. Under this cash transfer programme, pregnant women working in the tea gardens are provided with Rs 12,000 by the government. “The women would get this money in instalments through the pregnancy and after childbirth,” said Krishna Kemprai, joint director, health services for Sonitpur district. For women who make Rs 167 per day, providing monetary assistance to buy nutritious food could help improve their health, at least marginally.

Eight generations have passed since these tea estate workers were brought to Assam by the British. The villages have grown, and a few villagers have found employment outside the estate, but not all. “There are only so many people the tea estates can absorb. This situation is critical and needs a sincere political solution,” said Khaund.

When a maternal death is reported, a district-level committee is constituted to examine the causes. The mechanism does not function effectively, however. Only a few deaths are reported to district-level hospitals such as the Tezpur Medical College and Hospital (above). Many go unreported.

Unregistered deaths
Before it works to save its dying mothers, India needs to identify maternal deaths. India is lagging when it comes to registering births and deaths on to the Civil Registration and Vital Statistics portal. Around 83.60% of births and 67.40% of deaths are registered in India, according to data from the World Health Organization. India’s neighbour Sri Lanka registers 90% or more of both births and deaths, and Brazil, a developing country like India, registers close to 99%.

Maternal deaths might not be registered when the delivery is done at home or as a result of an illegal abortion. “If a primary health centre or rural hospital registers too many maternal deaths the administration could come down heavily on them and so there is a tendency not to register them if no one is watching,” said Singh from Doctors for You.

This is not to say that there is no system in place to investigate maternal deaths. In theory, every death needs to be investigated, and committees need to be formed at the district level.

“When we come across maternal deaths we hold a meeting to discuss the reasons and submit a report,” said Jagannath Patar, associate professor at the obstetrics and gynaecology department at the Tezpur Medical College and Hospital, Sonitpur. However, there are limitations to such investigations. There is no facility or personnel to conduct an autopsy at the hospital. “We are not even sure if the reports we make have an impact or the feedback reaches those at the primary healthcare centres,” Patar added.

The feedback does not reach the intended, the Nazdeek report confirmed.

There is another way to make sure maternal deaths are recorded accurately. “Record all deaths of women in the reproductive age of 15 to 49 and then investigate if that woman was pregnant or had recently delivered a baby. That way you will not miss any deaths,” advised Mavalankar of the IIPH.

This process does not have to be expensive. Countries such as Sri Lanka investigate all maternal deaths at low cost, a model that can be replicated, according to studies. “India has not paid attention to recording of all deaths, including maternal deaths,” said Mavalankar.

Registering each death and investigating the cause behind them would help identify the problems and its solutions, which in turn will help more mothers live.

(Shetty is a reporting fellow at IndiaSpend.)

This report was supported by the International Women’s Media Foundation’s (IWMF) Reporting Grants for Women’s Stories.

We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

This story was first published here on HealthCheck.

Courtesy: India Spend

The post Assam’s World-Famous Tea Gardens Are Deadly For Pregnant Women appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Borhlang Blah, 27, inside a sacred grove–a community forest protected by his village–in Mawphlang, Meghalaya. When Blah was growing up, the grove was denser and walking difficult. The grove and Meghalaya’s forests have thinned out since.

Everything came to a standstill: adults skipped work, children skipped school, and markets stayed shut in Blah’s home village of Mawphlang, an hour’s drive from Shillong, capital of the northeastern state of Meghalaya.

The rain of nine days and nine nights is now a childhood memory, reduced to no more than two or three days at a stretch.

“The changes in rainfall affects our crops,” said Blah, who gets his last name from the local Blah tribe, traditional protectors of the 200-acre sacred grove, which is the size of 150 football fields and offers a cornucopia of medicinal plants, pink rhododendrons and towering oaks. “The orange is no longer as sweet as it was once, and the size of the fruits that we grow is much smaller.”

At first glance, the data do not appear to record Mawphlang’s decreasing rain: The monsoon rainfall over Meghalaya–literally, abode of the clouds–was unchanged for 32 years to 2012, and the annual rainfall increased 11.5 mm per year, according to a 2017 Indian Institute of Technology – Gandhinagar (IIT) study. The average temperature rose 0.031 deg C every year over these 32 years.

Rainfall in Cherrapunji–one of the wettest regions of the world–has gone up. This change is not uniform across the state of Meghalaya. Some regions have registered a drop in rainfall levels, in line with the extreme weather events an IPCC report warned about.
Source: NOAH, an application that tracks rainfall and surface water changes using satellite data.

“This is a significant rise,” said NH Ravindranath of the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore, co-author of a 2018 report that studied changes in Meghalaya’s forests. “IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports talk of temperature changes of 1.5 to 2 degrees but over centuries. This change was in just a few decades.”

What has happened in Meghalaya, said experts, is in line with global-warming trends: “rainfall variability” has increased, meaning as it becomes warmer, the rain is more uncertain than ever before, with more intense rain and more dry days.

As one of India’s greenest states with 80% of its area under forests and trees, three times the Indian average, Meghalaya is unique and uniquely vulnerable, and most vulnerable are its irreplaceable rainforests, the survival of which holds lessons for the rest of India.

This is the sixth story in our series on India’s climate-change hotspots (you can read the first story here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here and the fifth here). The series combines reporting with the latest scientific research and explores how people are adapting to the changing climate.

From local tradition to global funding

In Mawphlang, Blah’s father and village secretary Tambor Lyngdoh is part of the Khasi Hills Community REDD+ Project, which started in 2007 as a village movement to revive and strengthen sacred groves by making sure the trees were not cut, the produce, such as fruit and mushroom, was untouched, and animals were not poached.

The Mawphlang project has received international funding since 2011 and is India’s first REDD project, a United Nations programme to mitigate the impact of deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.

When forests are cut, large amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) are released into the atmosphere and temperatures rise. Human activities have already warmed the world by 1 deg C, according to a September 2018 report by the IPCC, the world body for assessing science related to climate change.

Mawphlang is the largest of about 200 sacred groves in Meghalaya, and its preservation–the government hopes–will be an exemplar of what is possible. Over eight years, the project has expanded to 62 villages by involving local councils called Himas; the target is to revive 27,000 hectares of forests–that’s roughly the size of Pune. “If sacred groves were to extend to the entire Meghalaya we will be able to reverse the damage caused by climate change,” said Lyngdoh. The Meghalaya government, which works closely with Lyngdoh, in 2018 received World Bank funding to manage its resources better. Using this money, the government hopes to offer incentives–whether cash or otherwise–to communities, so they protect patches of forests in village backyards.

The urgency for Meghalaya is evident.

Over 16 years to 2016, nearly half of Meghalaya’s forests experienced an “increase in disturbance”, and around a quarter are now “highly vulnerable” to the impact of climate change, found a 2018 study commissioned by the state government and carried out by the IISc. The forests are disturbed by infrastructure projects and logging, and once that happened, recovery is difficult, said experts.

Cherrapunjee and Mawsynram in Meghalaya continue to receive some of the highest rainfall in the world, but monsoon rainfall patterns have deviated from the long-term mean over 32 years, the IIT Gandhinagar study found. The East Khasi Hills, home to Cherrapunjee and Mawsynram, have faced five to six drought years over this period, compared to three to six years for the rest of the state, said the IIT Gandhinagar study.

Apart from Meghalaya, forests decreased in eight other states and three union territories in India over two years, according to a 2017 Forest Survey of India report. Odisha (885 sq km), Assam (567 sq km) and Telangana (565 sq km) showed the highest decline in forest cover, each losing forests nearly the size of the city of Bengaluru or more.

“Forests in the whole of MP and those in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and even Karnataka are prone to forest fires, have low density and the organic carbon in the soil is very low,” said BK Tiwari of the Department of Environmental Studies at North Eastern Hill University (NEHU). “These types of forests are not sustainable or healthy.”

Overall forest cover in India has increased, officially, by 6,778 sq km or nearly twice the size of Goa–as per data that rise from a flawed definition of “forest cover”, as FactChecker reported in July 2019. Part of this rise is attributed to afforestation measures and plantations. “Plantations are not biodiverse,” said Tiwari. “Unlike natural forests they are neither stable nor sustainable. They can be called equivalent to a forest but not equal.”

Part of the reason for India’s receding forests is a long-running conflict over ownership between the government and 200 million Indians who live in these forests. When in February 2019 the Supreme Court ordered the eviction–the judges later stayed their own order–of forest dwellers from their traditional homes, a nationwide controversy broke out because the government’s rejection of 46% of land-right claims was flawed and, often, illegal, as IndiaSpend reported in March 2019.

Meghalaya, as we said, is unique because almost all the forest land is controlled by its people. But that has not stopped the march of deforestation and climate change.

Locals point to the thinned out forest cover even in protected forests like the sacred grove in Mawphlang (above).

Papayas in Shillong and other problems

On a February morning cold enough to require a thick jacket, Blah pointed to the empty spaces between the thinning trees of Mawphlang’s sacred grove, untouched stands of rain and other forest.

“As a child I wasn’t able to walk around here without several bushes getting in the way,” said Blah. Towering oak, rhododendron and khasi pine trees still block out direct sunlight in the depths of Mawphlang’s sacred grove, the best protected, according to studies.
You can enter Meghalaya’s sacred groves on only one condition: Nothing can be taken out.

This rule has enabled Meghalaya–roughly 15 times the size of Delhi–to retain its green cover. Meghalaya stands apart from other states in India because more than 90% of forests are owned and protected by its people and not by the government.

Sandwiched between Assam in the north and Bangladesh in the south, Meghalaya is a part of the Indo-Burma biodiversity hotspot–one of the most threatened biodiversity hotspots in India after the Himalayas–due to rapid resource exploitation and habitat loss.

The hills of the eastern sub-Himalayas–Garo, Khasi and Jaintia–run through most of Meghalaya, and the rest of the landscape is a high plateau.

While most of India receives 801 to 1,500 mm of rainfall in the monsoon months, Meghalaya receives double of that, according to the 2019 data from the India Meteorological Department (IMD). There is a wide variation in rainfall within Meghalaya. Some areas like Cherrapunji–once famous as the wettest region on Earth–receive up to 12,000 mm of rainfall every year, about five times the amount Mumbai gets.

The Disturbed Forests Of Meghalaya

Half of the the state’s forests are “extremely disturbed” due to the impact of climate change, according to a study by scientists from the IISc-Bangalore.
Source: Assessment of the Impact of Climate Change on Forests and Biodiversity of Meghalaya

When locals started complaining of a perceptible difference in rainfall and warm-weather plants like papaya appeared over the last decade in Shillong–where the average day temperature is 17 deg C–the government commissioned an investigative study.

“We looked at the data, starting from the year 2000, because we have good satellite images for that period,” said Rajiv Kumar Chaturvedi, an assistant professor at the Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani in Goa, and a co-author of the IISc study referred to earlier. Data were also collected manually from 300 locations statewide to understand the impacts of changing climate on biodiversity.

“The places where we saw maximum forest degradation were the places with the most biodiversity,” Chaturvedi said. The annual mean minimum temperature has increased by 0.6% between 1951 and 2000, the IISc study found.

The fragmentation and isolation of once contiguous forests because of infrastructure projects is also why a fourth of Meghalaya’s forests are now vulnerable to climate change. “Fragmented forests don’t recover from the impact of temperature and rainfall changes like natural forests do,” said Ravindranath from IISc.

Development activities were as much to blame, the study confirmed. “You can’t cut trees in a place, clear forests for plantation or build right through a forest and then call [the effects] climate change,” said NEHU’s Tiwari.

In February 2019, a NASA image that showed the earth greener than it was 20 years ago–led by India and China–went viral and was taken out of context. The rise in the greening of the planet was attributed to agriculture and afforestation, which do not provide ecological benefits, such as cooling the air or supporting biodiversity, as forests do.

The biodiversity issue is particularly relevant to Meghalaya, home to some of India’s last stands of rainforest.

Why rainforests are important

A sq km of rainforest can harbour as many as 1,000 different plant species. That is more plant species in Europe and North America combined.

India’s rainforests are primarily scattered across the Western Ghats, along the country’s western coast and parts of the Eastern Ghats along the east coast. Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya and Assam in the northeast are the other areas that support such forests.

A tenth of Meghalaya’s forests are biodiverse “tropical wet evergreen forests” or rainforests, which stay green all year round and are home to several plant and animal species. In Meghalaya, rainforests are found around Cherrapunji (above) and Mawsynram.

Around 10% of Meghalaya’s forests are tropical wet evergreen forests or rainforests. Several species of plants and animals–vultures, frogs, turtles and orchids–in Meghalaya’s rainforests are ”critically endangered” or “vulnerable”. These are endemic to the region, found nowhere else in the world.

Meghalaya’s sacred groves, some of which are rainforests, are home to 1,886 plant species, including orchid, bamboo, timber and medicinal plants. “Since there is plenty of sunlight and water, plant productivity in a rainforest is high,” said Kenneth James Feeley, professor at the University of Miami, where he studies tropical forests and climate change. “This allows several insects and fungi to grow which in turn become food for other animals.”

It is these forests that Meghalaya is losing, a decline, the government hopes, can be halted by local communities.

Homestays and other benefits

In 2011, as word of the Mawphlang REDD+ project spread, sisters Icylian, 47, and Castilian Wankhar, 42, realised that conservation was drawing in more tourists, some from as far as Europe. They opened their homes to the tourists, giving them another source of livelihood.
“The number of tourists has gone up in the past decade. We have someone or the other living with us most of the year,” said Castilian. Other homestays, too, have opened.

Sisters Icylian Wankhar, 47, and Castilian Wankhar, 42, remember going to the community forest to fill drinking water and pick mushrooms.

Icylian, an English schoolteacher, remembered a time when, as young girls, they picked mushrooms and filled pots of water from the ponds inside the sacred grove.

Many of these ponds are now drying, a sign of the forest’s ill-health.

“Forests act as a sponge,” explained the University of Miami’s Feeley. When it rains, forests absorb water and release it over a period of time. As trees are cut, the water runs off quickly and increases the chances of floods, erosion and even droughts. “Having forests is good for the community that depends on the water bodies.” Around 60 of Meghalaya’s sacred groves are located at the source of perennial streams, playing a crucial role in soil and water conservation. “Almost 90% of our water flows directly to the neighbouring state of Assam and Bangladesh,” said L Shabong, officer on special duty and head of the Institute of Natural Resources at the Meghalaya Basin Development Authority (MBDA). “This has impaired nearly 54% of our natural springs.”

As Meghalaya’s forests thin, parts of Bangladesh receive excess water during the monsoon season, causing floods, and then face water scarcity during the winter.

Changes In Surface Water In The North-East, 1985-2015

Satellite data from NOAH–an online programme that allows users to see changes in surface water and rainfall over 30 years to 2015–show that water bodies around Meghalaya and Bangladesh, where most of Meghalaya’s run off makes its way, have been drying. The red in the map indicates water bodies that have dried over time, and the green indicates an increase in water. Black indicates no change in the amount of surface water.

But policy making to arrest the slide is a bit of a shot in the dark.

One of the biggest challenges for Meghalaya, and other states in the northeast, is that even if they were to collect detailed climate data, there is no research institute in the region to analyse these data. Only a handful of institutes across India can, and that is not enough to study the impact of climate change across sectors, said the IISc’s Ravindranath. He is set to lead a pan-India study on the impact of climate change; it will be ready over the next six months.

“We simply do not have the data to make informed policy,” said Ravindranath. “We can only provide broad trends.”

Since the trends have been clear–uncertain rain, fewer benefits from the grove–Mawphlang’s people are enthusiastic about reviving traditions.

The villagers are currently working together to identify patches of degraded forests, to which they can restrict access to allow natural regeneration. Some of the villagers are adopting patches of forests and nurturing them personally, weeding out, for instance, any new species not native to the area.

As they work with the government to increase supplies of cooking gas, community leaders are also persuading villagers to stop using firewood for cooking. A typical Khasi household consumes 15 to 20 kg of firewood daily.

Blah, too, is building a homestay. For a decade he, and his father, Lyngdoh, the village secretary, hosted two tourists every night at their homes. In 2017, they began building a new homestay. Some of the rooms are ready, and as many as 15 tourists can stay overnight. Lyngdoh is proud of the livelihood opportunities that conservation affords to his people. “People love the experience of living here,” said Lyngdoh.

But tourist satisfaction is only a part of the effort to rejuvenate the sacred grove.

“As a state we’ve taken a lead in adapting to changing climate, and we think other states can learn from us,” said Shabong, the government officer at MBDA.

The sacred-grove project has enhanced Lyngdoh’s reputation, and government officials now consult him if they need the support of other tribal leaders. For Lyngdoh, this is a vindication of his traditions, that the elders of his tribe knew what they were talking about.
“We already know how to conserve the forests,” said Lyngdoh. “We have been doing it for centuries. All we need to do is support and help spread the tradition.”

This story was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center.

(Shetty is a Columbia Journalism School-IndiaSpend reporting fellow covering climate change.)

This is the sixth of a series on India’s climate change hotspots. You can read the first part here, the second here, the third here, the fourth here and the fifth here.

We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.

Courtesy: India Spend

The post As Climate Change Depletes Forests, One Of India’s Greenest States Turns To Its People appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Lok Sabha constituency Varanasi (above) is one of the world’s most polluted cities when measured for PM 2.5. Many gases and particulate matter that cause air pollution also have greenhouse properties, exacerbating climate change.

Soon, your skin feels the coarse particles that make up this dust. There is enough of it here, according to 2018 World Health Organization (WHO) data, to classify Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency as one of the cities with the most polluted air on the planet.

Home to 1.2 million people, Varanasi, sprawled along the banks of India’s holiest river, the Ganga, has since 2016 frequently overtaken India’s national capital New Delhi in terms of air pollution, according to WHO data.

Varanasi is not alone. Home to over 600 million, the Gangetic plain hosts four other cities–Kanpur, Faridabad, Gaya and Patna–that occupy the top five slots in the 2018 WHO list of the world’s most polluted cities, measured for particles that are 2.5 micron in diameter (PM 2.5) or less.

These particles are 1/25th the diameter of a human hair. They are known to cause cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, even cancers. India’s cities also occupy 11 of 15 of the slots in WHO’s list of most polluted cities in the world when a larger pollutant–PM 10–is considered.

The impact of this air pollution doesn’t just stop at human health. Several of the gases that cause air pollution also have greenhouse properties–they trap the sun’s heat and push up the earth’s temperature, and the latest research implicates these pollutants as changing local and global climate by means still being studied. It does seem, experts said, that temperatures are rising on the Gangetic plain, and the monsoon is becoming more uncertain.

“Air pollutants, a lot of them, also have an effect on the climate,” said Erika von Schneidemesser who studies the links between air pollution and climate change at Institute of Advanced Sustainability Studies (IASS) Potsdam, a German research institute. “If the particulate matter released in the air has a high amount of black carbon (or soot), then it will absorb more sunlight and contribute to warming and thereby climate change.”

While several gases–such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and nitrous oxide–were known to cause warming, it was earlier believed that particulate matter in the air reflects sunlight, causing a cooling effect.

Emerging research now indicates otherwise. While some particulates have a cooling effect, others cause an increase in temperature, studies suggest.

The year 2018 was the warmest on record for the planet since record keeping began in 1880, according to an assessment by US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the largest repository of climate data in the world.

As temperature fluctuations become the new normal, people are paying less attention to weather, said a 2019 February study based on twitter interactions. People tend to remember weather events only for as long as two to eight years, and if unusual weather continues for longer, they will no longer find it unusual or be able to tell the difference, the study said.

This is the fifth story in our series on India’s climate-change hotspots (you can read the first story here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here). The series combines ground reporting with the latest scientific research and explores how people are adapting–or trying–to the changing climate.

The human cost of air pollution

Boatman Ravi Sahani, 24, scans the Assi ghat, or steps–one of the most popular in Varanasi along the Ganga–for tourists, whom he will offer a 30-minute ride. It is 2 pm. He has been here since 4 am and will remain here till 8 pm, pleading with tourists to take a ride in the boat.

But few are interested.

The river water is dark and the air smoggy. Tourists complain that the polluted air makes them cough and causes their skin to itch. For Sahani this means reduced income.

“We have done this work for generations. The money I make is barely enough to survive,” he said. “If I had money to start something else, I would, but I don’t have it.”

Ravi Sahani, a boatman in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, said fewer people are interested in a boat ride on the Ganga, affecting his only source of income. The river water is dark and the air smoggy. Tourists complain the air makes them cough and causes their skin to itch.

Varanasi had no good air day in all of 2015, according to a 2016 report called Varanasi Chokes by the Centre for Environment and Energy Development (CEED), IndiaSpend and Care4Air. “One of the reasons why we chose to study Varanasi was to make a point that the problem of air pollution is not limited to Delhi alone. The need was to take it beyond the national capital,” said Aishwarya Madineni, Bengaluru-based researcher and report’s author.

While air quality in high-income countries is improving, nearly 97% of those living in cities–with a population of more than 100,000–in low and middle-income countries are now breathing polluted air.

In 2016, the WHO attributed 7 million deaths–comparable to the population of Hyderabad–to indoor and outdoor pollution. Of these, the highest number of deaths, 2.4 million, were in south-east Asia alone. As air quality declines, more people will be at risk of stroke, heart disease, lung cancer as well as chronic and acute respiratory disease, according to the WHO.

Cities in Asia, including India, have some of the world’s most polluted air. The darker shades represent higher levels of PM 2.5 (particulate matter less than 2.5 µm diameter) in the map above, updated regularly by the WHO.
Source: World Health Organization

These cities will also be drivers of climate change, experts said.

Air pollution is affecting temperature, rainfall

Air pollution can cause a net rise or fall in temperatures and change rainfall patterns, experts said.

When something burns, the chemical process of combustion leads to the release of either a gas or particulate matter like soot. In most instances, gases and particulate matter are released together. Scientists said they have a “fair understanding” of the nature of both most gases and particulate matter.

“But there are blind spots in our knowledge,” said Schneidemesser of IASS-Potsdam, and it is difficult to say how these chemicals will interact with each other.

If the particles and gases causing warming dominate the mix, the net result would be a rise in temperature. Particles such as those of dust, sea salt and ash suspended in the air are known as an aerosol. Some aerosols absorb more heat from the sun, others have reflective properties, causing temperatures to drop.

“Aerosols can make significant changes to cloud properties,” said Sachchida Nand Tripathi, professor and head, department of civil engineering, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Kanpur. He has, for years, studied how air pollution caused changes in local and regional environment.

In the clouds, water condenses around particulate matter to form droplets, which then come down as rainfall. Aerosols can weaken rainfall. Here’s how it works: while the water available in the clouds is the same, it is now redistributed among the large number of particles available.

As a result, two patterns are emerging. “One, it shows the increasing aerosols in the atmosphere are slightly weakening the Indian monsoon,” said Tripathi. “And two, over a short time scale, it can redistribute the rainfall.”

But the impact of aerosol pollution on rainfall is a complex mechanism, which depends on moisture availability, amount of pollution and altitude, among other factors.

At the local level, this could mean that rainfall might vary greatly within a city. For instance, a highly polluted city centre might receive a sudden, short burst of rainfall that can even lead to flash floods, as Nagpur reported in August 2016. Aerosol pollution can interfere with cloud formation and cause hailstorms, similar to the one reported from Delhi in February 2019.

Of the world’s 15 most polluted cities–measured for PM 2.5–13 are Indian. All 13 are in the Indo-Gangetic plain, which stretches from Pakistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east.

In 2017, nearly 7% of global carbon emissions came from India, up from 6% in 2016 according to a December 2018 report from the Global Carbon Project, a collaborative effort between several research institutes to quantify global greenhouse-gas emissions.

Currently, India is the world’s fourth largest emitter of CO2, behind China, US and the European Union (EU). While US and EU emissions are falling, Indian and Chinese are rising. The US continues to have the highest per capita carbon emissions in the world.

These emissions come from the burning of fossil fuels or even changes in land-use patterns. Large scale deforestation could lead to a net rise in carbon emissions from a country.

Countries With World’s Highest CO2 Emissions

Carbon emissions from India and China continue to rise, while those of the US and the EU are declining. The US has the world’s highest per capita carbon emissions.
Source: Global Carbon Budget Report 2018

A majority of Indian cities in the top 20 most polluted cities in the world are in the Indo-Gangetic plain.

What makes this region, that stretches from Pakistan in the west to Bangladesh in the east, so polluted?

“Apart from being densely populated the region also has a unique topography,” said Tripathi. “To the north of the Indo-Gangetic plain are the Himalayas, and to the south is the Deccan plateau. This creates a valley effect and causes the air to stagnate.”

Northwesterly winds that blow across the region spread polluted air across the Indo-Gangetic plain. Winds can also spread pollution from Central Asia and Pakistan all the way to parts of Punjab, said Tripathi.

The Indo-Gangetic plain is a “global aerosol hotspot”, causing the ice in the Himalayas to melt faster, said a 2011 NASA study. The aerosol is also causing rainfall variability during the summer monsoon, another 2015 study said.

But it is not just cities in the Indo-Gangetic plain that are polluted.

“There is high pollution around both Mumbai and Hyderabad as well. In the case of Mumbai, due to the topography, the pollution gets carried by the winds to the oceans,” said Sagnik Dey, associate professor at the Centre for Atmospheric Sciences, IIT-Delhi. Dey has studied the distribution of aerosols over India using satellite imagery and found that the distribution changes every season, varying even between neighbourhoods.

This image from NASA, taken on August 23, 2018, shows aerosol pollution–a mix of particulate matter and gases–over India. The red over the Indo-Gangetic plain in north India indicates aerosol pollution caused by soot, the purple haze over Rajasthan indicates aerosol pollution due to dust from the Thar desert, while the blue specks over northern Gujarat are from aerosol pollution caused by the presence of sea salt in the air.
Credit: Earth Observatory, National Aeronautical and Space Agency, USA

Dey highlights another gap: the lack of air-quality sensors.

“We have just over 130 continuous automatic air monitoring systems, of which 40 are in the NCR [National Capital Region],” said Dey. “Nearly 500 districts in India don’t have a single monitoring system, whether automatic or manual. To put it simply, we have no idea how polluted many of India’s tier-2 and -3 cities are because we are not measuring the pollution levels there at all.”

Back in the Indo-Gangetic plain, the effects of India’s inaction are plainly evident.

A lifetime of changes

Baijnath Majhi is 87. He has never gone to school. Like his father, he is a boatman, as are his children and grandchildren. Over his lifetime, Majhi has watched the Ganga’s water get visibly polluted and the air quality in Varanasi deteriorate.

“We can earn money only when people come,” said Majhi, “I have been sitting here since morning but there hasn’t been a single customer yet.”

Baijnath Majhi said he has seen air and water quality in Varanasi deteriorate over his lifetime. These are changes that should, normally, take hundreds of years, according to experts.

For those like Majhi, the polluted air means a worsening quality of life and a cycle of poverty he hasn’t been able to escape. Majhi accepts whatever a tourist is willing to pay. The alternative is day long idleness.

Many changes that Majhi has seen over his lifetime tend to play out over a timescale of hundreds of years, said experts. But the sheer quantity of air pollution has meant that those like Majhi are able to notice a perceptible difference.

The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has almost doubled since the pre-industrial age till now, according to the Global Carbon Budget report released in December 2018. Between 1960 and 2017 alone, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere has gone from 310 ppm (parts per million) to 410 ppm–a rise of over 32%.

Level Of CO2 In The Air Since 1950s

Source: Global Carbon Budget 2018 report

A lot of this pollution does not come from vehicles in India. “Household pollution in rural India is a big contributor mostly caused when solid fuels like coal or wood is used for cooking,” said Dey. This is a feature common to most developing countries, he added.

Improving monitoring

In Delhi in January 2019, unprecedented air pollution and public pressure led the government to launch the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP)–a five-year plan that focused on improving air quality across 102 cities in India.

A key component of this plan is increasing the monitoring of data using low-cost air monitoring devices. “For real change, different departments have to work together; the pollution control board alone will not be able to make much of an impact,” said a senior official at the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change (MoEFCC), speaking on condition of anonymity since he was not authorised to talk to the media.

The NCAP has its flaws: it lacks legal mandate, does not have clear timelines for its action plan, and does not fix accountability. It also ignores air quality in rural India, as IndiaSpend reported in February 2019.

Solutions to tackle air pollution exist, but state government officials must lead the way, said the MoEFCC official. “An increase in public pressure is needed to drive change,” he added.

Coordination between government departments to address air pollution is another requirement. In Varanasi, for instance, the civic body in charge of making regulations rarely consults the pollution control board.

Dey of IIT-Delhi believes that while the NCAP is “heading in the right direction”, it is not enough. “We need to invest a lot more in measuring the data,” he said.

Measuring air pollution and climate-change impacts is difficult, said IASS-Potsdam’s Schneidemesser, because “there are so many interactions and feedback mechanisms” between air, land and ocean systems.

But on the bright side, “if regulations are put in place, it is possible to see improvements in air quality on the timescale of weeks and at times even days”, she said, citing the example of Beijing–a city where the minimum temperature falls to -8 deg C– where air pollution was brought down by 35% over five years to 2017.

Beijing’s transformation was possible because the government had a plan, various departments enforced the plan and the laws and helped millions of households switch from coal to natural gas for winter indoor heating. In Varanasi, it would be a start if government officials started talking to their colleagues.

This is the fifth of a series on India’s climate change hotspots. You can read the first part here, the second here, the third here and the fourth here.

(Disha Shetty is a Columbia Journalism School-IndiaSpend reporting fellow covering climate change.)

Courtesy: India Spend

The post On The Gangetic Plain, 600 Million Indians Feel Effects Of Air Pollution And Changing Climate appeared first on SabrangIndia.

Bengali-speaking children, like those in the bridge school centre in Bengaluru, above, have travelled more than 2,000 km from districts bordering Bangladesh. Some of these children are climate change refugees from Sundarban. As many as 40% of students in some Kannada-medium government schools in Bengaluru speak Bengali, according to the Samridhdhi Trust that runs bridge schools to help these children cope.

“Most of them said they were from West Bengal. I wondered what these children were doing so far from home,” Ravindran said. As she started conducting workshops in Hindi, that the children were somewhat familiar with, their stories started flowing.

“They spoke about the trees near their homes, the spirits that lived in them and the clean air. They missed their home,” Ravindran recalled.

The Sundarban delta–nearly one million hectare in area–is formed at the point where the rivers Ganga, Brahmaputra and Meghna merge into the Bay of Bengal. The delta is extremely fertile as the three rivers carry an estimated one billion tonnes of sediments.

Nearly 40% of Sundarban–the world’s largest mangrove forest, three times as large as Goa–is in India, the rest is in neighbouring Bangladesh.

Sundarban (literally ‘beautiful forest’) features in the list of UNESCO’s 209 natural heritage sites in the world for supporting “an exceptional level of biodiversity in its terrestrial, marine and aquatic habitats”.

Over the last 40 years, Sundarban has lost 220 sq km–nearly the size of Kolkata–to the sea, according to Sugata Hazra, director of the School of Oceanographic Studies at Jadavpur University.
As rising sea levels engulf entire islands, residents are migrating en masse, from the Bangladesh as well as the Indian side of Sundarban.

Not all are environmental migrants, but with no documentation of this kind of migration, the numbers are hard to estimate.

But ripples of this migration are being felt over 2,000 km to the southwest. As many as 40% of students in some Kannada-medium government schools in Bengaluru speak Bengali, according to the Samridhdhi Trust that runs bridge schools to help these children cope.

IndiaSpend tracked some of these migrants from Sundarbans to the Kalihata slum in east Bengaluru’s Marathahalli area. Studies show that several districts of West Bengal, not just in Sundarban but across the state, are extremely vulnerable to the impact of climate change.

By 2060, nearly 1.4 billion people across the world will be at risk of becoming environmental migrants, some internal and others flocking across borders. The annual rate of sea level rise is expected to triple by the year 2100, making agriculture as well as everyday life in low-lying places, like Sundarban, unsustainable.

This is the third story in our series on how climate change is disrupting people’s lives (you can read the first story here and the second here). The series combines ground reporting from India’s climate change hotspots with the latest scientific research, and highlights how people are adapting to the changing climate.

The Sundarban delta, home to the world’s largest mangrove forest, is at risk from rising sea levels because of global warming.

One in 10 individuals living in a low-lying coastal area on this planet is in India. Along with China, Bangladesh, Indonesia and Vietnam, India has the highest population that will be exposed to the impact of flooding and extreme weather events that the rising sea will bring, according to a 2015 study.

Human activities have already caused global warming by 1 degree Celsius, according to the September 2018 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world body for assessing science related to climate change. Governments of 195 countries are on this panel.

“Over 90% of the heat trapped in the climate system is actually in the oceans. As the oceans warm, just like liquid in a thermometer, it expands and (the) sea level rises,” said John Church, research scientist and one of the lead authors for the chapter on sea level rise in the IPCC’s fifth assessment report.

Melting of non-polar ice, like that in the Himalayas, the thermal expansion of oceans as they warm, and the melting of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica are pushing up global sea levels.

“With unmitigated emissions the sea level rise could be as much as one metre by 2100,” Church said. If the entire ice sheet over Greenland were to melt, that alone would cause global sea levels to rise by seven metres. If all the ice sheets in Antarctica melt, it could push the levels up by another 55 m.

A video by the European Space Agency (ESA) explaining what contributes to sea-level rise.

Sea levels will continue to rise not just through the century but well past 2100. For people living on small islands, low-lying coastal areas and deltas, this means, at best, that more salt water from the sea will enter their fields making the soil unsuitable for agriculture, there will be increased flooding, frequent cyclones and infrastructure damage. At worst, it means the piece of land they call home would be under water.

Scanty research on the India side of Sundarban
The changing climate in the Bangladesh side of Sundarban is well documented but not much is known about the Indian side, according to Selvin Pitchaikani, an oceanographer at the Institute of Environmental Studies and Wetland Management (IESWM) in Kolkata.

Pitchaikani, who published his data on the changing weather patterns in Sundarban in 2017, found that the land is increasingly growing saline and that cyclonic storms have become frequent. Rainfall patterns have already changed, making conventional cultivation difficult for farmers, his research found.

But “to come to any conclusion, we need data for a minimum of 20-25 years. We need more weather stations in the region as well as funding”, he said emphasising the need for more research.

With migration, children grow up without a parent, fewer people to care for the elderly
It’s a four-hour car ride from Kolkata to the Sundarban delta region. Once here, a car becomes useless. To reach the island of Mousuni, it’s another hour-long journey of switching between electricity-powered rickshaws while on small stretches of land, and small boats to cross the streams.

Electricity reached Mousuni–one of the larger islands in the delta with a population of over 25,000–a year ago, trailing climate change by decades.  

Mousuni is an island in the Sundarban delta with a population of over 25,000 residents. Frequent floods and the rising sea level have forced many to migrate from Mousuni.

Sheikh Sufi, 27, grew up in Mousuni. His home is on the coast overlooking the Bay of Bengal. “We used to grow rice and chillies but a decade back there was severe flooding. After that the crops haven’t grown,” Sufi said, holding his three-year-old son Abdul Rehman over his shoulder. Once their land became infertile due to salt water, they learnt to fish. Now, six months a year, Sufi travels over 2,000 km to Kerala to work as a construction worker earning about Rs 300 a day.

Like Sufi, nearly 96% of these environmental migrants are headed to other areas within India, according to a study of 1,315 households in the region. The study was conducted by Deltas, Vulnerability & Climate Change: Migration and Adaptation (DECCMA), a consortium of researchers from universities in UK, Ghana, Bangladesh and India.

Of these migrants, 83% are men and 17% women. Most are young; between the ages 21 and 30. The men interviewed for the study said they were moving for employment opportunities as agriculture was unsustainable. The women were moving to either join their husbands post marriage or to live with other family members.

Left behind are the elderly, children and most women.

“There are two types of migrations–proactive, who plan their retreat from the coast in advance and reactive, who move only when there is no other alternative left. In Sundarban we are still witnessing reactive migration,” said Indrila Guha, principal at Basanti Devi College, Kolkata and a researcher in environmental economics.

Children growing up without a parent, fewer people to care for the elderly, and poor women who could become easy targets for traffickers, are some of the potential fallouts of this situation, according to Guha.

For the ones who move with their families in tow, life continues to remain tough. The children in Bengaluru’s bridge schools struggle to adjust to life in the city, the language barrier making it even more challenging for them to adjust. Parents frequently move in search of jobs and education is one of the first casualties.  

Deltas, Vulnerability & Climate Change: Migration and Adaptation (DECCMA), a consortium of researchers from Universities in UK, Ghana, Bangladesh and India is studying the impact of climate change in river deltas.

Source: http://generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk/deccma/

Residents adapt to rising seas
As the onslaught of the sea continued, Sufi’s home was reduced to rubble. During high tide, the sea waves wash away chunks of his house. On a low tide day, like the one when IndiaSpend visited, his home provides a view of the sea that tourists scout the globe for.

Sufi, his wife and young son live with a neighbour. “We have no money to build another home. Where can we go?” he said, with eyes downcast.

Sheikh Sufi, 27, outside his destroyed home in Mousuni. Sufi works as a construction worker over 2,000 km away in Kerala for six months in a year.

“We have no policies directed at rehabilitation and resettlement of people who have lost their land due to sea level rise and coastal erosion,” said Hazra, of Jadavpur University.

Rainfall is usually heavy, and severe cyclonic storms frequent. This area receives 1,501-2,500 mm of rainfall, compared to the Indian average of 801-1,500 mm.

Those who haven’t migrated try to adapt. Shabir Sheikh, 27 and Khushbanoo Bibi, 25, married for 12 years, are constructing a new home for themselves and their three children, on higher ground.
“During floods, the stove gets wet and so we are making sure in the new home it will be higher so flood waters don’t reach it,” Khushbanoo said. Most women here cook in the open, on mud stoves and firewood, which makes it impossible to cook during the floods.  

Shabir Sheikh and his wife Khushbanoo Bibi’s new home is being built at a higher level to keep flood waters at bay.

The government is helping by building embankments along the coast to stem the flood waters, and flood shelters to accommodate those affected by floods. There are no long-term policies to help relocate and rehabilitate residents.

Adapting To Changing Climate: The Sundarban Delta
Double burden of rehabilitation and poor health in Sundarban
Globally, of the regions in the low lying coastal areas at the risk of flooding, most are underdeveloped or developing.

Nearly a third of the children under the age of five in South-24 Parganas, the district where Mousuni is, are stunted–short for their age. Half of the households still lack modern sanitation facilities and as many six in every 10 women are anaemic. Yet, the district is now having to prioritise infrastructure to deal with climate change.

Depending on the material used to build the embankment, a one-km long section could cost as much as Rs 1 crore.  As seas rise, locals plead for the government to build more walls even as they are aware that these are just short term measures against climate change.

Threat to biodiversity  
More than 200 species of plants, 400 species of fishes and 300 species of birds, numerous phytoplankton, fungi, bacteria, zooplankton, reptiles, amphibians and more call Sundarban their home. Even within Sundarban, species differ depending on the salinity of the soil. Sundarban is also home to many threatened and endangered animals like the Royal Bengal tiger, estuarine crocodile and the Indian python.

The changing temperature of water and increased salinity and acidity in the soil has already impacted the region’s biodiversity, according to studies by the Marine Science Department of Calcutta University and the Department of Biological Science of the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research in Kolkata.

While the rising sea level impacts biodiversity, experts also blame human activity. “If, for instance, there were no obstructions on the major rivers and flows were not diverted, eroded material would have reached the delta,” said Anurag Danda, senior advisor for Climate Change Adaptation at the World Wildlife Fund.

“Between the Tehri dam (Uttarakhand) and Farraka barrage (Murshidabad, West Bengal), there are at least 1,000 interventions along the Ganges that either divert water or hold water resulting in much reduced sediment delivery,” he explained.

Problems for nature and man will continue to grow as sea levels continue to rise, scientists say. “The question would be not whether it would happen but how quickly it would happen,” Church, co-author of the latest IPCC report, said.

What is the way out for those living along the coastline? Planned retreat to safer places, aided by the government, is the main option, Hazra said. “It will be economically beneficial as a whole rather than keeping people there and rebuilding embankments.”

This is the third in a series on India’s climate change hotspots. You can read the first story here and the second here.

(Disha Shetty is a Columbia Journalism School-IndiaSpend reporting fellow covering climate change.)

Courtesy: India Spend
 

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