Climate Change – Impacts on South Asia

Recently the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its fourth assessment report. See Link. After seeing Al Gore's documentary my interest in this issue has definitely increased. I have also been following the 'debate' on global warming in the US. This would be one of the ridiculous debates since Galileo was persecuted in medieval times. A few Galileos from NASA have been 'burned' at the stake here as well. Well, I digress from my main intention for the post. One thing that was not clear to me was the level of apathy and the insouciance exhibited by Western Governments in general and the developed economies, which was markedly at odds with their pattern of alacrity in even dealing with remote threats such as Saddam's WMDs. After reading the report summary, it is so painfully apparent why it is so.

Though the primary cause of global climate change is the carbon emissions generated by human activities, the effect would be felt acutely by specific regions as climate systems are regional in nature. This would result in uneven effects on the globe, imparting benefits on some regions and unmitigated disasters on others in the near and medium term. In the long term, however entire globe would be affected. The major effects on the globe are classified into mainly Water, Ecosystems, Food, Coasts and Health. On water, the melt down of glaciers in the polar and high latitude regions is going to increase water availability and at the mid-latitude and semi-arid latitudes (a.k.a South Asia) the water availability is going to decrease by 20-30%.

In India, the Indo-Gangetic plains which get their water from the glacial lakes in Tibet, initially during the melt down and receding of the glaciers, in the very near term water availability will peak causing floods. However glaciers are banks; when the glacier melts more than it needs to, it is a draw down of the capital. Within few years, the water supply to Indus/Ganges river systems is going to considerably diminish resulting in low agricultural productivity, reduced hydel-power generation by 20-30% because of low availability and more droughts. In such a heavily concentrated area this will also strain our minimal adaptive capacity. When it comes to the peninsular rivers that get their catchment thru monsoon rains this is a dicier bet. Monsoons being highly unpredictable the effects of the temperature increase on ocean's surface and its increasing acidity , the monsoons may become more erratic and uneven , upsetting the patterns in agriculture, river water accumulation causing more droughts, laying waste entire swaths of our prime agriculture centers. To anyone who is plainly observing the average levels of water flowing in our rivers in the last 10-15 years this would be obvious.

Rising sea-levels due to glacial and snow melt down in the poles would cause significant strain on coastal deltas. The first layer to face this threat would be the mangroves and marsh vegetation which hold the sea water at bay and prevent salinity in our fertile coastal plains such as Godavari, Krishna and Cauvery deltas. Faced with multiple impacts of lower catchment on the rivers and rising sea levels, these areas are at significant risk. One tsunami takes two or three years to recover from; multiple natural disasters in a short period of time such as floods caused by uneven rainfalls and cyclone activity will be horrendous to even contemplate. Subsistence farmers and fishermen are at maximum risk. This will necessitate increased internal migration to in-land areas straining existing resources.

Au contraire, the near-term and medium term impact of the global climate change for developed countries is reduced winters and less harsh winters, increase in cropping season duration, increase in water availability in the low latitude regions, mostly in the northern hemisphere. Corn farmers in Iowa are going to have a field day, no pun intended. In urban centers, this will result in less energy consumption on heating and other winter living amenities. Improvement in these conditions will also result in higher productivity. This year in US the timing for switching to daylight time was advanced a full 3 weeks. The list is not entirely full of benefits but with some disadvantages as well. In countries as vast as the United States and Canada, there are bound to be some sub-regions that would be adversely affected. But then the adaptive capacity, mitigation capacity is order of magnitudes greater than developing countries such as India's or of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.

All of this must give a pause to any serious policy maker in India. In the next few decades, we have to multiply our energy capacity, water capacity and other infrastructural needs just to keep up with the population growth and the share of the population joining the work force. The great Asian '8-9-10%growth' has a dangerous flip side to it. Already this growth has caused so much inflationary pressure on huge segments of population. The absence of this growth would cause jolts in society as there won't be enough revenues to even keep going. On the face of this generational and civilizational challenge what we can expect from our leadership is zilch. There is near total ignorance about this issue and nil debate as to what we need to do to cope, mitigate and overcome these challenges. On a final note, the IPCC report has a world map, where the observation centers to study the climate change are plotted. US, Europe, Russia, China, Antarctica and Australia have a large number of centers, in that order. The number of observation centers in India: ZERO.