Dr. Devendra Kothari
Population and Development Analyst
Forum for Population Action
India
is a country that is facing the challenges of people and nature.
The Nature Conservancy[1]
The
Issue:
As one of the
greatest challenges facing India, climate change deserves serious treatment by
all of us. Of all the most polluting nations – US, China, Russia, Japan and
the EU bloc – only India’s carbon emissions are rising: they rose almost 5
percent in 2016. No one questions India’s right to develop, or the fact that
its current emissions per person are tiny. But when building the new India for
its 1.35 billion people, especially those who are living below poverty lines,
whether it relies on coal and oil or clean and green energy will be a major
factor in whether global warming can be tamed.
Over fifty per cent of India’s population (around 700 million) still
has little or no access to basic facilities, such as quality education, health
or sanitation even after
the adoption of market-friendly strategies during the 1990s and record-high GDP
growth in recent years.[1] As such, “India is the frontline state,” says
Samir Saran, at the Observer Research Foundation in Delhi. “Two-thirds of India
is yet to be built. So please understand, 16% of mankind is going to seek the
American dream. If we can give it to them on a frugal climate budget, we will
save the planet. If we don’t, we will either destroy India or destroy the planet.” This view
is shared internationally: Christiana Figueres, the UN’s former climate chief who delivered the landmark
Paris climate change agreement says India is “very, very important” for
everybody. Similarly. Lord Nicholas Stern, the climate economist who has worked
in India for 40 years, says a polluting, high-carbon development would leave
India alone accounting for a huge chunk of the world’s future emissions, making
it “very difficult” to keep the global temperature rise below the
internationally agreed danger limit of 2C. Right now, India gets 0.4 per
cent of its energy from wind and just
0.03 per cent from solar PV, and even in 2040, in an extremely optimistic
scenario, India will get just 3 per cent of its energy from wind and solar.
India, therefore, has to step up to balance
economic growth with nature. For
this, there is work to be done everywhere in India with various perspectives to
manage the climate change. In the face
of such overwhelming need, the paper, based on secondary data and analysis,
will try to identify and respond to the most pressing challenges, and will
suggest a way out. In
fact, it offers an opportunity for nations including India to step in and help
lead the way with a smarter approach to manage the climate change. Here, India could contribute the path
breaking way out looking to its tradition – coexisting with nature – with right
type of policies. In a news item, The Guardian argues that “How India’s battle with climate change
could determine all of our fates.” [2] It is because India’s population and
emissions are rising fast, and its ability to tackle poverty without massive
fossil fuel use will decide the fate of the planet.
Climate change and its
impact:
The difference
between the two terms environment and atmosphere is that the atmosphere refers to the envelop
of gases for the earth, whereas the environment refers to all the living and non-living things
including atmosphere that make up the surroundings. Climate is part of
environment. Climate affects and is affected by the environment in reciprocal
fashion.
Climate change is a change in the statistical distribution
of weather patterns when that change lasts for an extended period of time. The
change is attributed largely to the increased levels of atmospheric carbon
dioxide (CO2) produced by the use of fossil fuels and/or by human activities. Global
warming, also referred to as climate change, is the observed century-scale rise
in the average temperature of the Earth's climate system and its related
effects. Multiple lines of scientific evidence show that the climate system is
warming.[3]
The world has warmed more than one
degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement —
the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day
in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees.[4]
The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions
trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two
degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical
reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian
Gulf. Large scale migration cannot be ruled out. Long-term disaster is now the best-case
scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster:
forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a
former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC), has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four
degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh
claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned
to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a
five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists
to warn of the end of human civilization.[5]
Climate change has occurred repeatedly throughout Earth's
history. Some aspects
of the current climate change are not unusual, but others are. The
concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has reached a record
high relative to more than the past half-million years, and has done so at an
exceptionally fast rate. Current global temperatures are warmer than they have
ever been during at least the past five centuries, probably even for more than
a millennium. If warming continues unabated, the resulting climate change
within this century would be extremely unusual in geological terms. Another
unusual aspect of recent climate change is its cause: past climate changes were
natural in origin, whereas most of the warming of the past 50 years is attributable
to human activities.[6]
When comparing the current climate change to
earlier, natural ones, three distinctions must be made. First, it must be clear
which variable is being compared: is it greenhouse gas concentration or
temperature, and is it their absolute value or their rate of change? Second,
local changes must not be confused with global changes. Local climate changes
are often much larger than global ones, since local factors (e.g., changes in
oceanic or atmospheric circulation) can shift the delivery of heat or moisture
from one place to another and local feedbacks operate (e.g., sea ice feedback).
Large changes in global mean temperature, in contrast, require some global
forcing (such as a change in greenhouse gas concentration or solar activity).
Third, it is necessary to distinguish between time scales. Climate changes over
millions of years can be much larger and have different causes (e.g.,
continental drift) compared to climate changes on a centennial time scale.
Why does carbon dioxide (CO2) get most of the attention
when there are so many other heat-trapping gases? Climate change is primarily a problem of too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
This carbon overload
is caused mainly when we burn fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas or cut down and burn forests.
As a result, rate of acceleration of climate change is gaining momentum. Globally, 2018 is shaping
up to be the fourth-hottest year on record. The only years hotter were the
three previous ones. That string of records is part of an accelerating climb in
temperatures since the start of the industrial age that scientists say is clear
evidence of climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions.[7]
In
2018, record heat wreaked havoc on four continents.[8]
For example, the contiguous United States had its hottest month of May, Japan
was walloped by record high temperatures in July, killing at least 86
people in what its meteorological agency bluntly called a “disaster.” Further, Nawabshah is in the heart
of Pakistan’s cotton country. But no amount of cotton could provide comfort on
the last day of April, when temperatures soared past 122 degrees Fahrenheit, or
50 degrees Celsius. Even by the standards of this blisteringly hot place, it
was a record. Similarly, May had been the warmest in 100 years in Oslo.
June was hot, too, according to MET Norway. And weather stations logged
record-high temperatures on the edge of the Sahara and above the Arctic Circle.
At 3 p.m. on July 5, on the edge of the vast Sahara, the Algerian oil town of
Ouargla recorded a high of 124 degrees Fahrenheit. Even for this hot
country, it was a record, according to Algeria’s national meteorological
service. While
attribution studies are not yet available for other record-heat episodes this
year, scientists say there’s little doubt that the ratcheting up of global
greenhouse gases makes heat waves more frequent and more intense. No
doubt, there
will be variations in weather patterns in the coming years, scientists say. But
the trend line is clear: 17 of the 18 warmest years since modern
record-keeping began have occurred since 2001.The temperatures and wildfires
witnessed this summer are set to become the new normal - yet much of the world
is unprepared for life on a hotter planet, scientists are warning.
India
is no exception. The country has about 18 percent of the world’s population, eight
percent of its biodiversity, about two percent of its land and less than one
per cent of its water. As such, the country is highly vulnerable to climate change.
Average temperatures have been rising throughout the country, and rainfall has
become more erratic. These changes are projected to continue accruing over the
coming decades. South Asia’s Hotspots: The Impact of Temperature and
Precipitation Changes on Living Standards (2018) is the first book of its kind
to provide granular spatial analysis of the long-term impacts of changes in
average temperature and precipitation on one of the world’s poorest regions. [9]
The book finds that higher temperatures and shifting precipitation patterns
will reduce living standards in communities across South Asia including India —locations
that the book terms “hotspots.” More than 700 million people in India currently
live in communities that are projected to become hotspots under a carbon-intensive
climate scenario.
According to this World Bank
report, rising temperatures and changing monsoon rainfall patterns from climate
change could cost India 2.8 percent of GDP and depress the living standards of
nearly half the country’s population by 2050. Most of them now live in the
vulnerable areas and will suffer from declining living standards that could be
attributed to falling agricultural yields, lower labor productivity or related
health impacts. Some of these areas are already less developed, suffer from
poor connectivity and are water stressed.
India’s average annual temperatures
are expected to rise by 1.00°C to 2°C by 2050 even if preventive measures are
taken along the lines of those recommended by the Paris climate change agreement
of 2015. If no measures are taken average temperatures in India are predicted
to increase by 1.5°C to 3°C.
The work scientifically identifies
vulnerable states and districts as “hotspots” using spatial granular climate
and household data analysis. The report defines hotspot as a
location where changes in average temperature and precipitation will have a
negative effect on living standards. These hotspots are not only necessarily
higher temperature zones than the surrounding areas, but also reflect the local
population’s socio-economic capacity to cope with the climatic changes.
In India today, approximately 600
million people live in locations that could either become moderate or severe
hotspots by 2050 under a business-as-usual scenario, the report says. States in
the central, northern and north-western parts of India emerge as most
vulnerable to changes in average temperature and precipitation.
According to the report’s analysis,
by 2050 Chhattisgarh and Madhya
Pradesh are predicted to be the top two climate hotspot states and
are likely to experience a decline of more than 9 percent in their living
standards, followed by Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and Maharashtra. Seven out of the top 10 most-affected hotspot
districts will belong to the Vidarbha region of Maharashtra.
“These weather changes will result in
lower per capita consumption levels that could further increase poverty and
inequality in one of the poorest regions of the world, South Asia,” says report author Mani
Muthukumara (2018), a Lead Economist in the South Asia Region of
the World Bank. “
To be concluded.....
[1]
Chancel,
Lucas and Thomas Piketty. 2017. “Indian
income inequality, 1922-2014: From British Raj to Billionaire Raj?” WID, World Working Paper Series No. 2017/11,
World Inequality Lab, Paris School of Economics. Also refer at: http://wid.world/document/chancelpiketty2017widworld/
[2] Carrington, Damian and Michael Safi, 2017. “How
India’s battle with climate change could determine all of our fates,” The Guardian Weekly (Nov. 6 2017) at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/nov/06/how-indias-battle-with-climate-change-could-determine-all-of-our-fates
[3] IPCC. 2013. Climate Change 2013 – The Physical Science Basis Working
Group I Contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, Edition: 2014, Chapter: Observations: Atmosphere and
Surface, Cambridge University Press,
pp.159-254
[4] . The climate
scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for
long-term disaster.”
[5]
Rich, Nathaniel. 2018. Losing
Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change, The New York Times Magazine
(August 1, 2018). Also refer at: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html
[6] IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Climate Change 2007. FAQ
6.2 Is the Current Change Unusual Compared to Earlier Changes in Earth’s
History? at: https://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/faq-6-2.html
[8]
Sengupta Somini, Tiffany May and Zia ur-Rehman, 2018. How Record
Heat Wreaked Havoc on gout continents, The New York Times at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/30/climate/record-heat-waves.html
[9]
Mani, Muthukumara, et al. 2018. South Asia's Hotspots : Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation
Changes on Living Standards. South Asia Development
Matters; Washington, DC: World Bank. Also refer at: https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/28723
License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
[1] The Nature Conservancy is a charitable environmental
organization, headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, United States. Its mission
is to "conserve the lands and waters on which all life
depends."
