Climate getting more & more furious by the year

It is becoming increasingly clear that many disasters such as floods, storms, landslides and droughts are no longer purely natural, but are the most dramatic impacts of climate change caused by human activity. The world is now 1.2 degrees Celsius warmer than in pre-industrial times.

With the UN calculating that current emission-control pledges will lead to a 2.7-degree warmer world by 2100, the frequency and intensity of such disasters is expected to increase. The Third Pole, an organisation dedicated to the Himalayan watershed and river systems studies, has warned of severe consequences of South Asia even during early monsoon periods. This has already proven true in the case of our country. Even Nepal and Pakistan are no exception. There are two kinds of ‘natural’ disasters – fast and slow. Fast disasters include storms, floods, landslides and heatwaves, and have sudden and obvious effects. With slow disasters such as droughts, increases in water and soil salinity and crop losses, the impacts may take longer to emerge but they can be very severe. As far back as 2012, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) established that all these disasters are increasing in frequency and intensity due to climate change. The accuracy of that observation has been reconfirmed time and again in the past decade in South Asia and the Himalayas.

Disrupted monsoons, increased salinity in coastal regions due to rising sea levels, and flash floods caused by faster melting of glaciers are just some of the ‘natural’ disasters that have been made more likely and more severe by human-induced climate change. The sharp rise in hydro-meteorological disasters (storms, floods and droughts) around the world in the last century is attributed to climate change by scientists. In the past few years, cyclones in the Bay of Bengal have suddenly picked up intensity when they move over the sea. Scientists attribute this to the higher-than-before sea surface temperature, a result of climate change. This means more water evaporates and gets sucked into the vortex of the storm, making the cyclone more destructive.

In 2020, scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology forecast that climate change would make the South Asian monsoon more erratic than before. That was borne out within a year: there were many rainless days during the 2021 June-September monsoon, punctuated by bouts of heavy rainfall in the plains and cloudbursts in the Himalayas. The result was a cycle of droughts and floods in quick succession, sometimes even in the same area. The Bundelkhand region, along the southern border of the Indo-Gangetic plains, is one example.

Floods in Assam and Bihar have become such a regular phenomenon that they no longer get the media coverage they should. They have been worsened not only by climate change, but also by poorly planned flood-control measures such as dams and embankments. A result of the climate change is that the cloudbursts almost invariably lead to flash floods and landslides. The number of landslides in 2021 has been too high to track, in terms of incidents, fatalities and economic damage. Cloudbursts and landslides are now occurring in the Himalayan region right from the start of the monsoon season, as happened in Nepal’s Melamchi river basin in 2021 and this year in Himachal Pradesh. Only a political can resolve the problem which is a distant dream in India.