INDIA: Mix of Droughts, Floods Linked to Climate Change

By Ranjit Devraj Reprint | | Print |

Ranjit Devraj

NEW DELHI, Aug 1 2002 (IPS) - India may be in the throes of its worst drought in a dozen years, but its snow-fed rivers and lakes are overflowing. The reason? Climate change caused by global warming, say environmental experts.

“There are strong reasons to connect the current drought to larger climate change since what we are witnessing is a peculiar and sudden variation in climate as predicted by experts studying global warming,” says R K Pachauri, recently elected chief of the Geneva-based Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Across northern India, fiercely hot winds seemed to keep away the cooling, moisture-laden monsoon rains on which agriculture on the sub-continent depends. They also melted the snow and ice in the high Himalayas that crowns the region, causing floods in the eastern region which acts like a giant drain emptying out into the Bay of Bengal.

Leading scientists across the world, including those attached to the United Nations, agree that global warming and climate change are the result of industrial and other activity that generates greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, which traps heat.

Said Syed Iqbal Hasnain, who chairs the Working Group on Himalayan Glaciology under the UNESCO-funded, International Commission for Snow and Ice (ICSI): “You need look no further than the Bhakra dam to see what is happening.”

Located about 300 km north of Delhi, the Bhakra dam, which holds back the snow-fed waters of the Sutlej river brimming into the Gobind Sagar lake, presents a picture of contrast to the arid landscape around the largely agricultural, northern Punjab state.

The irrigation channels that proceed from the dam cannot save the season’s crops in Punjab, India’s granary, because irrigation can only supplement and not replace the monsoon rains which, this year, has been ‘wayward’ in its appearance across the southern, central and northern parts of the country.

But people travelling east of northern Uttar Pradesh state may be forgiven for thinking that they are in an altogether different country, because the Ganges and its tributaries fed by Himalayas and the Brahmaputra (originating in Tibet as the Tsang Po) are in spate.

Millions of people in Bihar, West Bengal, Assam states and neighbouring Bangladesh are now battling floods.

Almost prophetically, the IPCC in its Third Assessment Report released last year, speaks of “the possibilities of unforeseen surprises in the future” for South Asia, especially with regard to the emergence of droughts and floods. It also dwelt on the melting of the polar ice caps and the Himalayan glaciers.

The report considered agriculture to be highly vulnerable to the impact of climate change in the South Asian region which, in 1997, generated between 24 and 40 percent of its GDP from agriculture.

According to Hasnain, the “water towers” of the Himalayas can provide some relief to the hundreds of millions of people living in the plains below. But if the glaciers continue to melt and recede at the present rate as a result of global warming, they may disappear altogether by 2035.

“This year’s events should show that global warming is a reality and not a myth and that the Asian monsoon circulation pattern is closely governed by timely snowfall, which in turn is affected by climate change,” Hasnain said.

According to Hasnain, the failure of the monsoons accelerates the pace of de-glaciation because the monsoon brings with it cloud cover that protects the ice and snow from melting too rapidly.

Other symptoms of global warming this year include the slow submergence of islands in the South Pacific — with residents fleeing as their drinking water turned saline, large chunks of ice stretching miles across breaking away from the Antarctic ice mass, and record floods in Europe.

Environmental activists and researchers have also pointed to floods becoming an annual event in China, massive windstorms in Eurasia and the melting of the permafrost under northern Europe as other symptoms of climate change, and lay the blame on man made activities.

According to Pachauri, once the delicate balance in the global circulation patterns is disturbed by man-made activities, “non-linear and sudden changes are bound to be the outcome,” the present erratic monsoon behaviour being a sampling of things to come.

Global warming and climate change first became an issue during the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A follow-up conference at Johannesburg, South Africa in late August is expected to show up the scant progress in the past decade.

One of the achievements at Rio was the creation of the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) under the auspices of the United Nations.

But last year, the United States put it in jeopardy by pulling out, saying it was opposed to the Kyoto Protocol that sought to enforce binding targets on the reduction of greenhouse gases produced by the industrialised world.

In truth, most countries have failed to establish the aggressive regulations needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The regressive movement on the FCCC, marked by the withdrawal of the U.S. — the largest contributor of greenhouse gases — has prompted leading environmental campaigners like India’s Vandana Shiva to refer to the Johannesburg meet as ‘Rio-minus-10’ rather than ‘Rio-plus-10’.

But other scientists say that global warming may not be such a bad thing for South Asia.

One of them is Anil Gupta, a professor at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kharagpur, who believes that over the past four centuries, the monsoons have actually grown stronger as result of the warming of Eurasia.

Gupta co-authored a paper with David Anderson of the University of Colorado and Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona, due to be published in the next issue of the journal ‘Science’, which says that climate-forcing events such as greenhouse gas emissions, volcanic aerosols and solar output may be increasing the strength of the monsoon.

The trio relied for their hypothesis on fossil records dredged up from sea sediment long the coast of Oman, which provided data on wind speeds during the summer southwest Asian monsoon going back more than 1,000 years.

Roughly 65 percent of the world’s people live in monsoon regions. In these areas, too little rain during weak monsoons can cause significant crop failures and too much rain can cause flooding, crop damage and population displacement.