Women with goats come out of their submerged house, in Shibaloy, Manikganj district, Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

By Farid Ahmed
DHAKA, Aug 20 2017 (IPS)

Aid agencies warn of a serious unfolding humanitarian crisis as floodwaters continue to inundate new areas of three South Asian countries, forcing millions of people to flee their homes for shelters.

The death toll from drowning, snakebite, house collapse and landslide triggered by monsoon rains and floods rose to over 600 people, officials said on Aug. 19.In Bangladesh, farmers are bearing the brunt of the ongoing flooding as the country’s agriculture department estimated rice and other crops cultivated in half a million hectares of land in 34 districts were washed away.

More than 16 million have been affected by monsoon floods in Nepal, Bangladesh and India, with many of them either displaced or marooned without food or electricity.

In many areas, although the floodwater has started receding, rivers are still swelling.

A large number of displaced have taken refuge in squalid makeshift camps and are staying in extremely unhygienic conditions, according to aid agencies.

Road and rail communications in the affected areas have been also severely disrupted. Thousands of educational institutions have been forced to close, while submerged hospitals are unable to assist flood victims even as water-borne diseases are spreading.

“This is fast becoming one of the most serious humanitarian crises this region has seen in many years and urgent action is needed to meet the growing needs of millions of people affected by these devastating floods,” said Martin Faller, Deputy Regional Director for Asia Pacific, International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC).

“Millions of people across Nepal, Bangladesh and India face severe food shortages and disease caused by polluted flood waters,” Faller said in a statement.

The aid agency Oxfam said there was urgent need for supplies like drinking water, food, shelter, blankets, hygiene kits and solar lights.

Bangladesh authorities said more than a third of the country was submerged, and water levels in major rivers were still rising, inundating new areas every day.

The premises of a school inundated by floodwater in Shibaloy, Manikganj district, Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

In Bangladesh, flooding by major rivers has surpassed the levels set in 1988, the deadliest floods the country had seen to date.

According to the disaster management department control room of the Bangladesh government, at least 98 people died in August.

The Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief estimated that more than half a million people in Bangladesh were affected by flooding.

In Bangladesh, farmers are bearing the brunt of the ongoing flooding as the country’s agriculture department estimated rice and other crops cultivated in half a million hectares of land in 34 districts were washed away.

Abdul Hamid, a farmer in Rangpur district, said he had cultivated rice in 10 bighas of land, but it was completely ruined by floods. “I don’t know how to recover the loss,” he said, adding that his house was also destroyed.

In India, over 11 million people have been affected by floods in four states across the north of the country. India’s meteorological department is forecasting more heavy rain for the region in the coming days.

The flood situation in parts of India’s northern West Bengal remained grim until August 18, with many rivers still flowing well above the extreme danger level despite improvement in the overall situation in the region, Rajib Banerjee, West Bengal’s minister for irrigation and waterways, told IPS on Aug. 19.

“The situation in Malda still looks grim and remains as a matter of concern as the water of the River Mahananda continues to rise,” he said.

The situation in villages in the Indian state of Assam is very serious, as embankments of rivers in many areas have been breached, forcing hundreds of families to flee their houses. Poor people, mostly farmers, were the chief victims and many took refuge on roadsides and embankments.

Children on a boat come to their two-storey tin-roofed house half of which is submerged in flood water, in Shibaloy, Manikganj district, Bangladesh. Credit: Farid Ahmed/IPS

Thousands of people in northern Uttar Pradesh in India, where the authorities sought military help, were also badly affected and many of them still remained marooned.

Bihar, the worst-hit district in India, also estimated over 150 dead and half a million displaced in the past couple of weeks.

“In Nepal, government recorded 134 dead and 30 missing in flood-affected areas,” a senior journalist and director of news and current affairs of Nepal’s ABC News TV, Dr. Suresh Achaya, told IPS.

Some 14 districts out of 75, mostly located along the border with India, were badly affected, Acharya said.

In Nepal, many areas remain cut off after the most recent destructive floods and landslides on Aug. 11 and 12. Villagers and communities are stranded without food, water and electricity though the government said it had been providing the victims with foods and other support.

In the flood-hit areas, thousands of people had taken shelter in schools, temples and sides of roads and embankments.

The Nepalese ministry of agricultural development estimated that floodwaters had washed away rice and other crops worth Rs. 8.11 billion (77 million dollars) and feared the crop damage could cast a long shadow on the economy.

The Nepalese government, at a meeting with chief secretary Rajendra Kishore in the chair on Aug. 18, decided to accept foreign support and aid to meet the need.

Scientists attribute the deadly floods in South Asia to a changing climate, which they believe increased the magnitude of the current flooding many-fold.

“The untimely floods being experienced in Nepal, India and Bangladesh can definitely be attributed to climate change-induced changes in the South Asian monsoon system,” Dr Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD), told IPS.

The countries in the region have already been taking the brunt of changing climate that caused extreme weather patterns increasing the daily rainfall amount, droughts, untimely flooding and frequent tropical storms.

Dhaka is home to about 14 million people and is the centre of Bangladesh's growth, but it has practically zero capacity to cope with moderate to heavy rains. Credit: Fahad Kaiser/IPS

By Rafiqul Islam
DHAKA, Aug 16 2016 (IPS)

Like many other fast-growing megacities, the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka faces severe water and sanitation problems, chiefly the annual flooding during monsoon season due to unplanned urbanisation, destruction of wetlands and poor city governance.

But experts are warning that if the authorities here don’t take serious measures to address these issues soon, within a decade, every major thoroughfare in the city will be inundated and a majority of neighborhoods will end up underwater after heavy precipitation.A 42-mm rainfall in ninety minutes is not unusual for monsoon season, but the city will face far worse in the future due to expected global temperature increases.

“If the present trend of city governance continues, all city streets will be flooded during monsoon in a decade, intensifying the suffering of city dwellers, and people will be compelled to leave the city,” urban planner Dr. Maksudur Rahman told IPS.

He predicted that about 50-60 percent of the city will be inundated in ten years if it experiences even a moderate rainfall.

Climate change means even heavier rains

Dhaka is home to about 14 million people and is the centre of the country’s growth, but it has practically zero capacity to cope with moderate to heavy rains. On Sep. 1, 2015, for example, a total of 42 millimeters fell in an hour and a half, collapsing the city’s drainage system.

According to experts, a 42 mm rainfall in ninety minutes is not unusual for monsoon season, but the city will face far worse in the future due to expected global temperature increases.

The fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns that more rainfall will be very likely at higher latitudes by the mid-21st century under a high-emissions scenario and over southern areas of Asia by the late 21st century.

More frequent and heavy rainfall days are projected over parts of South Asia, including Bangladesh.

Dhaka is also the second most vulnerable to coastal flooding among nine of the most at-risk cities of the world, according to the Coastal City Flood Vulnerability Index (CCFVI), developed jointly by the Dutch researchers and the University of Leeds in 2012.

Dhaka has four surrounding rivers – Buriganga, Turag, Balu and Shitlakhya – which help drain the city during monsoon. The rivers are connected to the trans-boundary Jamuna River and Meghna River. But the natural flow of the capital’s surrounding rivers is hampered during monsoon due to widespread encroachment, accelerating water problems.

S.M. Mahbubur Rahman, director of the Dhaka-based Institute of Water Modeling (IWM), a think tank, said the authorities need to flush out the stagnant water caused by heavy rains through pumping since the rise in water level of the rivers during monsoon is a common phenomenon.

“When the intensity of rainfall is very high in a short period, they fail to do so,” he added.

Sylhet is the best example of managing problems in Bangladesh, as the city has successfully coped with its water-logging in recent years through improvement of its drainage system. Sylhet is located in a monsoon climatic zone and experiences a high intensity of rainfall during monsoon each year. Nearly 80 percent of the annual average precipitation (3,334 mm) occurs in the city between May and September.

Just a few years ago, water-logging was a common phenomenon in the city during monsoon. But a magical change has come in managing water problems after Sylhet City Corporation improved its drainage system and re-excavated canals, which carry rainwater and keep the city free from water-logging.

A critical network of canals

City canals play a vital role in running off rainwater during the rainy season. But most of the canals are clogged and the city drainage system is usually blocked because of disposal of waste in drains. So many parts of the capital get inundated due to the crumbling drainage system and some places go under several feet of stagnant rainwater during monsoon.

“Once there were 56 canals in the capital, which carried rainwater and kept the city free from water-logging…most of the canals were filled up illegally,” said Dr Maksudur Rahman, a professor in the Department of Geography and Environment at Dhaka University.

He stressed the need for cleaning up all the city canals and making them interconnected, as well as dredging the surrounding rivers to ensure smooth runoff of rainwater during monsoon.

In October 2013, the Dhaka Water Supply and Sewerage Authority (DWASA) signed a 7.5 million Euro deal with the Netherlands-based Vitens Evides International to dredge some of the canals, but three years later, there is no visible progress.

DWASA deputy managing director SDM Quamrul Alam Chowdhury said the Urban Dredging Demonstration Project (UDDP) is a partnership programme, which taken to reduce flooding in the city’s urban areas and improve capacity of DWASA to carry out the drainage operation.

“Under the UDDP, we are excavating Kalyanpur Khal (canal) in the city. We will also dig Segunbagicha Khal of the city,” he added.

Dwindling water bodies

Water bodies have historically played an important role in the expansion of Dhaka. But as development encroaches on natural drainage systems, they no longer provide this critical ecosystem service.

“We are indiscriminately filling up wetlands and low-lying areas in and around Dhaka city for settlement. So rainwater does not get space to run off,” said Dr Maksud.

A study by the Center for Environmental and Geographic Information Services (CEGIS) in 2011 shows that about 33 percent of Dhaka’s water bodies dwindled during 1960-2009 while low-lying areas declined by about 53 percent.

Lack of coordination

There are a number of government bodies, including DWASA, both Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) and Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) and the Bangladesh Water Development Board (BWDB), that are responsible for ensuring a proper drainage system in the capital. But a lack of coordination has led to a blame game over which agency is in charge.

DWASA spokesman Zakaria Al Mahmud said: “You will not find such Water Supply and Sewerage Authority across the world, which maintains the drainage system of a city, but DWASA maintains 20 percent of city’s drainage system.”

He said it is the responsibility of other government agencies like city corporations and BWDB to maintain the drainage system of Dhaka.

DSCC Mayor Sayeed Khokon said it will take time to resolve the existing water-logging problem, and blamed encroachers for filling up almost all the city canals.

Around 14 organisations are involved in maintaining the drainage system of the city, he said, adding that lack of coordination among them is the main reason behind the water-logging.

DNCC mayor Annisul Huq suggested constituting a taskforce involving DWASA, city corporations, Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha (RAJUK) and other government agencies to increase coordination among them aiming to resolve the city’s water problems.

This story is part of special IPS coverage of World Humanitarian Day on August 19.

Excerpt:

Schoolchildren hold up a handmade sign that reads: ‘Let’s Eradicate Dengue’. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jun 30 2014 (IPS)

What’s the connection between weather forecasts and the mosquito-borne dengue virus? It’s not just a question for science nerds; in Sri Lanka, health officials believe answering this question could save lives.

For over half a decade now, doctors and residents of this island nation, especially those living in the cramped Western Province, have been battling the persistent, sometimes deadly, dengue plague, which tends to follow the monsoon rains that drench the southwest coast from June to October.

The tropical disease generally results in prolonged fever, muscle and joint pains, as well as skin rashes. In a small number of cases, the disease turns into the life-threatening dengue hemorrhagic fever, characterised by bleeding, low levels of blood platelets, or dangerously low blood pressure, which can send the victim into shock, sometimes triggering fatalities.

“When we have better forecast data, we [will] be able to correlate the disease distribution in various parts of the island and make a feasible disease map that can be used for the whole country." -- Faseeha Noordeen, head of the department of microbiology at the University of Peradeniya
In mid-2009, soon after the annual monsoon, dengue infections increased at an alarming rate across Sri Lanka. By the end of the year, 35,095 people were infected, while the number of fatalities stood at 346.

The impact of the epidemic can be gauged by comparing current infection rates with the last dengue outbreak, which was recorded in 1989, a year that saw 200 infections and around 13 deaths.

Since 2009 the number of infections has been steadily high; they have never fallen below 28,000, while the highest number of infections – 44,461 – was reported in 2012.

While fatalities have been brought down – there were 83 deaths in 2013, the same year that logged 32,000 infections – dengue experts and medical professionals say there is an urgent need for a comprehensive management plan to curtail the impact of the disease.

“We need a much more stringent prevention regime,” Nimalka Pannilahetti, a consultant community physician at the National Dengue Control Unit, told IPS.

It is not that Sri Lanka has been lax on tackling mosquito breeding grounds; in fact it has initiated everything from a Presidential Task Force on Dengue Prevention, to fines for those who neglect possible breeding grounds, to declaring national dengue eradication programmes.

Unfortunately, the combined result of these projects is that the rate of infection is exactly what it was five years ago, or – in areas where slight reductions are reported – still alarmingly high.

The situation is especially worrying in the Western Province, home to over 25 percent of the country’s population of over 20 million people, and to 60 percent of all reported dengue cases since 2009.

Enter the forecasters

Given that so many strategies have been tried and failed, experts are now suggesting that the authorities call in help from the national Meteorological Bureau as the latest weapon in the fight against the virus.

Faseeha Noordeen, head of the department of microbiology at the University of Peradeniya in central Sri Lanka, told IPS that there is a clear connection between changing climate patterns and the spread of dengue.

In a research paper she co-authored, published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases in October 2013, Noordeen said that mosquito breeding grounds increased following heavy rains, pointing out that the two annual peaks in infections were recorded soon after the two annual monsoons.

Noordeen’s research also found that warming weather patterns increased the distribution of the dengue-carrying mosquito. She believes that detailed weather forecasts could help health authorities to better allocate resources and strategically implement prevention campaigns.

“When we have better forecast data, we [will] be able to correlate the disease distribution in various parts of the island [and] make a feasible disease map that can be used for the whole country,” she said.

Pannilahetti agrees, stressing that detailed forecasts would be “invaluable” for people like her, who are tasked with hunting a species of mosquito that is constantly on the move, and eradicating a disease that is constantly changing.

“Right now we are following the rains,” she said. “Preemptive programmes could be much more effective.”

Midway through June the Prevention Unit was scrambling to relocate most of its resources to the Western Province, which absorbed the heaviest rains in the first week of this month.

The third of week of June, meanwhile, saw the launch of a massive dengue eradication programme that included members of the armed forces, Pannilahetti added.

Some regions of the province received four to six times their average June rainfall in the first week of the month this year. Pannilahetti said that detailed forecasts would have enabled health officials to raise their levels of preparedness beforehand.

Greater risks for low-income communities

She added that the burden of the disease is unevenly distributed between the rich and poor, since the spread of dengue is largely determined by the cleanliness of the immediate environment, and a community’s proximity to receptacles like tanks of stagnant water, or even accumulated garbage.

“What we have seen is that there are more breeding grounds in low income areas, where people tend to pay less attention to how safe or healthy their immediate environment is,” Pannilahetti said.

Additionally, medical treatment comes at a high price, often leaving the poor without access to quality care.

LakKumar Fernando, who heads the Centre for Clinical Management of Dengue and Dengue Hemorrhagic Fever at the Negombo Government Hospital, 35 km north of the capital Colombo, says that dengue can be successfully treated if detected early.

“The first thing is to get a blood test done,” he told IPS; but doing so costs about 2,000 rupees (about 15 dollars) at private clinics, a sum that many people in this country cannot afford.

In a bid to make the process more accessible, the government recently set up six new blood testing centres in government hospitals across the Western Province, but these alone will not be able to tackle the hundreds of cases coming in every single day, according to experts.

The unit that Fernando heads has been recognised as one of the best treatment facilities in the country, with only a single fatality out of 1,180 cases admitted since June 2013.

“We never let our patients go into shock, we monitor them round the clock,” Fernando said, adding that the most effective treatment for dengue was constant monitoring of blood pressure, pulse and urine output while maintaining a good fluid intake.

But the cost of setting up the unit, where each of the 17 beds is equipped with state-of-the-art monitoring equipment, was about 100 million rupees, or 750,000 dollars, hardly the kind of initiative that can be easily replicated around the country.

In fact, units like the one in Negombo are few and far between in Sri Lanka’s public health system, which makes an even stronger case for developing solid prevention systems, experts say.

(END)

A man rides a bicycle over a road washed away by floods in the village of Panasalgolla in the north-central Polonnaruwa district. Extremely remote and almost entirely dependent on agriculture, this village is falling into a debt trap due to cyclical natural disasters, according to the United Nations. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jun 9 2014 (IPS)

By now, the tale has become almost mundane: first the rains remain elusive, refusing to quench the parched earth. Then, without warning, they fall in such torrents that they leave scores dead, hundreds injured, and thousands homeless, plus a heavy bill in accrued damages.

This is what climate change looks like in Sri Lanka, where unusual weather patterns have left meteorologists stumped, and the poor bear the brunt of the government’s lack of preparation for the annual monsoon, which hits the southwestern coast between June and October.

By the time the deluge subsided a day later, 24 people were dead, over 120,000 in 13 districts were badly affected, 25,000 were displaced by floodwaters and close to 1,500 houses had been damaged.

As always, the poorest of Sri Lanka’s poor were hardest hit: over 12 percent of the country’s urban population of three million live in slums, most of which are erected on government lands close to lakes and canals and are thus prone to flooding. Other affected populations include impoverished fisher communities who reside in humble dwellings along the coast.

This is not the first time that Sri Lanka’s most marginalised and ill-informed communities have had to bury loved ones and flee their homes as a result of unexpected, torrential downpours.

On Jun. 8, over 60 fishermen from the coastal Kalutara district, 50 km south of the island’s capital Colombo, were killed when they were caught off-guard by the monsoon’s fatal embrace.

Two years earlier, just a month before Christmas, 25 fishermen from the same region perished at sea in fast-moving winds and fierce rain.

Time and again, Sri Lanka’s most impoverished populations suffer in silence, be they slum-dwellers in Colombo, fishermen on the southern coast, farmers in the north-central provinces or war-affected members of the Tamil minority population in the northeastern regions.

Heavy monsoon clouds advance on Sri Lanka's southern coast near Hikkaduwa town. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Aug 20 2013 (IPS)

Gulam Rasul, chief meteorologist at the Pakistan Meteorological Department, was sure early this month that the second leg of the annual monsoon due in the latter half of the month was going to be bad. “Normally it peaks towards late August,” Rasul told IPS.

Even before peaking, the 2013 monsoon has been deadly. By mid-August, floods in Pakistan had killed more than 80 and left over 80,000 stranded, according to the Pakistan Disaster Management Agency.

Rasul says South Asian countries need to treat the monsoon with more respect than they do.

“It is vital for the region, probably the most vital annual weather event, and we need to be better prepared. It is at our risk that we take it lightly,” Rasul said from his office in Islamabad.

The monsoon has been erratic in recent years. Last year the monsoon failed in Sri Lanka, and parts of the country’s northern, eastern and southern regions went through a drought that affected at least 1.2 million people.

This year the monsoon has been above average. Rains have been lashing the country since June, and have so far caused 58 deaths and stranded over 17,000.

“We need to have a better understanding how the monsoon is changing and be better prepared,” S. H. Kariyawasam, head of the Meteorological Department in Sri Lanka said, agreeing with Rasul.

One of the effective means of achieving this is real-time sharing of weather information among countries in the region, experts say.

Rasul sees a simple need to share information. “If countries at the beginning of the monsoon keep sending updates, then countries at the toe end like Pakistan could prepare better.”

If such a scheme had been in place, it would have proved life-saving, according to Mandira Singh Shrestha, programme coordinator and senior water resources specialist at the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, Nepal.

She told IPS that as the monsoon moved north from Sri Lanka into north India, information-sharing could have alerted national and regional weather authorities in India to take precautionary measures.

The fast-moving monsoon this year, assessed by some as the fastest in over four decades, ripped into Uttarakhand region in North India by the second week of June without any warning of its deadly potential.

By the time it left, more than 1,000 bodies had been recovered. Over 6,000 people are still listed as missing. The Uttarakhand region has been left in tatters. The region was full of pilgrims who had arrived just before the traditional rainy season when the monsoon burst above their heads. No one told them the rains were moving faster than usual.

“There is a need for coordination between the hydrological and meteorological agencies for providing timely and reliable forecasts,” Shrestha said.

At a meeting attended by regional and national experts organised by the Planning Commission of India on Aug. 13 to assess the aftermath of the Uttarakhand floods, the focus was at last on sharing information, and weather updates.

Experts at the meeting said that the trans-boundary nature of disasters made data-sharing essential.

Since 2005, officials from South Asian countries have been meeting just before the monsoon through the South Asia Climate Outlook Forum set up with the assistance of the World Metrological Organisation. This year’s meeting was held in Kathmandu, Nepal in mid-April.

The final update from the meeting was that the monsoon would be “within the normal range with a slight tendency towards the higher side of the normal range.”

When it arrived a month and a half after the meeting, the monsoon was moving faster than anticipated and was more potent than expected.

Such changes, according to Kariyawasam, are becoming a part of the increasingly erratic monsoon, whose pattern is proving hard to predict.

At the April meeting participants had agreed that detailed information on the monsoon as it moved inland could only be provided by national and regional weather offices. It was not, and it is this kind of update that Rasul and Kariyawasam want shared.

“What we need is a mechanism to do this,” Kariyawasam said. Both Sri Lankan and Pakistani officials say that one of the forums that can be used is the Meteorological Research Centre under the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) based in Dhaka, Bangladesh.

“The SAARC platform can work better than a totally new one, because there is already a structure of regional cooperation in other areas,” Rasul said.

ICIMOD’s Shrestha told IPS that one of the models that can be adapted is the regional tsunami alert network set up after the deadly December 2004 tsunami.

“A new network of land-based seismic stations, deep water pressure sensors and warning centres have been developed throughout the region to provide early warning to the countries,” she said.

The effectiveness of such information-sharing was clear on Apr. 11, 2012 when an 8.6 magnitude undersea earthquake was reported off the coast of Indonesia. The Sri Lanka Disaster Management Centre (DMC) issued a warning within less than an hour of the earthquake, based on information received from regional networks.

More than 1,500 coastal villages from around the Sri Lankan coast were evacuated rapidly. According to DMC officials more than a million persons were moved to safe areas within hours of the earthquake.

A warning system of compatible levels does not exist when it comes to warnings on the monsoon, or fast-moving weather patterns. DMC officials say they rely on the Meteorological Department, that is currently ill-equipped to track and issue timely warnings on fast-moving weather patterns.

“It is very difficult to track these weather patterns, especially when they are moving fast,” Kariyawasam said. “Given what we are faced with now, a regional network for information-sharing is essential.”

South Asia's water resources are likely to fluctuate if temperatures continue to rise. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jun 19 2013 (IPS)

The Monetary Board of Sri Lanka’s Central Bank, tasked with keeping the island’s economy on an even keel, does not only keep tabs on exchange rates, gold prices and inflation – it also has an eye on a less obvious indicator of economic stability: water levels in the country’s main reservoirs.

Central Bank Governor Ajith Nivard Cabraal last week told a group of journalists in the capital, Colombo, that the Board pays as close attention to water as it does to oil prices.

"An extreme wet monsoon that currently has a chance of occurring only once in 100 years is projected to occur every 10 years by the end of the century." -- World Bank
The reason is simple – Sri Lanka’s power generation is hugely dependent on rainfall. Last year, when a severe drought hit between the months of January and November, water levels in the country’s nine reservoirs used for power generation fell badly.

By August, hydroelectricity made up only 17 percent of the grid, whereas in a normal year the country expects to secure about 40 percent of its annual electricity needs through hydro, or even 50 percent in good years.

The drought forced the country to spend a colossal two billion dollars on imports of furnace oil for thermal generation, according to Finance Secretary Punchi Banda Jayasundera.

Cabraal told IPS that the government is “concerned” about these changing weather patterns and “will take steps well ahead of time, before they become an issue.”

Some say these promises offer too little, too late.

Erratic weather patterns are wreaking havoc across the country. In the last fortnight alone over 50 fishermen were killed at sea due to heavy winds, yet the Central Bank does not have an official or a desk that routinely keeps tabs on the weather and its impact on poverty levels, industrial output or even cargo handling at the island’s ports, which was badly disrupted during the recent storms.

But new research from leading international bodies suggests that countries like Sri Lanka will not be able to take a lax approach to climate change any longer, as extreme weather events are set to become the deciding factor in economic growth.

The World Bank today released its report entitled ‘Turn Down The Heat: Why a 4°C Warmer World Must be Avoided’, detailing how global warming could affect sub-Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia.

The report paid particular attention to “the likely impacts of present day two-degree and four-degree-Celsius warming on agricultural production, water resources, and coastal vulnerability for affected populations” in South Asia.

In Bangladesh, land areas at risk of floods could increase by close to 30 percent if temperatures rise by two degrees. Two major industrial and financial hubs in South Asia, Mumbai and Kolkata, are meanwhile both threatened by sea-level rise.

In India, where over 60 percent of crops are rain-dependent, erratic monsoons and rising temperatures are likely to impact harvests and crop yields.

“With a temperature increase of two to 2.5 degrees Celsius compared to pre-industrial levels, by the 2050s reduced water availability for agricultural production may result in more than 63 million people no longer being able to meet their caloric demand by production in the river basins (of the Indus, Ganges, and Brahmaputra),” according to the report.

The Bank also warned that if pledges made at the climate summits in Copenhagen and Cancun are not met, there is a greater-than-40-percent chance of “warming exceeding four degrees Celsius by 2100, and a 10-percent possibility of this occurring already by the 2070s, assuming emissions follow the…business-as-usual…pathway.”

In South Asia, whose population of 1.6 billion is expected to rise to 2.2 billion by 2050, the biggest issue is water scarcity or excess in the extreme.

The report predicted that even if action is taken and warming is reduced, the effects of a hotter climate would still be pronounced in the region, adding, “Many of the climate change impacts in the region, which appear quite severe with relatively modest warming of 1.5-2°C, pose a significant challenge to development.”

Major industrial and financial hubs like Colombo, Mumbai and India’s capital, New Delhi, are vulnerable to flash floods. Floods in May 2010 were estimated to have caused over 50 million dollars worth of economic damages in Colombo, while just last week New Delhi’s main airport was flooded due to the fast moving monsoon.

Darshani De Silva, environment specialist at the World Bank’s South Asia Sustainable Development Sector, told IPS that rapidly changing climate patterns could undo development gains in the region.

In countries like Bangladesh, which is struggling to move off a list of the world’s Least Developed Countries (LDCs), extreme weather events can set back a year’s worth of development in the course of a single day. On Nov. 15, 2007, Cyclone Sidr tore through Bangladesh, destroying 800,000 tonnes of rice, accounting for two percent of total annual production in 2007. The storm left in its wake a bill of 1.7 billion dollars, amounting to 2.6 of that year’s gross domestic product (GDP).

The South Asian monsoon, once as predictable as clockwork, now comes in fits and starts, either evading desperate farmers for months at a time or emptying in buckets on unsuspecting and vulnerable populations. Pakistan felt the weight of these changes in 2010 when torrential rain turned into rushing floods that claimed nearly 2,000 lives and affected 20 million people.

On Jun. 17, officials at the Indian Meteorological Department said that the monsoon arrived in New Delhi almost two weeks before predicted dates. The last instance of the monsoon moving so quickly over India and reaching the capital so fast was recorded in 1961.

Last year, Cyclone Nilam swept the Southern Indian coast, consuming half a million hectares of agricultural land and leaving over 1,300 small tanks and 7,000 km of roadways in dire need of repairs.

“An extreme wet monsoon that currently has a chance of occurring only once in 100 years is projected to occur every 10 years by the end of the century,” according to the World Bank report.

De Silva said that countries should also be worried about lack of water and the impact on agriculture. “It is expected that the southernmost tip of India and Sri Lanka will be affected, with 20 to 30-percent of summer months experiencing unprecedented heat with disastrous consequences on agriculture, livelihood and health,” she said.

The World Bank expert told IPS that attention paid to the issue is marginal compared to the damages caused, adding, “A change in thinking is urgently needed.”

She believes that all development and poverty reduction programmes, as well as urban planning, should have an in-built mechanism that factors in the impact of a changing climate, rather than waiting for disaster to strike before taking action.

Poor urban planning is now forcing the Sri Lankan government to spend 233 million dollars on a flood protection scheme in the capital. This economic burden will only increase until governments start taking seriously the reality of a much hotter world.

The gathering rain clouds in the Sri Lankan skies are a source of trepidation for many. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, May 28 2013 (IPS)

The monsoon in Sri Lanka is always a much-awaited event. There is something about the sight of the gathered clouds, the washed trees and the drenched landscape that stirs romance even in the most hardened of souls.

The monsoon rain now comes to Sri Lanka mostly in short bursts, lasting some 15 minutes, accompanied by thunder. One minute it could be calm and sunny, the very next, winds could pick up, the delicate coconut palms sway dangerously and the heavens descend.

The short bursts of rain are a common scenario in the western plains. It is only when the rains decide to stay longer that their beauty recedes and the beast takes over.

Cities and villages get flooded, roads are jammed and thousands are left stranded, sometimes for days.

The island nation has had a brush with this scenario already this year, when Cyclone Mahasen swept past its eastern cost, leaving eight people dead, over 100,000 stranded and over 2,000 structures damaged.

There are also few who can erase the memory of the Dec. 2004 tsunami that left 35,000 people dead and close to a million displaced.

That disaster struck Sri Lanka hard, because there was no warning system in place.

The tragedy left the nation wiser, and one of the first things it did in the aftermath was to spruce up its early warning system and disaster mitigation effort.

“We are used to the monsoon and cyclones now and, more importantly, we are better prepared than ever before,” Sarath Lal Kumara, deputy director at the Disaster Management Centre (DMC), told IPS.

The DMC came into being in August 2005 as the nodal agency for disaster risk management in the country under the National Council for Disaster Management (NCDM), which later became the ministry of disaster management and human rights.

Each of Sri Lanka’s over 300 divisional secretariats further has a regional disaster management committee, the lowest administrative body in the government’s disaster management system. Every unit has a separate budget allocation for emergencies; funds are also allocated on a case-by-case basis by capital Colombo.

The DMC too has its own disaster management units in each of Sri Lanka’s 25 districts that make up the country’s nine provinces. Colombo once again coordinates their activities, but every unit has a senior manager of its own as head.

“They are stationed in the regions so that we can take quick decisions without having to go back and forth,” said Kumara. The units have also been provided with the resources to disseminate early warnings and coordinate initial rescue and relief work, he added.

Other non-governmental organisations too have upgraded their disaster monitoring and assistance capacities. The Sri Lanka Red Cross Society, for instance, has district-level disaster management units and routinely mobilises thousands of its volunteers in early warning and relief work.

Staffers and volunteers also go through regular refresher courses on disaster preparedness. All of which came in handy, most recently when Cyclone Mahasen struck Sri Lanka.

“I think we are in a better position than we ever were to meet natural disasters,” Bob McKerrow, head of a delegation for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC), told IPS.

It is just as well that Sri Lanka is investing some resources in early warning and preparedness, say experts. South Asia, they warn, will be subjected to a barrage of extreme weather events, and will have to deal with them on a long-term priority basis.

Over 25 million people have been displaced in the region between 2011 and 2012 due to natural disasters, according to the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre in Geneva.

Millions are at risk in South Asia due to extreme weather events, Bart Édes, director of the poverty reduction, gender and social development division in the Asian Development Bank (ADB), told IPS.

“All around South Asia,” he said, “in addition to the current vulnerability to cyclones, flooding and drought, those living along South Asian coastlines confront the slowly rising seas.”

With millions affected by disasters, already stretched resources like water, healthcare, schools and other infrastructure can collapse under renewed pressure, Édes added.

“Environmental migration is exacerbating the urbanisation trend being witnessed across South Asia,” the ADB official told IPS. “The physical and social infrastructure of many cities is already stretched to capacity.” As a result, climate-related migration was becoming a serious issue in the region, he added.

A recent study by the World Food Programme (WFP) and the Sri Lankan ministries of disaster management and economic development on the impact of the December 2012-January 2013 flooding offered a glimpse into the scale of damage that natural disasters can inflict.

Titled the ‘Rapid Flood Assessment Report’, it noted that over half a million people in Sri Lanka’s northern, north central, eastern, southern and northwestern regions were affected in early January by the flooding.

They have, in fact, been hit by a double whammy, as 67 per cent of the flood victims surveyed said they were also impacted by the 10-month drought preceding the floods.

An earlier assessment by the IFRC in November 2012 had put the number of drought-affected in Sri Lanka at over 1.2 million.

The WFP report also found 37 per cent of the households surveyed were severely ‘food insecure’ and 44 per cent were ‘borderline food insecure’. And the bulk of those who bore the brunt of the twin disasters were employed either in agriculture or in casual jobs.

“Loss of livelihoods, extreme poverty and losses to cultivation are the key drivers of food insecurity, among the flood-affected households,” the report noted. It also pointed to the fact that over 67 per cent of the flood-affected lived below the poverty line.

DMC’s Kumara cited anecdotal evidence to suggest that these victims of disasters were moving into cities, especially when harvests failed, looking for an income.

“We cannot stop natural events, we cannot alter them,” Kumara said. “What we can do is to be prepared for the worst-case scenario. God willing, we are on that track.”

Ask Kusumlatha Tammitta, who lives in the remote village of Mamaduwa in the Vavuniya district of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, if this is enough, and she tells you that what they really need is better, accurate forecasting that will indicate how the monsoon will be.

Till that is available, people like her are condemned to live at the very edge of existence.

Critical dependence on water makes Sri Lanka vulnerable to changing rainfall and temperature patterns. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Jul 22 2012 (IPS)

For many Sri Lankans, the effects of climate change can be summed up in one word: rainfall.

“The biggest impact (of climate change) is rainfall or the lack of it,” W L Sumathipala, one of Sri Lanka’s foremost experts in changing climate patterns, told IPS on a scorching hot and humid day in Colombo.

“The availability of water can effect multiple things in Sri Lanka from crops to power generation to the currency,” Sumathipala, who formerly headed the climate change unit at the Ministry of Environment, added.

The last six months, with their merciless combination of scarce rainfall and blazing temperatures, have proved his statement to be true. The failure of the seasonal monsoon to deliver adequate amounts of rain have had a serious impact on lives, livelihoods and the economy.

In the north central districts, a vital region for the country’s staple rice harvest, smaller irrigation reservoirs have run dry, while their larger cousins, fed by rivers, have stopped issuing water to farmers because their water levels are too low.

The Parakrama Samudraya, a 20 square-kilometre tank in the Polonnaruwa District, was only eight percent full by the first week of July due to lack of rain.

“This is probably the worst (drought) we have had in recent years,” irrigation engineer R M Karunarathna told IPS.

The drought will almost certainly have a serious effect on the rice harvest. Farmers who depend on the Parakrama Samudraya and connected reservoirs have held public protests warning that as many as 40,000 acres of paddy fields may have been lost.

Further north, in areas that have recently emerged from three decades of civil unrest, the lack of water is threatening to undo some of the gains made since the war ended in May 2009, according to the latest United Nations updates for the country.

“The delay of the north west monsoon rains has caused severe drought condition in the country affecting the country’s agricultural sector (and) threatening to destroy the majority of expected yields from paddy, vegetables and other food crops. According to the Ministry of Agriculture, nearly 150,000 acres of cultivation lands are in danger of getting destroyed,” the updated warned.

The lack of water has also left the country’s power generation capacity almost entirely dependent on thermal power.

In an average year, around 42 percent of the country’s power supply can be met through hydropower, Thilak Siyambalapitiya, an energy consultant and a former engineer with the Sri Lanka Electricity Board, told IPS.

During years where the rains have been exceptionally high, between late 2010 and early 2011 for instance, the contribution of hydropower has been as high as 50 percent.

In fact in 2011 the Ceylon Electricity Board (CEB) recorded a rare profitable year, largely due to the high hydro generation component, Siyambalapitiya said.

“This year if CEB can meet something like 25 percent (of power needs) from hydro, we will be lucky,” he predicted. But even that may be optimistic: by early July less than 15 percent of the required power was met through hydro generation.

It costs about 13 rupees (about one U.S. cent) to generate a unit of electricity using hydropower, while thermal costs increase the unit production price to seven cents for coal, 11 cents for furnace fuel and 18 cents for diesel. “The cost differences are exorbitant,” Siyambalapitiya said.

To add to the woes, the Sri Lankan rupee has fallen steadily against the dollar since late last year.

In mid November 2011, the Central Bank stopped intervening to strengthen the currency and in the ensuing eight months, the rupee has weakened by about 17 percent.

“When the rains stay away and the hot weather patterns evaporate surface water, this is what we get,” Sumathipala said.

The phenomenon will likely continue; experts predict that water scarcity will play a crucial role in the coming years.

The latest Central Bank annual report said that temperatures have recorded an increase of around 0.45 degrees Celsius in the last two decades. A 0.5-degree rise can reduce the rice harvest yield by about 5.9 percent.

The Bank added this would be disastrous for the country’s 1.8 million people – close to 10 percent of the country’s population – who depend on agriculture for survival.

“Sri Lanka is vulnerable to the impact of climate change largely due to its critical dependence on water resources for biodiversity, food security, livelihood and power generation,” the report said.

The Second National Communication on Climate Change 2012, a report by the Ministry of Environment, also confirmed that the pattern of rising temperatures and falling rains would have a big impact on rice harvests and yields.

The same report revealed that while the dry zone will continue to get drier due to less rain and increasing temperatures, the wet zone is likely to get more rain than needed. It even suggested transporting excess water between the two zones.

The high concentration of rain in the wet zone increases the risk of flood-related damages as well as the spread of vector diseases like dengue.

In the last five years Sri Lanka has been logging an increased number of dengue victims during and after monsoon rains, especially in flat urban areas like the capital Colombo.

“The city of Colombo is vulnerable to (flash flooding) where the low-lying parts of the city go under water whenever there is high intense rain falling even for a few hours,” the report said.

Experts say that to meet the evolving nature of water availability, better coordination between public and private enterprises and experts is vital.

“Some the changes and patterns can be predicted, but we need better communication to be ready for them,” Malika Wimalasuriya, head of the Climate Change Unit at the Meteorological Department, told IPS.

(END)