A man walks through agricultural land in the village of Mirusuvil, in Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna District. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka, Oct 3 2014 (IPS)

Gazing out over the parched earth of Sri Lanka’s Northern Province, one might think these farmlands have not seen water in years. In fact, this is not too far from the truth.

The World Food Programme (WFP) last month allocated 2.5 million dollars to assist hundreds of thousands of Sri Lankans in the throes of an 11-month drought that has shown no signs of abating.

A woman stands in front of her parched paddy land in the eastern Batticaloa District, one of Sri Lanka’s largest paddy-producing regions, that has been hit by the 11-month-long drought. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A man stands in the middle of parched paddy land in the northern Kilinochchi District. Sri Lanka’s staple rice harvest is expected to record a loss of 17 percent from around four million metric tonnes in 2013. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The WFP said on Sep. 1 that 2.3 million dollars worth of supplies, including rice rations, would be provided to the drought victims. The assistance scheme will also provide 277,000 dollars in cash grants to needy families.

A woman covers her head with a cloth to escape the extreme heat in Sri Lanka’s northern Jaffna District where daytime temperatures can reach 40 degrees Celsius. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A woman carries firewood in the drought-impacted Pillumalai area of the eastern Batticaloa District. Residents of this region are staring a water crisis in the face, as the main reservoir, the Vakaneri Tank, is almost completely dried up. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The drought has so far impacted over 1.6 million people, of whom at least 190,000 are in need of urgent food assistance, while there are concerns about the food security of an additional 700,000.

A parched tank bed in the southeastern Moneragala District, where farmers say the absence of rain since late 2013 has completely destroyed their agricultural lands. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A young girl drinks water out of a bottle in Sri Lanka’s eastern Batticaloa District, where over 220,000 persons have been affected by the drought. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

Over half of those impacted by the drought are from the northern and eastern provinces of the country, two of the poorest in the nation.

A tractor moves along the side of the dried-out Elephant Pass causeway in the northern Kilinochchi District. Officials told IPS the district was in need of at least nine million rupees (69,000 dollars) per week for drought relief. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

A man uses water from an industrial-grade pump in the Karadiyanaru area of the eastern Batticaloa District. Experts warn that the rampant use of powerful water-pumps in this arid region is putting undue stress on the water table. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

While the situation calls for immediate assistance, the WFP also warned that the affected would need long-term help to adapt to the impacts of changing climate patterns.

A woman tries to salvage whatever is left of her green gram crop before the lack of water destroys the entire plot in the eastern Pillumalai area of the Batticaloa District. According to government estimates, Sri Lanka’s agricultural output is likely to fall by at least 10 percent this year due to the drought. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

The World Bank estimates that the annual risk to Sri Lanka posed by climate-related disasters stands at some 380 million dollars. The worst disaster to date, a severe flood in 2010 and 2011, caused damages to the tune of 50 billion dollars.

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.

It was another Monday afternoon in the remote Thai village of Baan Dong when an incoming text message lit up the black, dust-covered Nokia phone belonging to Eiem Sompeng.

Jasmine rice farmer Eiem Sompeng shows a weather forecast text message he received on his mobile phone. Credit: Marwaan Macan-Markar/IPS

The brief, 18-word message alerted the 68-year-old farmer to unexpected showers across parts of Yasorthorn, one of the poorest provinces in Thailand’s northeastern rice bowl, including his own village of 190 families.

Accustomed by now to these weekly alerts, part of a scheme initiated by the Community Weather Forecast Centre (CWFC) to help farmers cope with climate change, Eiem says the messages “have helped us farmers prepare our fields”, echoing the sentiments of roughly 10,000 other farmers benefiting from this new flow of information.

“The forecasts are also useful for (planning) planting, water storage and harvesting times,” Eiem told IPS.

With the annual monsoon rains expected in June, farmers in this community that grows Thailand’s famous jasmine rice are becoming increasingly dependent on their mobile phones for regular and precise weather updates, which they use when preparing the fields for another harvest of the long, fragrant white grain.

Until now, a joint effort by Thailand’s meteorological department and a private mobile phone operator had served to supply weather forecasts to vulnerable farmers. These daily updates had provided broad estimates, such as rainfall percentages for an entire province.

But farmers like Eiem found little use for such information, since it was “too general, when we need specific details.”

“In some provinces like Yasothorn there were no forecasts at all and the farmers had to rely on the forecasts for nearby provinces like Ubon Ratchathani,” Kasina Limsamamphun, programme coordinator for the British-based charity Oxfam, told IPS.

Little wonder, then, that the CWFC has earned thousands of farmers’ praise and gratitude for connecting agrarian communities to a network fed by the Bangkok-based Geo-Informatics and Space Technology Development Agency that uses satellite-supplied information to make very specific predictions.

After two years of trials CWFC has succeeded in providing forecasts particular to small geographic areas, which have helped to reduce losses and damages caused by extreme weather on the farms.

Just last year, for instance, over 1,600 jasmine rice farmers in one part of Yasothorn reported that rice yields dropped by 15 percent from the previous year due to a lengthy dry spell.

“Micro-level weather information is what farmers prefer at a time of erratic rain and drought conditions,” says Suwanasart Konbua, head of the Climate Change Knowledge Management Centre, an affiliate of the CWFC. “Many of the farmers are still struggling to cope with the way the weather keeps changing, destroying crops and harvests.”

The nod towards technology also stems from the fact that unpredictable weather patterns have rendered traditional forecasts unreliable.

One such example is the annual fireworks festival, ‘Bang Fai’, where rockets are fired into the sky at rural fairs throughout the month May, signaling the end of the dry season. According to custom, the rockets are meant to appease the local gods, whose blessings will precipitate heavy monsoon showers.

But farmers can no longer depend on the magic of deities. Severe droughts and unusual storms have come to characterise this region known locally as the ‘Crying Plain’, where unique soil conditions in eight provinces are responsible for producing 80 percent of Thailand’s world famous staple, demand for which is matched only by India’s basmati.

The first hints of the fluctuations that would come to plague jasmine rice farmers in Yasothorn emerged eight years ago, according to Oxfam’s Kasina.

“It became a serious issue five years ago, when they (farmers) perceived a rice yield reduction of 30 to 50 percent.”

According to the Earth Net Foundation, a local grassroots campaigner, some years have seen prolonged dry spells during the early months of the growing season – usually beginning in June – and then heavy rainfall at harvest time, resulting in broken grains.

The loss from climate extremes is made worse by the fact that 6.7 million hectares of Thailand’s estimated 11.2 million hectares of paddy fields are rain-fed.

Thus farmers like Eiem, who earn about 300 dollars a month at the best of times, are entirely dependent on the monsoon rains in order to plough their fields and earn money from a crop that has made Thailand one of the world’s leading rice exporters.

Last year saw Thailand ship 6.9 million tonnes of rice to the world market – of which nearly two million tonnes were jasmine rice – down from the previous year’s exports of 10.7 million tonnes.

Experts attribute the drop to a rice-pledging scheme introduced by the government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra, which made a promise during the 2011 general elections to buy the grain from farmers at 665 dollars per tonne, roughly 40 percent above the market rate.

But the unprecedented windfall for the rural economy will not go far if the government fails to heed warnings by the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO): according to a 2012 report by the United Nation’s food agency, rice farmers in Thailand’s northeast should brace for more weather extremes, given that they fall within the Southeast Asian terrain forecast to be seriously affected by the adverse impacts of climate change.

Since early November 2009, rainfall has been consistently below the long-term average in Southeast Asia, a region that accounts for 48 million hectares of the world’s 154 million hectares of rice harvested annually.

“It is estimated that 50 percent of the world’s rice production is affected to a greater or lesser extent by drought,” the report added.

Water, too much and too little of it, will be the biggest climate-induced factor determining Sri Lanka’s future in an era of extreme weather. Credit: Amantha Perera

By Amantha Perera
UDAWALAWE, Sri Lanka, Dec 30 2012 (IPS)

Wild elephants are usually the primary attraction in the remote shrub jungles of Udawalawe, about 180 kilometres southeast of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo. But this Christmas season, the massive Udawalawe dam stole the limelight from the lumbering beasts.

By the end of December, heavy rains had brought water levels in the Udawalawe reservoir close to spilling point, forcing irrigation engineers to open the sluice gates.

Despite these efforts, the massive tank continued to spill over, creating a gigantic flood downstream.

People drove in cars, vans, motorcycles, lorries and even bullock carts to witness the spectacle, which was but a minor footnote compared to the impact of the rains elsewhere in this South Asian island nation.

Between Dec. 17 and 26, cyclone-level rains left 34 dead, nine unaccounted for and 328,000 stranded. Over 8,000 homes were damaged and roughly 4,000 were completely destroyed.

“No one expected this much rain,” Lal Kumara, deputy director at the government’s Disaster Management Centre (DMC), the main public body tasked with early warnings and post-disaster relief efforts in Sri Lanka, told IPS.

But someone should have expected the rains, based on the extreme weather events that ripped through the country in 2012, forcing Sri Lankans to come face to face with the disastrous impact of changing climate patterns. The end-of-year torrential rains were not the first time the country experienced unexpected floods, nor will it be the last, experts say.

In the first week of November, sudden rains brought on by Cyclone Nisha left over 200,000 people stranded, 15,000 displaced and nine dead. Over 5,000 homes were also destroyed.

Just prior to the November rains, much of the country had been hit by a 10-month-long drought. Close to a million people were affected, according to the International Federation of Red Cross Societies (IFRC), which recently launched a million-dollar international appeal to assist over 125,000 drought-affected people in Sri Lanka.

The drought destroyed 23 percent of the secondary rice harvest, the Ministry of Agriculture said, putting thousands of farmers at risk of starvation.

“More and more people are being forced to think about climate change and evaluate the impact,” Bob McKerrow, head of the IFRC delegation in Sri Lanka, told IPS.

The Northwestern Puttalam District provides a salient example of the extent of weather fluctuations within a matter of months.

During the December floods, parts of the district were submerged under eight feet of water, forcing 36,000 displaced persons to take shelter in over 60 government camps.

Yet just three months prior to the floods, people in the district were walking miles to dig holes in dried-out tank beds and wait overnight to collect the water.

“Water, the lack of it and too much of it, will be the biggest climate induced (factor) determining the way Sri Lankans live in the future,” W L Sumathipala, former head of the climate change unit of the ministry of environment, told IPS.

And though the signs are evident for all to see, hardly any action is being taken to mitigate the likelihood of future intense weather events.

The Meteorological Department still lacks the capacity to provide detailed forecasts, leaving the public to decipher cryptic notices, like the one that appeared on Dec. 20 stating, “There will be showers or thundershowers at times in the Northern, Eastern, North Central and Uva provinces and in the eastern slopes of the central hills and in the Hambantota district. Fairly heavy falls are also expected in some places.

“Showers or thundershowers will develop (in) several places elsewhere, particularly during the afternoon or evening,” the bulletin concluded.

Even officials at the DMC bemoaned the fact that they were not given detailed accounts of how much rain to expect, which would have enabled them to issue more precise warnings.

S H Kariyawasam, director general of the Meteorological Department, told IPS that the department lacked the technical and personnel capacity to give out such forecasts.

Erratic weather also continues to plague the vital paddy sector. In 2011, the country lost close to 17 percent of the total harvest to floods, followed by a bumper harvest the year after. The 2012 drought ignited fears of another lost crop, but heavy rains this month are forcing experts to rethink their forecasts yet again.

Initial reports said the rains had caused substantial damages to paddy storage facilities.

Farmers have yet to change their practices to accommodate the volatile weather, and paddy cultivation continues to follow the traditional cycle of planting and harvesting according to the two monsoons.

“Maybe if this trend continues we will have to think of adjusting the crop cycles,” said L Rupasena, additional secretary at the government-run Hector Kobbekaduwa Agrarian Training Research Institute.

According to McKerrow, the nature of incremental climate change over decades, and sometimes generations, means people pay less attention to the patterns that they should. “Slow moving disasters are the hardest for people to understand,” he said.

But for those who gathered in close proximity to the gushing torrents under the Udawalawe dam, there was no doubt about the need for urgent action.