Adaptation and Risk Analysis

Earth, home to over 8 billion species, saw record CO2 emissions in 2023. The temperatures rose by 1.4 °C, close to the 1.5 °C cap of the Paris Agreement, making it the warmest year. Recently, as we celebrated the World Environment Day on 5th June — the biggest day on environment observed to increase awareness about and action against this aggravating climate change situation — it is timely to reinterpret our fundamental rights and duties through a climate lens.

Recurring urban flooding in Bengaluru, India, has brought multiple intersecting development challenges to the forefront. While climate change is a catalyst for flooding, rapid urbanisation has aggravated the problem by neglecting its ecological history. Repeated floods have particularly affected migrants living in the slums, further worsening their already vulnerable conditions. Currently, only about 40% of slums are formally recognized by city authorities, leaving most slum dwellers with limited access to public benefits and basic infrastructure.

Come summer, we are used to seeing heat alerts from the India Meteorological Department (IMD) for various parts of India. This year, these alerts began in February itself. Parts of the northeast and western India have already reported appreciably warm temperatures (3.1-5 degrees Celsius above normal) before the start of summer.

This study performed the spatio-temporal analysis of drought hazards across the agro-climatic zones (ACZs) of Karnataka under historical and future climate scenarios. The India Meteorological Department’s high-resolution gridded data for1989-2019 was used for historical drought occurrence analysis. Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment ensemble data of the Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 4.5 and 8.5 scenarios were used for analysing future drought hazards in the near (2031-2060) and end term (2061-2099) periods.