Adaptation and Risk Analysis

Nineteen extreme weather events in 2019 claimed 1,357 lives, with heavy rain and floods accounting for 63% of deaths in India. Between 2013 and 2019, there has been a 69% increase in the number of heatwave days. Many Indian states are increasingly experiencing extreme weather events such as heavy rainfall, heat waves, and super cyclones. These are projected to increase even further in the future. These changes in India's climate will be an additional stress to ecosystems, agricultural outputs, and freshwater resources, and could also damage the infrastructure.

The rise in temperature, high rainfall variability, and increased frequency of extreme events in recent decades are all evidence of climate change. In India, these trends are projected to worsen—temperature likely to increase by 4°C, frequent heat waves to persist over longer durations, heavy rainfall events to get more frequent, dry spells to extend, and the sea level to increase by about 3 metres by the end of the century.
 

In India, the implementation of a large number of developmental and infrastructure programmes have often led to environmental degradation. Very often, environmental damage is recognised post-implementation of a programme or a project.

The Government of India has Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and clearance requirements for large projects. Even this is a flawed process since most of the projects are cleared anyway. Of late, there have been efforts to further dilute the EIA.

Changes in the climate system over tens of thousands of years brought about ice ages and interglacial warming periods. Science confirms that climate change, which is a large-scale and long-term change in the earth’s weather patterns, is human-induced and not due to natural causes.

Globally, the past five years have been the hottest on record, extreme weather events such as heat waves, floods, and droughts have gone up five-fold, and economic losses have increased seven-fold over the past 50 years.

The deluge of recent calamities including Cyclone Amphan, floods in Assam, Maharashtra, and Karnataka, and the wildfires in California and Oregon bears testimony to the recurrence of climate crises in rapid succession. In fact, the year 2020 has underscored the uncertainty and unpredictability of such catastrophes. The regularity of such incidents calls for the immediate application of resilience thinking.

Reams of newsprint have been spent on the devastating blow to the job market and economy during the current pandemic. Amid this pall of gloom, Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) brought comfort to 55 million households by ensuring livelihoods from April to August 2020. Many of those who got jobs under the scheme were the ones who had reverse migrated from cities due to complete shutdown during the pandemic.

In the fight against COVID-19, India announced INR 1.70 lakh crore (0.8 per cent of GDP) stimulus package. The package covers food, cooking gas, and direct cash transfers to low-income households. It includes insurance cover for health workers and wage support to low-wage workers. Later on, in May 2020, the government announced INR 20 lakh crore (10 per cent of GDP) to revitalise the economy. This package is inclusive of the INR 1.7 lakh crore to make India self-reliant.

The temperature in the Indian subcontinent is set to increase 4 degree Celsius or more by the turn of the century, with frequent heatwaves persisting over longer durations. This and more such acute insights were revealed in a recent study released by the Ministry of Earth Sciences, Government of India. Based on a thorough assessment of the observed changes and future projections of temperature, rainfall, sea level, and extreme weather events such as droughts, floods, and heatwaves, the report is a clarion call for immediate action.

The domino effect set in motion by COVID-19 is a blunt reminder that under-prepared systems will have to bear devastating shocks. Climate change is one such inexorable force that not only amplifies existing risks but also creates new risks to natural and human systems.

Swarms of locusts are currently on the rampage in Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, after leaving a trail of destroyed crops in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana. These are no ordinary hoppers in that they become dangerous when they enter the gregarious phase, by forming swarms that can travel up to 150 km per day and eat as much as about 10 elephants in a day. When millions of locusts descend on a crop, they destroy everything, devastating the agricultural supply chain and livelihoods of farmers.