The Hindu Business Line : Warming up to climate change

The Peace Nobel for Mr Al Gore, former US Vice-President, and Dr Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), brings together the narrator of an “inconvenient truth” and a “climate warrior” on an important platform.

Mr Gore lost a controversial presidential poll in 2000 but achieved overnight fame by making the 2006 Oscar-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth that launched him internationally as a champion of environmental issues and climate change. Dr Pachauri heads the IPCC, the influential body established by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environment Programme to investigate global warming and its consequences for Earth.

Comprising 3,000 atmospheric scientists, oceanographers, ice specialists, economists and other experts, IPCC is the world’s top scientific authority on global warming. The Nobel should help Dr Pachauri get attentive ears in New Delhi.

India has been very negligent in addressing issues of pollution, deforestation and climate change; and might need to pay a heavy price for not enforcing legislation against pollution, unbridled industrialisation and destruction of natural resources.

Global warming

The latest IPCC assessment has laid bare shocking scenarios for India and the rest of South Asia in the backdrop of climate change caused by global warming. Sea-levels in Asia will rise by at least 40 cm by 2100, flooding vast areas on the coastline, including some of the most densely populated cities, whose populations will be forced to migrate inland.

In the South Asian region as a whole, millions of people will find their lands and homes inundated. In Bangladesh, for instance, huge areas could come under water because of rising sea-levels, triggering an exodus of environmental refugees into India.

Man-made changes

Human activities have been boosting the concentration of greenhouse gases, mostly CO{-2} (from combustion of coal, oil, etc.) and a few other trace gases. Global warming from increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases mainly constitutes the anthropogenic (man-made) climate change. The possible impact of such a change at the local scale on agriculture, water resources, ecology and health needs to be assessed for planning the mitigation or adaptation strategies, says Dr G. Srinivasan, Director, India Meteorological Department (IMD), and an Expert Reviewer on the IPCC panel.

How does climate change affect the common man? The first to be affected will be those living in the fringe zones, working outdoors or whose livelihoods depend directly on the physical environment. Viewed from this perspective, the main sectors facing risks from direct impact could be agriculture, water resources and health.

Climate change presents a major challenge in the tropics, in which India falls. Most of the countries in this region are either developing or in the low-income category, with a large percentage of the population being agrarian and pastoral. Subsistence economics is predominantly biomass-based with most of the day spent in fodder and fuel collection, animal care and grazing. The lives of people in this region are, therefore, dependent on the environment and natural resources, which can be affected by climate change.

Water is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity because of the rapidly increasing population, urbanisation and industrialisation pressures. Forests are degrading rapidly as well. Air and water pollution have attained alarming proportions. Higher population densities, poor living conditions, malnutrition and warm/humid environments predispose the region to diseases.

Agriculture and climate

Though there is no definite evidence to show any direct impact of changes in climatic parameters — thanks to the slow change — on Indian agriculture, , some trends can be noticed. Although increased CO{-2} is likely to benefit several crops, the associated rise in temperatures and increased rainfall variability would affect food production considerably.

The recent IPCC report indicates high probability of crop losses with increases in temperature in the tropical regions. Studies do confirm this trend, though there is considerable disagreement on the magnitude of loss.

Among cereal crops important for food security, wheat is most sensitive to even small increases in temperature. Relatively, rice has greater tolerance to temperature increases. It is, however, possible for farmers to adapt to a limited extent and reduce the losses. Increasing climatic variability could, nevertheless, result in considerable seasonal/annual fluctuations in food production. All agricultural commodities are sensitive to such variability.

The retreat of many Himalayan glaciers has been observed and documented. However, it is well-established that glaciers, in general, recede or build up in response to variations in the temperature of the region they are located in. The recession in glaciers could be attributed to various reasons, including global warming.

In the past 750,000 years, there have been Ice Age cycles, separated by warmer periods called interglacial periods. This is part of the normal climate variation cycle. The effects of greenhouse warming, if any, will be superimposed on such natural variations. Owing to such complexities, it is difficult to fully attribute the observed recession of Himalayan glaciers to global warming.

Given that the CO{-2} emitted now stays in the atmosphere for up to 200 years, getting those concentrations down will take a long time. Mitigation efforts at present focus on reducing the current level of emissions from human activities. One of the options is to put in place CO{-2} sequestration technologies that capture emissions and fix them at locations preventing escape into the atmosphere. These are, however, quite expensive methods with some degree of uncertainty about their sustained impact.

There are also some ideas (perhaps more in the realm of science fiction than real options yet), such as deliberately injecting minute particles (aerosols) on a large scale in the upper atmosphere to block incoming radiation from the sun. Most of these ideas are technology fixes — but experience with environmental issues till now is that such fixes have always led to other consequential effects that have to be dealt with at a later time.

A case in point is replacement gases introduced as substitutes for gases with high ozone-depleting potential (capability of destroying stratospheric ozone that blocks harmful ultraviolet radiation from sun). These broad categories of gases referred to as “halocarbons” turned out to be strong greenhouse gases with long atmospheric life-times.

An evolving issue

The three major IPCC assessments since 1990 have shown that climate change is a continually evolving issue with uncertainties that may not be totally resolved. The number of international environmental treaties coming into force is increasing rapidly, and the treaties are periodically reviewed based on research updates. Scientific knowledge and capability to keep them at state-of-the-art level will, therefore, play an active role in future decisions on the issue.

It is, therefore, necessary to develop national assessment and response capabilities with skills in the different areas of climate change, together with the ability to use these skills in a coordinated manner.

Building such capability among the developing nations will also facilitate diversified inputs on climate change issues, which are crucial to comprehensive and equitable international debate and decision-making.

There is also a need for an exclusive focus on Asian developing countries, with emphasis on building regional science perspectives and indigenous technological options to deal with environment and allied issues.

The key to concerted and efficient global action on climate change lies in building an effective science-policy interface that can provide viable strategies for bringing together innovations and research in science and technology to better utilise our available natural, financial and human resources to steer us towards sustainable development, both regionally and globally.

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