The Hindu Business Line : Adaptation for climate change

Suddenly, climate change is hogging the news. Dire disasters are being foretold. There are lurid accounts of widespread devastation and displacement of millions of people, especially in low elevation coastal areas, resulting from global warming and the rise in sea levels.

These pronouncements command credibility not merely because they come from world's top scientists and climatologists but because of the exact figures mentioned. Increase in temperature will be precisely 3 degrees Celsius at the end of this Century, not 2 or 5; similarly, sea level will rise by 59 cms, not 55 or 60. With such exactitude marking the predictions, the findings cannot be easily dismissed.

Scenarios constructed for some vulnerable countries and cities are grim. China and India will face severe heat waves, unseasonal rainfall and drought, with their vast populations living along the coastline exposed to the cataclysmic loss of large land-areas to the sea. Dhaka in Bangladesh will be subjected to heavy floods following the melting of glaciers and snow in the Himalayas and `heat-stress'.

Alexandria in Egypt will be submerged by a catastrophic swelling of the sea by 50 cms. World famous historical, cultural and archaeological monuments would be lost.

The irony about climate change and the attendant havoc is that it is the poor nations that will be most affected, while industrialised nations, acknowledged to be responsible for causing it all, will continue to quibble about the efforts and financial resources needed for their mitigation.

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change provides for the creation of three important funds - the Adaptation Fund for carrying out `concrete adaptation' programmes, the Least Developed Countries Fund to support National Adaptation Programme of Action, and the Special Climate Change Fund to help bring about technology transfer, rehabilitation and opening up economic opportunities to make up for lost livelihoods. They are yet meet their targets.

There is no sign yet of follow-up action to draw up full-fledged, comprehensive, holistic and practical schemes detailing sequentially the various steps for mitigation and adaptation and assigning them for action by respective national and international agencies. The schemes will have to be country-specific and meet the differing requirements of mitigation (complying with the time-table for reduction in the emission of greenhouse gases) and adaptation (by framing and putting into effect contingency plans to ward off the effects).

CREATING AWARENESS

India cannot afford to be complacent in this respect, considering its huge population and its slow-moving official machinery. It should learn from the mistake it committed when struck by the tsunami in 2004 and straightaway make a designated nodal agency under a duly empowered functionary answerable for taking advance action for adaptation.

On the model of the War Book, Civil Defence Plans and Internal Security Schemes, the adaptation strategy should specify the roles of Government, public, private and civil society set-ups in undertaking the variety of tasks envisaged.

The most crucial of these is a campaign to create public awareness of the ramifications and risks of climate change and their financial implications, and making available to all concerned full information on the threats.

Side by side, it will be necessary to undertake radical revision of infrastructural standards, improve the quality of buildings, broaden the scope of insurance coverage, and have plans ready for coping with displacement of people from areas likely to be swallowed up by the sea. The Prime Minister should himself take a hand in directing these efforts and in having the plan of action brought before the Chief Ministers' conference especially called for the purpose.

B. S. RAGHAVAN

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