India is highly sensitive to climate change. The country faces more erratic monsoon patterns, more floods and droughts, and steadily shrinking Himalayan glaciers.
 | Climate Change DestructionPoor people are usually hit hardest by flooding, like in the Indian city of Srinagar (Photo: Getty) |
Monsoons and Floods
Monsoons are an essential part of the Indian climate, bringing months of steady rain to the subcontinent. In some regions, up to 80 percent of all annual rainfall comes during the monsoons.
In extreme cases, monsoons also cause severe flooding, landslides, and human displacement, as well as crop and infrastructure damage. In July 2005, the heaviest monsoon rains ever recorded left almost a third of Mumbai, India’s biggest city and commercial capital, under water.
Heavy monsoons in central India have become more frequent and intense since the mid-20th century. The increase is probably linked to global warming.
Scientists such as Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research fear that climate change could alter monsoon patterns leading to dry spells and droughts that could affect hundreds of millions of people.
More Droughts
Climate change could exacerbate water shortages especially during the dry season. India already struggles with water scarcity. The country has 16 percent of the world’s population, but only four percent of its water resources.
Worst-case-scenario warming could cut per capita water availability in India by over a third by 2050. That could also mean annual crop yields decline by around a quarter by the end of the century. The number of dry spells in India could increase, particularly on the northwestern border with Pakistan, where water issues already cause bilateral tension between the two countries.
The area includes some of India’s most productive agricultural regions, such as Punjab and Rajasthan. According to a report by the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI), the threat of climate change to Indian agriculture lies not only in the physiological response of warming on crops.
Many Indian farmers are also poorly prepared to adapt to changes in weather or crop yield. Food shortages could become worse in non-irrigated, rural areas that are dependent on increasingly unpredictable rainfall. Irrigated farmland could suffer from dried-out rivers and declining water tables.
Melting Glaciers
The Himalayas, the world’s tallest mountain range, has the largest concentrations of glaciers outside of the polar regions. An estimated 750 million people live in watershed areas of rivers originating from these glaciers.
Scientists have noted that some of the Indian glaciers are receding at an alarming rate. The Dokriani Barnak glacier, for example, retreated over 20 meters in 1998 despite a cold winter, while the Gangorti glacier is retreating by 30 meters a year.
Disappearing Mangroves
The Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF) says rising sea levels, stronger monsoons, and deforestation are threatening the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest at the mouth of the River Ganges.
The destruction of the Sunderbarns and its thick mangrove vegetation, which acts as a natural barrier, would make the Ganges Delta more vulnerable to cyclones and storm tides. Small islands in the area could disappear under rising waters, reducing the habitat of the Bengal Tiger and other animal species.
Human Health
While poverty is declining in India, an estimated 240 million people officially live below the poverty line. These are the people most vulnerable to the potential health impacts of climate change, such as reduced food security and availability of water, or the increase in extreme weather events.
The 2003 heat wave in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, for example, saw temperatures surge to almost 49 degrees Celsius (120 Fahrenheit), killing over 1,200 people – mostly poor daily wage laborers, rickshaw pullers and construction workers.
Malaria is already a public health concern, affecting between one and two million people each year in India. Scientists predict longer transmission windows and broader geographic distribution of the disease if temperatures continue to rise. Incidence of other vector-borne diseases, such as Dengue fever and Japanese Encephalitis, could also increase.
Sources: WWF, TERI, Science and Development Network (SciDevNet), Department of Environment of Food and Rural Affairs (Defra, UK), Economic Times, Journal of Indian Academy of Clinical Medicine, BBC, The Hindu
editor: Valdis Wish
publishing date: July 4, 2007
updated: July 8, 2009
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