IPCC report paints grim picture for India

The Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released last month has warned that increasing air pollution has reduced the intensity as well as frequency of monsoon rains in India and the rest of south Asia.

Released just a few months ahead of COP 26, ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’ synthesizes the most up-to-date research on the current state of the climate. Over the last three years, 751 climate experts from 66 countries have voluntarily committed their time to the task of writing, editing and delivering this report to the international community. The Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers (SPM) has undergone a detailed line-by-line review by representatives from IPCC member countries and scientists to obtain consensus on its language and content, according to a Wire India report.

The Wire report adds that as the third largest national emitter of greenhouse gases in 2018, India’s transition to a low-carbon future will determine the trajectory of global efforts to mitigate climate change. However, its domestic mitigation efforts will be shaped not just by ‘climate-first’ policies, but by its broader economic, social and developmental choices over the coming decades. Recent Indian climate reports, such as the ‘Assessment of Climate Change over the Indian Region’ (undertaken by the Ministry of Earth Sciences in 2020), already predict increasingly frequent droughts, variability in monsoon rainfall, and a marked rise in temperature by the end of the century. The latest IPCC report confirms the weight of these findings.

“Rainfall has been on the decline and monsoon deficits on the rise in different regions in south Asia. Agreement among datasets invoke confidence about a decrease in mean rainfall over most parts of the eastern and central north regions of India,” the IPCC report has said.

The IPCC report added that “concurrently the frequency of heavy precipitation events has increased over India, while the frequency of moderate rain events has decreased since 1950”.  It said that the “the dominant cause of the observed decrease of south and southeast Asian monsoon precipitation since mid-20th century is anthropogenic aerosol forcing”.

An official statement from Union environment minister Bhupendra Yadav was reflective of the country’s long-standing position on global climate change. The Minister said that the IPCC report was a ‘clarion call’ for ‘developed countries’ that had ‘usurped far more than their fair share of the global carbon budget’ to ‘undertake immediate, deep emission cuts and decarbonization of their economies.’

As the Wire report points out, the IPCC is virtually certain that human-induced climate change is the main driver for the increasing frequency, intensity and duration of extreme global weather events. In the last year alone, India experienced numerous and concurrent weather extremes: heatwaves in north India, floods in the northeast, forest fires in Uttarakhand, and major cyclones. Amphan, the fiercest storm in the Bay of Bengal this century, struck in May 2020 and became the costliest tropical cyclone in the North Indian Ocean, resulting in economic losses of nearly $14 billion and displacing over 2.4 million people in the Indian subcontinent. Even in the backdrop of the global COVID-19 pandemic, the human costs of these disasters stood out, providing a glimpse of what a climate-disrupted India could look like.

In the near-term, the IPCC report reaffirms that India can no longer afford to ignore the very real developmental challenge that climate change poses at home, particularly to its ecology-dependent livelihoods. The IPCC forecasts that India will be subject to heavy rainfall, heatwaves, topsoil aridity, and groundwater depletion; each of these changes could spell economic disaster for India’s already-distressed farmers.

The IPCC also notes that glaciers in the Himalayas “feed ten of the world’s most important river systems and are critical water sources for nearly two billion people” – but that they are “projected to experience volume losses of approximately 30 to 100% by 2100 depending on global emissions scenarios”.  Such unprecedented changes, coupled with rising instances of floods and landslides, could displace local people, damage infrastructure, and demand non-trivial state and central funds to rebuild mountain livelihoods and communities.

A Down to Earth analysis points out that the IPCC report also spelt out with “moderate confidence” how urbanization has pushed up intense rainfall in cities across South Asia using several scientific evidences generated on India cities. It adds that the political leadership in south Asian countries, including India, must keep these findings in mind and act proactively as they plan post-novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) economic recovery, as experts have said.