Jiya Bharoli is a pristine mountain river fed by the great glaciers of the Himalayas, snaking through the remote northeast states of Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. Lord Nicholas Stern is a renowned British economist who has sounded one of the loudest bugles globally on the perils of climate change that could, within this century, doom this majestic river besides much else of our planet's ecology.
Rafting down the Jiya Bharoli with Lord Stern in early April, our small party saw two Wreathed Hornbills, endangered evergreen forest birds, flap overhead, flying purposefully toward some of India's most dense evergreen forests. In an alarming report he wrote for the British government just 18 months ago, Lord Stern has laid down economic prescriptions to save such forests, which too, are now endangered, thanks to rapidly advancing climate change. Keeping us company along our river route were other avains including sandpipers, River Lapwings and Small Pratincoles, and a small flock of juvenile Ibisbills, all mercifully able to find sustence in protected in the name of the tiger. It had rained, and we were wet to the bone by the time we stopped for a welcome cup of black tea generously offered by forest guards of the Nameri Tiger Reserve that borders the river. As we huddled around their tiny kitchen fire, we felt the unseasonable cold and (half) joked about changing weather patterns, until Lady Sue Stern smilingly shot us a look that seemed to say: "Forget the climate. Enjoy the moment." This we did walking 6km through the raw wilderness along a trail of tiger pugmarks on the sandy banks of many still forest pools, frequented by sambar, barking deer, wild pig and a host of water fowl. If climate change affects the jungles, the animals would go, too.
As the rubber raft bobbed downstream to allow us to complete our 16km journey to a fishing camp in the reserve, I contemplated the fate of this blue-white mountain river. It hosts one of the 168 sites selected by Indian engineers for one of the world's most ambitious hydropower programmes. India aims to generate 50,000mw of power by 2017 at an estimated cost of Rs. 3 lakh crore, which could go up 50% if escalations in past power projects are an indication. For the country's ever burgeoning middle class routinely suffering power cuts, the possibility of more electricity is hypnotic. But there is a catch. By the time the last dam gets built, there is hardly a doubt that the melting glaciers of the Himalayas will be unable to deliver enough water to run the expensive new turbines.
Just three days previously, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had received Lord Stern in New Delhi. Himself advisor to the British prime minister, Lord Stern made a presentation to the Indian prime minister on the best possible climate strategy for India. His audience, besides Dr. Singh, was as impressive as it ever gets: Finance Minister P. Chidambaram, Science and Technology Minister Kapil Sibal, Planning Commission Deputy Chairman Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Infosys Technologies managing director Nandan Nilekani, former UN under Secretary-General Nitin Desai and academic Kirit Parekh, a former economic advisor to five Indian prime ministers. Lord Stern had a simple advice to this Who's Who: Don't delay. Act immediately to mitigate and adapt to climate change.
"If India and the world do not take timely action, climate change will lead to falling crop yields, significant decreases in water availability, damage from rising seas, extensive damage to coral reefs, more intense storms, forest fires, floods and heat waves," Lord Stern has said in his October 2006 report that made the world sit up and start contemplating economic strategies to combat climate change. "And if business as usual prevails, we could see humanity pushed into a situation where we risk dangerous feedbacks and abrupt, large-scale shifts in the climate system… There is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we act now and act internationally."
Space imagery confirms that the Himalayan glaciers are melting. But perhaps the sun's glare off the icy peaks has so blinded ministers and officials in New Delhi that they just can't see the meltdown. These glaciers store the most water on earth outside the polar ice caps. The mighty rivers they feed give life to hundreds of millions of people across north, east and central India. In less than two decades from now, glacial meltdown is expected to morph into an unstoppable deluge, first flooding the rivers and then, over subsequent years, depriving them of water.
In a quarter century, there may well be no Himalayan glaciers to speak of. And, yes, the desert around India Gate - fancifully portrayed on TEHELKA cover this week - might well represent our true, irreversible, water-stressed situation. Things, of course, need not be so drastic, if the ubiquitous GOI - Government of India - wakes to climate realities and seizes the moment. India's national administration has to rethink its dogmatic development strategy. The model it persists in back can only hasten the doomsday scenario that scientists are warning us about.
Lest people imagine that the problem is distant, we should know that India is already in trouble. Because of a build-up of greenhouse gases in the earth's atmosphere, extreme weather events (such as the 26/7 Mithi River tragedy in Mumbai) are becoming more common, aquifers are turning saline, farmers' suicides no longer shock, and our food security cannot be taken for granted any more. Yet, few politicians find it necessary to address farmers, fishermen and the urban and rural poor, to warn them of the climate catastrophe staring them in the face.
Our policies are designed to cast (justifiable) blame on the industrial North, but without adequately shoring the defences of our 1.1 billion people against Nature wronged. Thus, for example, some villagers in the Sunderbans - the world's largest block of mangroves of its kind spread across India and Bangladesh - have begun to abandon their homes as they turn into climate refugees due to the extreme tides and erratic river currents. Most studies and projections unambiguously indicate that India stands to bear the brunt of some of the worst effects of climate change.
The Himalayan glaciers are reducing at a rate of 33ft to 49ft (10m to 15m) every year. Pindari glacier has retreated 23.5m and Siachen 31.5m per annum since 1981. The Gangotri glacier retreated 15m per annum during 1935-76 and 23m each year 1985 onwards. The trend continues across the world's tallest mountain ranges; the Milam Glacier in the Kumaon Himalaya retreated at an average rate of 9.1m per year during 1901-97.
Their meltdown is expected to lower the water levels in rivers like the Indus and the Ganga by two-thirds, affecting up to 500 million people. The per capita availability of water will decline by over 30 per cent in the next four decades.
If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise uncontrolled, India could well experience a rise in temperature of around 5°c by the year 2080, a significant decline in precipitation and a reduction in annual river runoff up to 75 per cent.
India could lose 125 million tonnes of cereal crops, with a drop of over 25 per cent in wheat, particularly affecting north India. Rice yields could fall by 40 per cent. Sowing seasons will become erratic.
Incidence of vector-borne diseases such as malaria and cholera will rise. Higher temperatures and changed humitity could produce strains to which we have no resistance.
In 100 years, sea levels could rise 40cm, flooding homes in low-lying areas. If the rise is 1m, nearly 6,000 sq km of land in coastal areas may be lost displacing seven million people, because water sources would also turn saline..
Some 30 per cent of the flora and fauna could be lost, including the snow leopard, Himalayan brown bear, the long-limbed wildcat lynx, the Gangetic dolphin, and the dugong, a marine herbivorous mammal. Also wiped out will be coral reefs, the amazing underwater living organisms that support extraordinary biodiversity that rivals rainforests.
The deficit in soil moisture in deciduous forests such as those at Kanha and Pench will lead to a shift towards tropical dry forests and will add to the difficulties of tigers, if they are still alive by then. The flooding of mangrove forests such as in the Sunderbans would wipe out all the Royal Bengal tigers in this ecosystem. Altered migratory patterns and increased forest fires would affect uncounted other species.
The economic costs of global warming would be monumental. Some economists estimate India's GDP could drop by nine per cent, largely due to submergence of low-lying coastal areas. Others take a darker view and suggest that our GDP could be eroded by anywhere from 20 to 40%.
Economic loss in urban areas such as Mumbai and Chennai would be phenomenal. Mumbai alone could lose up to $48 billion due to potential submergence. A cycle of vicious floods and droughts would spark unprecedented human migration to cities, leading to greater pressure on their infrastructure, more urban sprawl and a break down of law and order.
Monsoons may get shorter with more intense downpours, further increasing the likelihood of damaging floods, to the accompaniment of much more intense and frequent cyclones in the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal.
India is not alone in its climate misadventures. Every country in the world is being forced to come to grips with new realities. As if to spite the most innocent victims, however, climate change is likely to visit less damage on the main culprits including the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan and Australia. On the other hand, South Asia, Southeast Asia, China, Africa and South America will be hardest hit. To add insult to injury, in both developed and developing countries, the poor will be hit first and hardest because they will have fewer resources to adapt to or avoid the worst impacts of climate change that could range from water shortages, food shortages, failed crops, disease, displacement and unemployment.
During our trip to the northeast with the Sterns, Ranjit Barthakur, advisor on climate change and green accounting to the Assam chief minister, and I discussed such realities and listened to the measured, even voice of the author of the path-breaking Stern Review, which has emerged as the largest, most influential document on the impact of climate change on the global economy ( www.sternreview.org.uk).
It's not as though I was unaware of the possibilities stressed therein, for I had downloaded and read the Stern Review Report and had been quoting it widely over the past six months in the national press, in my own magazine, Sanctuary, and in the many climate change workshops we continue to organise. In the last ten years I have also read, with increasing disquiet, almost all available literature on the early warnings being sent to us through the natural world - amphibian die-offs, early and late migration of species, early or late flowering of plants, early or late nesting of birds and, of course, the impact of melting glacial and polar ice on such species as polar bears and snow leopards. But hearing climate realities calmly delivered by the man on whose data even the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and former US president Al Gore relied had a profoundly more sombre effect.
India is yet to show it is listening to sage counsel such as Lord Stern's. The Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change is mandated to develop a National Climate Action Plan to deal with this critical issue. But at the time of writing the Plan, due in June, is still cloaked in mystery. Instead of calling an open discussion and debate to thrash out the best strategy, the government says it will release the Plan to the public only when it is fully ready. Few people know how this Plan is going to project India's position before the world community, though one can make a guess.
An India intoxicated with prospect of economic wealth, and in the grip of coalition politics, is unlikely to find the courage to take hard decisions. I would hardly be surprised therefore if the report plays the blame game, asking the US and the industrial North to act, while India catches up with their economic progress. This would be a grave error on our part because while climate change is without doubt the primary responsibility of the industrial countries, we in India are going to be its primary victims. For our sake and not theirs, we need to set emulatable examples.
On some issues, nevertheless, Indian politicians are easily going to agree with Lord Stern. For instance, per capita emissions of greenhouse gases, which are responsible for warming the planet, must be equitable across the globe. On the harder issues - moving India away from its carbon dependency and changing mindsets from old fashioned developmental options - the jury is out.
Steps to take
With one-sixth of all humanity living in India, it should be a global leader on climate change strategies. Our financial interests would be far better served if we began, on a war footing, to move away from our carbon dependence by investing in efficiency, alternate energy, organic agriculture, ecosystem protection and conservation. What justification can there possibly be for drowning the forests in the Northeast to reach electricity to distant Kolkata, New Delhi and Mumbai?
According to expert Pavan Sukhdev of the Green Indian States Trust (GIST), India's estimated total CO2 emissions from deforestation and forest degradation is comparable in size to the total emissions of our organised power sector. It is both a problem and an opportunity, as the international trend now is towards recognising "carbon storage" (through forest maintenance and protection) and not just "carbon sequestration" (through afforestation). Barthakur has advised the Assam government that it would be eligible to earn carbon credits for managing deforestation and degradation down to lower and lower levels from its current or "baseline" level. If even five percent of India's "baseline" deforestation and degradation emissions were established as being from Assam forest areas, there could be an additional income of up to Rs 2,100 crore for Assam in carbon trading. Implemented internally in India, environmental, financial and climate equity would strengthen our hands on the global negotiation table where the US, for instance, must be forced to cut back sharply on its own carbon footprint.
Provided the money is spent sensibly and to a plan, India need spend as little as two per cent of its GDP over the next decade to ward off some of the worst impacts of climate change. But we are going the other way by offering incentives and budget allocations to hike coal and oil-based projects. Other government policies, such as the promulgation of the controvertial Forest Rights Act will see deforestation accelerate at an unprecedented pace. Thus, both old (fossil) carbon (oil, gas and coal, which accounts for roughly 25 percent of India's carbon emissions) and new carbon (tree and above and below ground biomass, which accounts 21 per cent) will end up as carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere. I have spent five years trying to influence the government to take the climate change crisis seriously. On a drive from Tezpur to Kaziranga, I saw clothes, chillies and grain being dried in the sun. Wind and oar propelled boats outnumbered engine-driven crafts ten to one. Cycles were everywhere. Virtually everyone used (the wholly inadequate) public transport. From Kashmir to Port Blair and from Kutch to Arunachal Pradesh, this low carbon footprint is typical of ordinary Indians.
The rich in India are, however, using the low carbon footprint of the poor to justify business as usual for themselves. In the name of the poor (who have consistently been displaced and marginalized by 'development') India plans to expand its coal-fired thermal power plant capacity by 300 per cent in the coming decade. This involves open pit mining in tiger and/or elephant habitats in Bihar, Jharkhand, Orissa, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra. This is hardly surprising as the World Bank, which is likely to finance many of these mines and thermal plants, lend 17 times more money for mines, thermal plants, dams and the like, than they do on alternative energy.
From a buffet of choices available to it, here are five that I belive the Indian government should initiate to significantly launch its battle against climate change.
One: India should intervene aggressively in the global debate on the developmental response to climate change. Currently, India's per-capita carbon footprint is extremely low compared with the industrial North. The government must leverage this advantage to negotiate substantially lower global per-capita greenhouse gas emissions, instead of sticking to the stand that India's per capita carbon emissions will be pegged "lower than the global average". If India handles this with statesmanship (decidedly missing right now)the world's greenhouse gas emissions, which currently stand at 45 billion tons a year, could be cut by half over five decades.
Two: India must immediately clamp down on deforestation and the destruction and degradation of natural ecosystems, which alone account for 21% of India's greenhouse gas emissions. Natural infrastructures such as forests, wetlands, coasts, estuaries and grasslands help moderate climate and sequester and store carbon. Here again, our government should start negotiating with the world's industrial nations to set aside and then transfer to us global funds for carbon that we are able to sequester through assisted natural regeneration of degraded forests. We must also be ask to be paid to store carbon in protected areas such as sanctuaries, national parks and reserved forests, which will go up in smoke if there is no incentive to keep them the way they are. This money should go to the communities living around forests to incentivise their role in protecting wildernesses.
Three: The government must strongly encourage investment in energy efficiency to squeeze more power from existing plants, particularly those located in low-performing states such as Bihar. Investments in improved generation and distribution, clean technologies and pollution control must be seen as "no regret" steps, which is to say that irrespective of global responses, these can only end up benefiting India. This can be wholly achieved by taking advantage of fund flows from Clean Development Mechanisms, an arrangement under the Kyoto Protocol that makes it possible for industrialised countries to invest in the still developing countries in projects aiming to reduce emissions, as an alternative to (more expensive) emission reductions in their own countries. This way, efficiency will kick in for India with improved power generation at a lower per-unit cost. We should of course complete half-finished power projects, retrofit turbines, improve transmission efficiency, re-line leaking canals, and restore health to catchments forests so that they can feed more water into existing dam reservoirs.
Four: The Indian government should start the shift away from our carbon dependence by investing significantly more money in alternate energy options such as wind, solar and tidal power, and by tweaking national policies - fiscal, regulatory, environmental - to create powerful incentives for business and industry to join the fight against climate change. You will be surprised to know that alternate energy generates more power in India than nuclear plants. Yet, this option continues to get step-motherly treatment, despite the obvious gains, namely, decentralised generation and distribution where it is most needed and almost instant returns -- as against a waiting period of over a decade for nuclear or large hydro power projects. The objective of this step would be to get a head start, while occupying the moral high ground at international negotiations where we will need to win fund transfers to offset the higher generation cost of power from climate-safe options.
Five: The government alone, and not the private sector, has the capacity to develop largescale sophisticated scientific projects that can enable us to assess the real impact of climate change on our people. This must be launched as soon as possible, since such data will immeasurably help determine the potential extent and intensity of the threat and thus help evolve regional region-specific solutions. The government must direct the vast pool of our scientists to provide decision-makers with realistic options based on hard climate data, models and projections based on good science.
But these steps will work only in tandem with some clear-cut Don'ts. The Indian government must stop behaving like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand. Instead of presuming a best-case scenario, the government should prepare for the worst and start utilising developmental funds for climate mitigation and adaptation. Such investments have the potential to employ our huge, young work force in a mission to secure their own lives. Most importantly, the government shouldn't keep the reality of climate change a secret from the people.
The Prime Minister must go public to address the nation on the climate risks we face, based on the UN's report that fetched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, led by Dr. R. Pachauri, its Nobel Peace Prize. The Stern's Review's message must also reach our people. The government should immediately withdraw from high risk projects such as large dams in the Himalaya, which are touted as a solution to our energy problems, but are themselves going to be one of the first victims of climate change.
In any event the Detailed Project Reports for these dams have not taken the most sobering consequences of climate change on river flows (thanks to glacial retreat) into account. The government cannot allow any more natural ecosystems to be sacrificed for short-term gains because mangroves, corals, grasslands, wetlands, forests, rivers, lakes and even deserts are India's infrastructures of survival without which the quality of life of the people of the subcontinent will plummet.
Lastly, the government should shun the developmental policies based on 'old economics'. GDP growth 'for the sake of growth' cannot guarantee food, water, health, economic or ecological security. Its 'New Economics' must take into account the value of ecosystem services such as the supply of water from forests and their role in soil conservation, flood and drought control, soil fertility, and protection from sea surges and cyclones.
Two geographical arenas that are already defining the manner and extent to which climate change will affect us are the Sunderbans and the Himalayas. At a workshop organised by Sanctuary magazine in December 2007 at the American Centre, Kolkata, participants sat in stunned silence as environmental refugees from the 24 South Parganas district of West Bengal narrated their harrowing story, ratified by representatives of the Jadhavpur University who have studied climate change impact on the Sunderbans for six years. The vast bulk of the Sunderbans is at sea level, some of it below sea level, where people have managed to keep tides at bay by creating an ingenious system of mud walls and dykes.
Families of an island called Lohachara have been forced to move to temporary shelter on a larger (but equally vulnerable) island called Sagar, which itself has lost 10,000 acres to the rising seas. Theirs is not an isolated tragedy. Two-third of the land of yet another village, called Ghoramara, which is yet another climate victim, has been lost to a combination of rising seas and erratic water discharges triggered by glacial melt (http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=3036). By all account, the effort of the West Bengal officials to find a home for refugees on the Sagar is a losing battle. Not just because sea levels will drown farms and villages, but because increasingly frequent extreme weather incidents will generate stronger and higher tides that will inevitably make freshwater sources in the Sunderbans saline, making living here impossible.
Experts suggest that around 50 million people living in harm's way in the Sunderbans across Bangladesh and West Bengal Sunderbans will eventually move northward to larger urban centres such as Khulna, Jessore and Dhaka in Bangladesh and Kharagpur, Kolkata and beyond in West Bengal. Put another way, the refugee crisis triggered by the war that saw the birth of Bangladesh in the 1970s is going to look like a teddy bear's picnic compared to the mass movement of climate refugees into Meghalaya, Mizoram, Assam and the higher latitudes of West Bengal. Overall the number of humans who will move on the Indian subcontinent would even dwarf the mass migration that took place when India was partitioned in 1947.
A similar colossal tragedy has begun to play out in the Himalaya. The glaciers of this mountain chain sustain over one billion people through nine distinct river systems in India, Pakistan, Bhutan, China, Bangladesh and Nepal. The inevitable floods from melting ice will soon be followed by crippling droughts that will turn the bread basket of India - Punjab, Haryana and west Uttar Pradesh - into a dust bowl. The first impact of this man-made catastrophe will be a dramatic drop in drinking water availability, followed closely by the failure of irrigation. William Cline, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Development (CGD) and the Peterson Institute for International Economic Research, suggests that India's agricultural productivity could plummet by as much as 40 per cent. In such an unwelcome event, the (supply side, demand side, or distribution-caused) food shortages that concern us today will be remembered as "the good days".
Let's return for a while to the power sector into which India instinctively pours not just money but its very soul. The Government of India's Economic Survey for 2007-08 confirms that the growth of power generation in April-December 2007 was below target. The peak energy deficit was placed at 14.8 percent and total energy deficit at 8.4 percent. We must assume that the Finance Minister will react by pumping still more money into the cul de sac of hydro and nuclear power (the latter showed the sharpest decline in the current year, when compared to the corresponding period last year) and on new thermal plants. What a tragedy for India this will be if he is allowed to follow this path.
As our climate warms, the truth is people will want more energy to cool urban homes, commercial premises. More pump sets will be demanded as surface waters dry up and water is sought from fast depleting aquifers. We have already seen the futility of investing in Himalayan dams, but consider this; a two degree rise in the temperature of river, lake or sea water piped into the inlets of the cooling systems of power plants - thermal or nuclear - will mean hotter water discharged into the environment. This will kill fish and other aquatic organisms in lakes, rivers and oceans.
The only option available is to reduce the quantum of power generated. But since this will affect the output of power plants, India is hardly likely to worry about the slower, but infinitely more damaging, impact of a drop in our already plummeting marine and fresh water fish stocks. Investments in wind and solar and micro-mini hydel projects could progressively bring electricity to every home in India. These options are not being availed because economists say they will cost more. But if we do not take the right step, climate change will prevent our people from enjoying the gift of life, irrespective of how much money is poured into 'too little too late' solutions.
And so the game continues. Apparently unaware of the climate Tsunami ahead, India has plans to enhance its financial investments in physical infrastructure - electricity, railways, roads, ports, airports, irrigation, urban and rural water supply and sanitation - from five to nine per cent of its GDP (The Eleventh Five Year Plan envisages a spend of $500 billion. For all practical purposes, virtually none of these investments take climate realities into account; virtually none of them go towards either mitigating, or adapting to climate change, or tweaking past investments to make them less vulnerable to the vagaries of changing weather patterns. What this means is that just like the bulk of the Rs. 300,000 crore being misspent on hydro power generation, the destiny of most power and infrastructure projects involves their becoming non-performing assets.
This neatly underscores the now famous line by Al Gore: "At one time they said climate change is a myth - today there is another myth at work - the governments of the world are doing something worthwhile to fight climate change - this is the inconvenient truth."
By Bittu Sahgal
First published in
