About 560 million people along India’s 7,500-km long coastline are at risk of inundation. More floods are likely along the Ganga and Brahmaputra. The monsoon will become more uncertain. Stronger cyclones may strike the western coast.
These are some of the predictions made for India by experts interpreting the findings of the latest climate-change report, released on September 25, 2019, by the Intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC), the United Nations (UN) body that assesses the science related to global warming.
Titled, “The Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate”, the IPCC report evaluates climate change on the oceans, which blanket 71 per cent of the earth’s surface, and the cryosphere--frozen areas, such as glaciers and ice sheets, which cover 10 per cent of the planet.
For India, the major impact will come from the melting of ice in the Hindu Kush region of the Himalayas, which holds the largest reserves of water, in the form of ice and snow, outside the polar regions and is the source of 10 of the largest rivers in Asia.
“These systems, therefore, are the economic engines of the region, especially due to the large freshwater reserve, biodiversity and natural resource support that it provides for the billions of people living downstream,” Anjal Prakash, coordinating lead author of the report and associate professor, Regional Water Studies, TERI School of Advanced Studies, told IndiaSpend. “What happens to Himalayan glaciers is directly connected to what happens to over 2 billion people living in Asia.”
The IPCC report said climate change is causing glaciers to melt at an “unprecedented” rate, leading to a rise in frequency of cyclones and changing global rainfall patterns.
Close to 670 million people worldwide live in coastal areas and 65 million in small-island nations. Another 670 million people live in high mountains. The impact of the changes in oceans and glaciers is likely to affect one in every five persons living on the planet.
The IPCC report has been ratified by 195 countries which means that it represents global consensus, but experts said this makes it a conservative estimate. The actual impact of climate change could be worse.
Indian lives, livelihoods at risk
As more ice melts, sea levels rise
Between 2006 and 2015, the Greenland ice sheet lost ice at an average rate of 278 gigatonne (Gt) every year, enough to cause sea levels to rise by 0.7 mm, said the IPCC report.
Over 52 years to 2019, the June snow cover on land in the Arctic declined by 13.4 per cent per decade. Between 1979 and 2018, sea ice in the Arctic decreased by 12.8 per cent per decade, a change not seen for at least 1,000 years.
This melting of ice is pushing up sea levels. Sea levels rose 15 cm, or roughly the size of a 500 ml coke bottle, over the 20thcentury alone. Currently, the seas are rising twice as fast–3.6 mm per year–and increasing.
By the turn of the century sea levels could rise up to 60 cm, or equivalent to four 500 ml bottles of coke atop each other, if global temperature rise is restricted to 2 deg C. It could be higher if global warming goes beyond that, the IPCC report said.
Not only are the seas rising, they are warming, and that has a range of consequences.
Rise in sea temperatures
Cooling and adaptation
(Shetty is a reporting fellow with IndiaSpend and reporting from the United Nations on a Reham al-Farra Memorial Journalism Fellowship.)
We welcome feedback. Please write to respond@indiaspend.org. We reserve the right to edit responses for language and grammar.
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