If the Indian government does not act urgently with great vision and resolve it risks the complete devastation of its people in the next four generations



Photo: Kalyan Varma

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 towards some of India’s densest 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 are now endangered, thanks to rapidly advancing climate change.

Keeping us company along our river route were other avians including sandpipers, river lapwings and small pratincoles, and a flock of juvenile ibisbills. 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 Stern smilingly shot us a look that said, “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 the still forest pools, frequented by sambar, barking deer, wild pig and a host of water fowl. If climate change affects the jungles, the animals will 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 the government for one of the world’s most ambitious hydropower programmes. India aims to generate an additional 50,000MW of power by 2017, at an estimated cost of Rs 3 lakh crore, which could go up by 50 percent if escalations in past power projects are an indication.

For the country’s ever burgeoning middle class that routinely suffers 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 new turbines.

On April 19, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh received Lord Stern in New Delhi. An 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 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 some simple advice for 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 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.”

IMAGES FROM SPACE have confirmed that the Himalayan glaciers are melting. But perhaps the sun’s glare off the icy peaks has so blinded the ministers and officials  in New Delhi that they just can’t see the glacial 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.

And yes, a desert around India Gate might well represent our true, irreversible, waterstressed situation. Things, of course, need not be so drastic, if the Government of India wakes to climate realities and seizes the moment. The dogmatic development strategy that India persists with can only hasten the doomsday.

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 floods 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 the farmers, fishermen and the urban and rural poor, to warn them of the climate catastrophe staring us 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, many 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, turning into climate refugees due to 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. The Siachen glacier has retreated 31.5m per annum and Pindari 23.5m per annum since 1981. The Gangotri glacier retreated 15m per annum during 1935-76 and 23m each year since 1985. The trend continues across the world’s tallest mountain ranges: the Milam glacier in the Kumaon Himalayas retreated at an average rate of 9.1m per year through the last century. The glacial meltdown is expected to lower the water levels in rivers like the Indus and the Ganga by as much as two-thirds, affecting 500 million people. The per capita availability of water will decline by over 30 percent in the next four decades.

If greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, by 2080 India could experience a rise in temperature up to 70°C, a decline in precipitation up to 3mm per day, 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 percent in wheat, particularly affecting north India. Rice yields could fall 40 percent. Sowing seasons will become erratic. Incidence of diseases such as malaria and cholera will rise. Higher temperatures and humidity could produce strains to which we have no resistance.

In 100 years, sea levels could rise 40 centimetres, 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.

Some 30 percent 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 underwater organisms that support extraordinary biodiversity.

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 trouble the tigers, if they are still alive. The flooding of mangrove forests like the Sunderbans would wipe out the Royal Bengal tigers. Altered migratory patterns and increased forest fires would affect innumerable other species.

The economic costs of global warming would be monumental. Some experts estimate that India’s GDP could drop nine percent, largely due to submergence of coastal areas. Others take a darker view and suggest that our GDP could be eroded by anywhere from 20 percent to 40 percent.

Economic loss in urban areas such as Mumbai and Chennai would be phenomenal. Mumbai alone could lose up to $48 billion due to 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 bitter contest over scarce essential resources.

Monsoons may get shorter with 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 is being forced to come to grips with new realities. 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. In both the developed and the developing countries, the poor will be hit first and hardest because they will have fewer resources to avoid the worst impacts of water and 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 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). I have been quoting the Stern Review Report for six months to the national press, in my own magazine, Sanctuary, and in our many climate change workshops.

For 10 years I have also read, with disquiet, almost all available literature on the early warnings being sent to us — amphibian dieoffs; early and late migration of species, early or late flowering of plants and nesting of birds;and, of course, the impact of melting glacial and polar ice on species like polar bears and snow leopards. But hearing climate realities calmly delivered by the man on whose data even Nobel Prize-winning former US vice president Al Gore relied, had a profoundly more sombre effect.

INDIA IS yet to show it is listening to sage counsel such as his. The Government is the singular entity with the power to tackle climate change issues. But the compulsions of playing to the vote gallery mean that politicians of every hue court both backward classes and the upwardly mobile. Still, being able to drive change doesn’t help to alter mindsets set in concrete — the concrete ideas of big cities, big dams and double-digit growth. The Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change is mandated to develop a National Climate Action Plan to deal with this critical issue.

At the time of writing, the Plan, due in June, is cloaked in mystery. Instead of calling an open discussion to thrash the best strategy, the government says it will release the plan when it is ready. Few know how this Plan will project India’s position before the world community, though one can guess. Intoxicated with prospect of economic wealth, and in the grip of coalition politics, India is unlikely to find the courage to take hard decisions.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the report asks the US and the industrial North to act, while India catches up with their economic progress. This would be a grave error because while climate change is without doubt the primary responsibility of the industrial countries, Indians will be its primary victims. For our sake, we need to set an example.

On some issues nevertheless, Indian politicians are easily going to agree with Lord Stern. For instance, per capita emissions of the greenhouse gases, which are responsible for warming the planet, should 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 still out.

STEPS TO TAKE
As home to one-sixth of humanity, India should be a global leader on climate change strategy. 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 emission from deforestation and forest degradation is comparable in size to the total emission 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 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 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.

India need spend as little as two percent 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 to coal and oil-based projects. Policies such as the controversial Forest Rights Act will accelerate deforestation. Thus, both old carbon (oil, gas and coal, roughly 25 percent of India’s carbon emissions) and new carbon (tree and above and below ground biomass, which is 21 percent), will end up as carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere.

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 10-to-1. Cycles were everywhere. Many used public transport. This low carbon footprint is typical of Indians across the country.

But the well-off use the low carbon footprint of the poor to justify their business. In the name of the poor, who have consistently been displaced by ‘development’, India will expand its coal-fired thermal power plant capacity by 300 percent in the coming decade. This will involve 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, lends only a sixth as much to alternative energy.

From a buffet of choices available to it, here are five that I believe 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. If India handles this with statesmanship, the world’s greenhouse emissions, currently at 45 billion tonnes 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 percent of India’s greenhouse gas emissions. Natural infrastructures such as forests, wetlands, coasts, estuaries and grasslands help moderate climate and sequester and store carbon. The government should start negotiating with the world’s industrial nations to transfer to us global funds for carbon that we are able to sequester through assisted natural regeneration of forests, and storing carbon in protected areas. We must also ask to be paid to store carbon in sanctuaries, national parks and reserved forests, which will go up in smoke if there is no incentive to maintain the status quo. This money should go to the communities around forests as incentive to protect the ecology.

THREE: The government must encourage investment in energy efficiency to squeeze more power from existing plants, such as in lowperforming Bihar. Improved generation and distribution, clean technologies and pollution control must be the “no regret” steps. This can be achieved with fund flows from Clean Development Mechanisms, an arrangement that makes it possible for industrialised countries to invest in developing countries in emission reduction projects, as an alternative to emission reductions in their own countries. India should also complete half-finished power projects, retrofit turbines, re-line leaking canals, and restore health to catchments to feed more water into existing dam reservoirs.

FOUR: The government should start the shift away from carbon dependence by investing 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 do so. 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 of decentralised generation and distribution and near instant returns against a waiting period of over a decade for nuclear or large hydro power projects. Such a shift would provide a head start, and help India occupy the moral high ground in international negotiations for fund transfers.

FIVE: The government alone has the capacity to develop large-scale sophisticated scientific projects to assess the real impact of climate change. Such data will help determine the potential extent and intensity of the threat and help evolve region-specific solutions. Towards this end, the government must direct the vast pool of our scientists to provide decision-makers with all the realistic options.

BUT THESE steps will work only in tandem with some clear-cut Don’ts. The government must stop behaving like the proverbial ostrich with its head buried in the sand. Importantly, it shouldn’t keep the reality of climate change a secret from the people. The Prime Minister must publicly address the nation on the climate risks, based on the UN report that fetched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, led by Dr R. Pachauri, its Nobel Peace Prize. The message of the Stern Review must also reach our people. The government should immediately withdraw from high-risk projects such as large dams in the Himalayas. In any event, the Detailed Project Reports for these dams have not taken into account the most sobering consequences of climate change on river flows. Our mangroves, corals, grasslands, wetlands, forests, rivers, lakes and deserts cannot be sacrificed anymore because they are the country’s infrastructures of survival. Lastly, the government should shun the developmental policies based on ‘old economics’ of GDP growth that cannot guarantee food, water, health, economic or ecological security. Its ‘new economics’ must respect the forests for their role in water supply, soil conservation and fertility, flood and drought control, and protection from sea surges and cyclones.

Two areas already defining the extent of climate change impact are the Sunderbans and the Himalayas. At a workshop organised by Sanctuary magazine in December 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 of displacement, ratified by researchers from Jadavpur University who studied climate change impact on the Sunderbans for six years. The bulk of the Sunderbans is at sea level. Villagers have kept tides at bay with an ingenious system of mud walls and dykes. Families on 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-thirds of yet another village, Ghoramara, has been lost to rising seas and erratic water discharges triggered by glacial melt.

The effort of 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 also because increasingly frequent extreme weather incidents will generate stronger and higher tides that will make freshwater sources in the Sunderbans saline. Experts say eventually 50 million people living in harm’s way in the Sunderbans, including in Bangladesh, will move to urban centres in that country and to Kharagpur, Kolkata and beyond in West Bengal. The refugee crisis triggered by the war that saw the birth of Bangladesh in 1971 could pale in comparison with 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 could dwarf the mass migration at India’s partition in 1947.

ASIMILAR TRAGEDY has begun in the Himalayas whose glaciers sustain a billion people through nine river systems in India, Pakistan, Bhutan, China, Bangladesh and Nepal. The inevitable floods from the melting ice will be followed by droughts that will turn the breadbasket 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 by the failure of irrigation. William Cline, a Senior Fellow at the Washington DC-based economic think-tank, the Peterson Institute for International Economic Research, suggests that India’s agricultural productivity could plummet 40 percent. In such an unwelcome event, the food shortages of today will become “the good old days”.

Let’s return to the power sector, into which India instinctively pours not just money but its very soul. The Economic Survey 2007-08 confirms that growth in 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 it’ll be if he is allowed to follow this path.

As our climate grows warmer, people will want more energy to cool urban homes and commercial premises. More pumpsets 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 that will kill aquatic organisms. 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, drop in our marine and freshwater 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.

Apparently unaware of the climate catastrophe 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 percent of its GDP (The 11th Five Year Plan envisages spending $500 billion). For all practical purposes, virtually none of these investments take climate realities into account; virtually none of them go towards mitigating or adapting to climate change. Clearly, despite the huge outlay of Rs 3 lakh crore on hydropower generation, most power and infrastructure projects run the risk of 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.”

A noted environmentalist, Bittu Sahgal is Editor, Sanctuary

http://www.tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=Ne030508what_men.asp

---