Suman Sahai
With dramatic changes in the climate overtaking our world,
the ferocious pollution in Delhi, the most polluted city in the world and
across North India, the irony should not be lost on anyone that world leaders
will be sitting down to yet another ineffectual talkathon on arresting climate
change just over a week from now.
The 2023 UN Climate Change Conference will be held in Dubai
from November 30 to December 12, 2023. The main meeting will be the COP 28
(28th meeting of the Conference of the Parties) as well as the 18th meeting of
the parties to the Kyoto Protocol. And the fifth meeting of the parties to the
Paris Agreement.
The Kyoto Protocol of 1997 was an international treaty to
reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases causing global warming. Industrial
countries with high emissions were required to cut back more than the less
polluting developing countries.
The Paris Agreement of 2015 was a pledge to keep global
temperature rise well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and
to aim to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
The hyperbolic agenda of COP 28 is: Fast-tracking energy
transition and slashing emissions before 2030; Transforming climate finance,
delivering on old promises and setting the framework for a new deal on finance;
Putting nature, people, lives, and livelihoods at the heart of climate action;
and even more immodestly -- Mobilising for the most inclusive COP ever. I
wonder how many people believe any of this.
Nothing except hot air has emerged from these treaties and
the global climate has only worsened, causing the UN Secretary-General, Antonio
Guterres, to despair recently that humanity has “opened the gates to hell” by
allowing the climate crisis to worsen.
As if to provide the scientific underpinning to Mr Guterres’
hopelessness, a new report has just come in October titled “The 2023 State of
the Climate Report: Entering Unchartered Territory”. Brought out by Oxford
University Press, the report is authored by a multi-disciplinary team of
scientists from different countries.
The headline message of the report is that “Life on Planet
Earth is under Siege and we are now in Unchartered Territory’’ This bald,
terrifying statement says in so many words that it is possibly too late to
reverse the damage done to the climate and that it is going to get increasingly
difficult, if not impossible, to predict the timing, the nature and severity of
anomalous events that will take place in the future.
2023 will probably turn out to be a benchmark year when many
planetary boundaries were irretrievably breached. In July, 2023 was recorded as
the hottest year on record. Scientists derive from paleo evidence that this
July was probably the hottest in 100,000 years. If that doesn’t sound crazy
enough, July 2023 is also when the Antarctic Sea ice reached its lowest level
so far and unprecedented numbers of wildfires were seen across temperate areas,
particularly in North America.
Asia is turning out to be particularly vulnerable to climate
upheavals and disasters. We are seeing the increasingly vulnerable state of
North India, particularly in the Indo-Gangetic plains, where high levels of
pollution persist for months and uncharacteristic weather events have become
more frequent. Cloud bursts and heavy monsoon rains cause flash floods and
landslides in northern India. The heavy, nonstop rain for three days starting
with a cloud burst wrought havoc in the Kumaon region of Uttarakhand in 2021.
If the devastating floods of Pakistan in 2022 and the frequent flooding in
Bangladesh and China are any indication, the Asian region has already slipped
into a highly atypical weather pattern.
The climate of the regions around the Hindukush and
Himalayan mountains is directly influenced by the snow-capped ranges which are
bearing the brunt of global warming. Glaciers here are melting at a quickened
pace. It is estimated that over half of the earth’s 215,000 glaciers will melt
by the end of the century, even if global warming is limited to 1.5 degrees
Celsius. Images captured by Nasa satellites reveal that the Himalayas have
already lost about one third of their permanent ice (permafrost) in just the
last 50 years. This has serious implications for the water availability in the
major rivers of North India.
When glaciers melt and retreat, glacial lakes are formed
collecting the melted water. These are fragile, highly unstable structures that
can rupture their banks easily, resulting in large volumes of water flowing
down in torrents, producing devastating floods. Such GLOFs (Glacial Lake
Outburst Floods) are becoming more frequent. A GLOF event is what caused the
2013 Kedarnath disaster, when at least 5000 people lost their lives.
A GLOF is also what
caused the flash floods in Sikkim in 2023 where along with a significant number
of lives lost, huge damage was caused to expensive infrastructure, including
Chungthang dam and hydroelectric power project. In a swiftly warming world,
there is a greater likelihood we will see more instances of catastrophic floods
caused when the unstable glacial lakes breach their insubstantial banks. As it
is, satellite data show that the last 30 years have seen a big surge in the
volume of glacial lakes.
All this tells us how precarious our hold now is on the
planet that has sustained human civilisations over millennia. Population growth
coupled with an economic growth model that is anchored in a rapacious appetite
for more and more has extracted more resources and emitted more pollutants that
the environment could handle. We have destroyed the equilibrium of nature. I
could end on a prescription of “What to Do” to make things good again, but the
solutions have been screamed from the rooftops at every COP meeting. Only,
nobody listened. I am afraid that they will not listen at COP 28 either.
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