Warning from China: Fossil fuel to devastate India’s heartland
ALARM BELLS India, China research team says drought, floods to hit nation’s food security
Indo-Gangetic plain will face extreme climatic conditions such as severe droughts if the burning of fossil fuel continues unabated and government policies fail to intervene, a group of Indian and Chinese researchers has warned.
The droughts, a possible result of the reckless burning of fossil fuels combined with regional warming, will lead to a fall in agricultural produce, compromising India’s food security, the researchers projected.
That wasn’t the only conclusion because of dependency on the intensity of monsoon and the variability of government intervention, “extreme wet events” or floods will be a probability too.
A two-year study was conducted at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing, the Beijing Normal University and the University of Cambridge.
“Dissecting the projected change led to the conclusion that not only will incidences of climatological and extreme drought increase dramatically in the future, but extreme wet events will also become more probable due to increased variability, indicating that extreme events, including droughts and floods, will become more common in the Indo-Gangetic plain,” said Debashis Nath, one of the researchers.
The study, published in the scientific journal Earth’s Future in March, analysed climate data from the region between 1961 and 2012 and juxtaposed it against two scenarios till the end of this century.
The first scenario was one where policies led to increased irrigation and cut down the emission of greenhouse gases; second where authorities failed to take steps and the region became prone to climatic changes. The situation is complicated by the fact that agriculture in India is mostly rain-fed.
“We found that in the IndoGangetic Plain region, the probability of drought is 45% and the region has become droughtprone in recent decades. Cereal production has declined from 2000, which is consistent with the increase in drought-affected areas from 20% to 25% to 50% to 60% before and after 2000,” said Reshmita Nath, one of the researchers attached to CAS.
The regions studied included Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Chhattisgarh, Bihar, West Bengal and parts of Madhya Pradesh and Odisha.