Climate change to impact monsoon in India: Report

NEW DELHI: Sea-level rise of several metres and major disruption to monsoon rains and river flows in India are among the biggest global economic risks from climate change, a policy report by leading economists and scientists has said.

“Climate change is likely to mean monsoon systems affect larger areas over longer timescales, and rainfall during monsoon season is likely to intensify while becoming less predictable. The largest effect, which is being observed today, is an increase in the year-to-year variability of the monsoon strength and the associated extremes of rainfall,” said the report.

Called “The missing economic risks in assessments of climate change impacts report”, the report was released two days ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York. It underlined that policy makers have been receiving economic assessments that omit the biggest risks from climate change. These include periodic assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The Earth Institute in Columbia University, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research represented by economist Nicholas Stern, climatologist Hans Jaochim Schellnhuber and others who authored the report highlighted that the cascading impacts of destabilisation of ice sheets; stronger tropical cyclones; extreme and frequent heat waves and floods; collapse of ecosystems are not being reported or analysed accurately.

For example, IPCC reports have mismatches between physical and economic impacts of climate change.

IPCC’s summary for policy makers for its fifth assessment report published in 2014 muted the impact on economy saying “aggregate global economic losses accelerate with increasing temperature but global economic impacts from climate change are currently difficult to estimate…”

Or the summary for policy makers of IPCC’s special report on global warming of 1.5° said risks to global aggregated economic growth due to climate change impacts are projected to be lower at 1.5°C than 2° C by the end of the century and that impacts refer to gross domestic product but impacts like loss of lives are difficult to monetize.