IPCC report on 'Climate Change and Land' -- Fails to provide policy guidelines

Painting by Michel Granger

At a time when half the country is recovering from a flood fury, especially in Kerala where massive landslides following incessant rains have taken a huge human toll; and much of the remaining half of the country is reeling under a continuing drought, the latest special report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) titled ‘Climate Change and Land’ couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. The 1,300 page report, a summary of which was released last week, presents a lot of scary facts, which were being talked about, but perhaps needed an official endorsement.

Speaking to The Guardian, Dave Reay, a professor at the University of Edinburgh who was an expert reviewer for the IPCC report summed it up: “This is a perfect storm. Limited land, an expanding human population, and all wrapped in a suffocating blanket of climate emergency. Earth has never felt smaller, its natural ecosystems never under such direct threat.” Although integral to the discussions on climate change, the direct relationship land has with climate change had never been so loudly emphasised. It however restrains from making any policy recommendations and that in my thinking is its biggest drawback. To illustrate, if fossil fuel subsidies have grown to $ 400 billion in 2018, unless a phase out programme accompanied by adequate public sector investments in sustainable food production systems or land management etc is provided, it is futile to expect any meaningful contribution towards protecting the climate from going haywire.

The report says that since the pre-industrial period (1850-1900) the global mean land surface temperature (till 2006-15) has almost doubled when compared with the global mean surface temperature, which is the average for land and ocean temperatures. While the land surface temperature has increased by 1.53 degree C, the rise in the mean land and ocean temperatures had hovered around 0.87 degree C. In other words, this report shows that to cap the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees, the world will have to ensure that any further rise in the land surface temperature is kept under control. Further, global warming has already brought shift in climatic patterns in many parts of the world, including expansion of the arid climate zones and contraction of polar zones, and has also unleashed extreme weather fluctuations, inducing long dry spells, prolonged heat period, heavy floods, enhanced frequency of cyclones, permafrost thaw thereby resulting in massive land degradation, loss of biodiversity and posing a threat to global food security. The gloom that has descended following the rapidly changing climatic patterns has to be contained by rapidly evolving policy fixes.  

Recent studies have shown that ever since the time man started recording temperatures, July has been the hottest month. The Himalayas are losing more than one and a half foot of ice every year since the year 2000, and Swiss glaciers have lost more than 0.8 billion tonnes of snow and ice in the month of June. While the IPCC report says that cultivated soils are being lost at a rate 100 times faster than it is being formed (and 10-20 times in no till areas), a major study by ETC Group had earlier shown that nearly 75 billion tonnes of soil is lost every year to erosion, with damages costing Rs 400 billion a year. In another report, published in Scientific American, a UN official was quoted as saying that if the current rate of degradation continues, the world’s top soil would be gone in 60 years.

Global food production systems, and that includes, agriculture, forestry, livestock and other land uses account for 13 per cent carbon dioxide, 44 per cent methane and 82 per cent nitrous oxide emissions, accounting for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. However this appears to be quite a scaled down estimate from another UN report on the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) for Agriculture and Food released last year which pegged greenhouse gas emissions from the same activities to be somewhere between 49 to 57 per cent. Nevertheless, the challenge to reduce emissions without any negative fallout on food security remains paramount. It has socio-economic as well as political implications.

The IPCC report does suggest sustainable agricultural practices, increasing crop productivity, moving away from bio-energy programmes, and for shifting dietary preferences from meat based to plant based foods among measures that could make a significant dent on the greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, almost a quarter of the food produced, is either lost or wasted. Several studies earlier have pointed to the enormous damage resulting from food wastage and in turn the environmental footprint it leaves behind. If food wastage was a country, it would have ranked third in greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, the food that goes waste in US for instance is good enough to meet the needs of sub-Saharan Africa.

Between 1961 and 2013, an additional 1per cent of world’s drylands had turned into drought. This however cannot be entirely blamed on climate change. In India, for instance, increasingly the drylands are getting into the drought zone because of a large number of water guzzling hybrid crops that are cultivated with impunity. Common sense tells us that drylands need crops which require less water. But it is just the opposite – crops that require more water are being grown in water scarce regions for several decades now. In Maharashtra, 76 per cent of the available irrigation is consumed by sugarcane alone, which occupies only 4 per cent of the cultivable area. The remaining 96 per cent of the crops that are cultivated are therefore faced with a terrible water stress which has little to do with global warming.

The IPCC report clearly mentions desertification, deforestation, industries, and urbanisation to exacerbate global warming. It also lists draining wetlands to be responsible for releasing carbon dioxide back into atmosphere. Kerala is particularly a victim of flawed policies that have drained wetlands, and by encouraging rampant quarrying in fragile areas of Western Ghats turned it vulnerable to landslides. In a quest for higher economic growth, natural resources are being ruthless devastated. 

I found the report to be very useful for academic purposes. Environmentalists will surely lap it up. But in the absence of any mandatory guidelines and policy directions that G-20 countries must be asked to adhere to more so at a time when the world is faced with a climate emergency, the IPCC simply let the opportunity go. #

IPCC report comes up short. The Tribune. Aug 21, 2019
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/ipcc-report-comes-up-short/820230.html?fbclid=IwAR0mPWda_EGCkdvlQIqiY0poYObXr8j2zggrpmOmwT7nnDhJwuqDdqE57X0

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The Mighty Himalayas Are Shrinking

Himalayan glaciers are retreating at an alarming rate 

-- Pic Al Jazeera

An ode to a dead glacier. Well, that’s exactly what scientists in Iceland plan to do. On Aug 18, scientists from Rice University and Iceland are planning to put up a memorial for the first glacier – called Ok glacier -- that has disappeared in western Iceland. The poignant message on the memorial plaque states: “Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

Ok glacier in Iceland is the first glacier to disappear but will certainly not be the last. As the plaque states all its glaciers are expected to disappear in another 200 years. But thirty years from now, in 2050, I am sure many people who read this message will curse the present generation for the disappearing act, for the extremely hot and dry planet we left for them, depriving them of their share of a happy world to live in. They certainly would know what wrong we did.

I think it is an excellent idea to set up memorials for our dying glaciers. But if that be so, the Himalayas would be inundated with memorials all across the Himalayan mountain range extending from Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Bhutan and to China. Termed as the water tower, Himalayas carry nearly 40 per cent of the earth’s fresh water. But with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) estimating that more than 50,000 glaciers are rapidly shrinking, the pace at which these glaciers are disappearing will leave behind a trail of destruction for almost 1.3 billion people living on either side of the highest mountain range.

The Himalayas have also been called as the third pole since they carry the third largest volume of ice after Antarctica and the Arctic. So it is not only that the two poles of the planet – Antarctica and Arctic those are melting, Himalayas too are equally vulnerable.  Although not as fast as the European Alps, which have seen many glaciers dying in the past decade. Perhaps one reason for this is that the temperatures had started rising in Europe much earlier than in South Asia.

 

Nevertheless, I was expecting a kind of an outrage in India when a recent comprehensive study conducted at the Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory concluded that the Himalayas are losing more than one and a half foot of ice every year since the year 2000.  Prior to that, the Himalayan meltdown between 1975 and 2000 was to the extent of 10 inches every year. Interesting this study does not include the high-mountain ranges of Asia – Pamir, Hindu Kush and Tian Shan. The cumulative impact of meltdown would certainly be disastrous for the entire Asian region. However, this alarming meltdown in the Himalayan ice cover should have shocked the nation; after all it will eventually strike a deadly blow to people living in the Hindi heartland. But except for a few headlines here and there, I did not see any public outrage. Newspapers didn’t even think it fit to raise this issue in its editorials, and the TV channels were busier with political statements without much relevance.

Based on declassified photographic images taken by US spy satellites as well as routine satellite images spanning 650 glaciers across the region, this study showed how the Himalayas are on a yearly basis losing up to 8 billion litres of water every year. This equals 3.2 million Olympic sized swimming pools being drained out every year. For a country emerging out of a water shock that Chennai in coastal south India went through recently, the shrinking of ice cover in the Himalayas should have made us sit back and think. After all, it is everyone’s future that is at stake, and people must start worrying about the state of water-less economy that we are leaving behind for our children. A strong public opinion could have jolted the nation, and I was hoping Parliament would sit for an impromptu mid-night session.

But nothing like this happened. Except for blaming agriculture for (mis)utilising 78 per cent of the available irrigation water, life went on as usual. So much so that another news report quoting a study by the Central Water Commission and pointing to a decline in water availability from the three major river basins – Indus, the Ganges and Brahmaputra – all emanating from the Himalayas, and serving as a lifeline for the entire northern region and extending up to central India, went unnoticed. The average water potential in the three river basins has declined by almost 40 per cent. A State of Forest Report 2015 had earlier shown that the decreased river flow is on account of cutting down of 628 square kms of forest cover in north and eastern Indian region.    

Under such circumstances, where billions of people living downstream face prospects of river drying up, and thereby acerbating the water crisis hitting agriculture, industry as well as drinking water supply, shouldn’t the Himalayan states – Jammu & Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, West Bengal, Meghalaya, Assam, Tripura, Mizoram, Manipur, and Nagaland – come together to collectively formulate a policy framework for protecting the hills? Why suitable policies can’t be put in place to ensure the repeat of Kedarnath devastation does not happen, and why riparian states can’t join hands and collectively invest to protect the river catchments? Ascribing an economic value to the eco-system services that mountains provide, and that includes the services that come from water, maintaining the tree cover, protecting soil erosion, wildlife etc and incorporating it in the state GDP calculations is surely a way to measure economic wealth that mountains provide. Reckless exploitation of hills in the name of development has to stop. This may require a new and distinct development paradigm for the hill states, which rely more on protecting nature and environment. Research programmes too need to suitably modify. I don’t see any logic in agricultural universities in the mountains doing farm research which is exactly a copy of research being done in the plains.#

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