This crisis is of our making

This is not normal; it is beyond tragic. Words fail me to explain the scale of devastation the northern Indian subcontinent has witnessed during this season of rain. Vast areas are flooded; homes, schools and hospitals have been lost; roads and other infrastructure destroyed; agricultural fields submerged. In the Western Himalayan region, where cloudburst after cloudburst has hit the ground, mighty mountains have crumbled like rivers of mud. This has a huge human cost; put a face to the flood and the devastation to comprehend what these losses mean.

What is not normal is the intensity of the extreme rain in this region. In the month of August, Punjab experienced heavy and extremely heavy rainfall, as classified by the India Meteorological Department (IMD), for 24 out of 31 days. IMD classifies “heavy” as more than 115 mm and “extremely heavy” as more than 204 mm of rain in 24 hours. It’s not a downpour, it’s a deluge of Biblical proportions.

It was the same in the Himalayan states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh and the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Himachal Pradesh broke all records as heavy and extremely heavy rain lashed the mountain slopes of the state for over 90 per cent of the days in the past three months. In addition, there have been flash flood events because of cloudbursts—13 confirmed by government data, with another 10 reported by the media. Over the months of June and August, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir have seen almost 50 per cent excess rains. But if you consider this in terms of weekly averages, the scale of the devastation becomes even clearer. For instance, Punjab has averaged 400 per cent more rainfall in the last fortnight of August than its normal. Himachal Pradesh, which is upstream of Punjab, has experienced incessant rains, and between August 28 and September 3, the state saw over 300 per cent more rainfall than the weekly average. This is why we are seeing such a scale of devastation, wiping out livelihoods, property and years of developmental investments.

Why is this happening? It is no doubt a climate emergency; but it is equally about what we are doing in the name of development. The recklessness of growth at all costs is showing up in this destruction. The fact is that the world is struggling to cut the emissions that drive climate change and so, these impacts will get more deadly. But if we can understand that the tipping point is here, we can build differently so that the next flood or cloudburst causes less damage.

Let’s first understand how the climate is changing. The fact is, much of this season of despair is because the weather system is disrupted, which is linked to climate change. We know that with warming, there will be more rain and that this rain will fall over fewer days. This is what we have seen in the past season—rainfall of the entire season came in a matter of hours.

But there is more at play in this weather pattern. We know that western disturbances are natural weather phenomena, where winds mostly originating from the Mediterranean bring cyclonic activity and rain to our region. This monsoon season, the western disturbances seem to have developed a fever. Instead of the occasional one or two which would come during the southwest monsoon, there have been 19 till the first week of September this year. These winds are literally colliding with the winds of monsoon, and this is leading to the catastrophic rainfall events we have witnessed in northern India and Pakistan. It is not clear why this is happening, except that western disturbances are linked to the jet stream—winds from the Arctic. As this Arctic wind system weakens due to climate change, it is disrupting other interconnected global wind systems, including the western disturbances.

This year, something else is also happening to the wind systems originating in the Arabian Sea, which in turn are pushing against the monsoon winds from the Bay of Bengal. All in all, it is a giant mess in the skies—all a play of a combination of factors, from the warming of the oceans to the heating of the Arctic region to the decreasing temperature difference between the equator and the North Pole. This instability is now impacting us in the form of floods from the skies. It seems that the revenge of nature is here. And it’s not going away; it’s only going to get worse.

It is for this reason that we cannot be complacent. Nor can we simply blame climate change and then, in our usual fatalistic excuse of a way, say: what can humans do? This destruction is not God’s doing. This is very much of our own making, and it is at our doorstep.

The fact is, climate change is the result of emissions we have released into the atmosphere for our economic growth and human greed. We are compounding the problem, deliberately and wilfully, through the way we pursue development. We are building in floodplains; we are not planning for drainage where we must; we are encroaching on vulnerable mountain regions; we are building houses, roads and hydropower units, without once thinking of the fact that these regions are seismically active, that these are the world’s youngest mountain ranges and that their slopes are made for landslides.

I can go on. But I hope you understand my anguish when I say that enough is enough. The time for merely talking about the need for adaptation and resilience is over. We are living in the age of climate change. We are living through catastrophic times that will bring even mighty mountains to their knees. The time for human arrogance, denial and mindlessness is over. Let’s get this straight.

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