A new report and a book this week presented two sides of the climate change coin.
While the report unveiled at the Bonn UN climate change meeting sounded alarm bells for many Asian countries, including India, predicting large scale migrations due to glacial thaw, the book was a guide for erring cities across Asia, Africa and Latin America – cajoling them into becoming ‘good boys’.
Reports of the report flooded the Indian media since a lot is at stake for the country. The climate gurus have warned that the ongoing melting of alpine glaciers in the Himalayas will devastate the heavily irrigated farmlands of Asia by increasing floods and decreasing long-term water supplies. The glacier-fed basins of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, Irawaddy, Salween, Mekong, Yangtze and Yellow rivers support over 1.4 billion people.
The report ‘In search of Shelter: Mapping the Effects of Climate Change on Human Migration’ also predicted breakdown of ecosystem-based economies including subsistence herding, farming and fishing.
And while we were still coming to terms with the crisis looking us in the face, the International Institute of Environment and Development (IIED) sent us word that they have quite a few pointers for the Indian city of Mumbai along with its Asian metro counterparts in their new book ‘Adapting Cities to Climate Change: understanding and addressing the development challenges’.
The book, they say, should be of interest to policy makers, practitioners and academics, who face the challenge of addressing climate change vulnerability and adaptation in urban centres throughout the ‘global South’. It describes how the first priority for adapting cities to climate change is to remedy deficits in infrastructure and services. For most urban centres in these regions at least half of the population lacks piped water, sewers, drains, health care or emergency services. Also included are chapters discussing where adaptation can overlap with reducing greenhouse gas emissions (for Indian cities) and a critique of the very limited international funding available to support adaptation.
The UN-Columbia University-CARE International report also makes a few policy recommendations that include prioritising the world’s most vulnerable populations and including migration in adaptation strategies.
Takes me back to the gloom I experienced while doing an investigation some time back in the Sunderban islands of the Bay of Bengal. The story of the vanishing islands has been quoted widely (and even got a BBC award). But the migrants from these sinking islands have not yet been recognised as vulnerable , neither has there been any serious rehabilitation effort to save these environment refugees. Just the other day, a young environmentalist who had revisited the Sunderban delta, reported at a seminar on climate change that she hadn’t seen any perceptible change in the plight of the people despite the international press writing about them.
Makes one cynically wonder, what do reports, books and investigations finally boil down to? I would love to be shaken out of this cynicism: do tell me of the last book, report or press coverage that helped significantly alter the lives of such vulnerable populations in India.
