Patralekha Chatterjee | Climate crisis to be India’s biggest threat this century
Deccan ChronicleIn the age of climate change, seemingly disparate phenomena are actually deeply connected. Not every extreme weather event can be definitively linked to climate change, but scientists say climate change is leading to more frequent and more erratic and extreme weather — rising number of heatwaves, cyclones, droughts, unseasonal and heavy rainfall, lightning strikes, landslides, rise in sea level and more that is happening in the country and around the world. The 2020 CEEW study, the first-of-its-kind district-level profiling of India’s extreme weather events, notes that the frequency of landslides, heavy rainfall, hailstorms, thunderstorms and cloudbursts, associated with floods, has surged by over 20 times between 1970 and 2019. That climate change-fuelled “extreme weather events” is becoming a pressing economic concern can be gauged by what the Reserve Bank of India has to say. Given the deep connections between extreme weather events and the economy, it is vital that policymakers do not think in silos and that all development plans factor in climate change and its impacts.