The worst fears of India being hit by the effects of climate change have been confirmed by 14 sets of research studies released here on Wednesday.
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Environment and Forest Minister Jairam Ramesh, while releasing the studies, said food production — now 230 million tonne — might fall 20-40 per cent by the end of this century.
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Besides, the severity of storms will increase, glacier melting will be faster and flash monsoon rains will become a routine affair.
Agriculture research body, Indian Council for Agriculture Research (ICAR), found that a temperature increase of one degree Celsius would mean 3 to 7 per cent fall in wheat, soybean, mustard, groundnut and potato crops.
“The loss will be much higher, if the temperature rise is more than one degree,” said P.K. Aggarwal, who heads the environmental sciences division of ICAR.
Aggarwal asked the government to start teaching farmers how to adapt to the changing climate as soon as possible by switching to crop varieties that could withstand heat.
He said, “A crop variety takes 10 to 20 years to develop. We need to act now.”
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Ramesh said the government formed a national network of 127 educational institutions to conduct research on climate changes and to provide solutions to farmers. “We are already late. It is now time to act,” he said.
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Ramesh said the government formed a national network of 127 educational institutions to conduct research on climate changes and to provide solutions to farmers. “We are already late. It is now time to act,” he said.
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A study forecast that wheat production would fall from 75 million tonne in 2000 to 72 million tonne in 2020 and further to 54 million tonne by 2080. But if the new crop varieties are used, the production figure may increase to 76 million tonne by 2020.
Data on the Himachal Pradesh apple crop showed that production per tree had fallen from 7 tonne in 1980 to about 2 tonne in 2001 due to warmer winters.
Also, rising temperature led to a fall in the quality of Basmati rice.
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But climate change could improve the chickpea, maize, sorghum and millet crops in the West Coast and the potato and mustard crops in northwest India due to reduced frost damage.
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.
