RK Pachauri, chairperson of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on Tuesday predicted steep fall in the production of wheat and cereals in India, thanks to the increasing global weather, reports Chetan Chauhan.
If the rising prices of cereals and wheat was not enough, RK Pachauri, chairperson of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, on Tuesday predicted steep fall in the production of wheat and cereals in India, thanks to the increasing global weather.
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In case of winter temperature rise by just 0.5 degrees Celsius, the per hectare wheat production will fall by 0.45 tonnes. In India, the average per hectare production is 2.6 tonnes. Similarly, the production of cereals and many other agricultural crops will see a substantial fall, he said.
What's worse, he said, was that the total agricultural land will reduce and land may not remain suitable to grow the present crops in the future. "Farmers will have to look at the scenario for changing the crop suitable to weather," he said, while pointing that climate change can lead to major food security issues for country like India. "The loss of livelihood in rural India can lead to more slums in the cities," he said.
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The UN second working report released last Friday also predicts huge coastal erosion by rising sea levels (about 40 cm) resulting from faster melting of glaciers in Himalaya Hindu-Kush ranges. "It can adversely affect half a million people in India because of excessive flooding in coastal areas and it can increase salinity of groundwater in Sunderbans and surface water in coastal areas," Pachauri said.
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The UN second working report released last Friday also predicts huge coastal erosion by rising sea levels (about 40 cm) resulting from faster melting of glaciers in Himalaya Hindu-Kush ranges. "It can adversely affect half a million people in India because of excessive flooding in coastal areas and it can increase salinity of groundwater in Sunderbans and surface water in coastal areas," Pachauri said.
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India's per capita water availability is expected to fall from 1820 million cubic metre per year in 2001 to 1140 in 2050. "The projected decrease in winter precipitation over the Indian sub-continent would reduce the total seasonal precipitation during December, January and February implying lesser storage and greater water stress," he said, while predicting more erratic monsoon.
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Terming the government's response to be inadequate he sought more India oriented research on climate change impacts and a policy on its mitigation. The government, on its part, has formed a Task Force to study the impact of climate change in India and recommend necessary policy changes.
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.
