UN panel warns India of severe food, water shortage

The alarmist report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released on Monday and focuses on the global impact climate change would have on agriculture, water supply and society.

Updated on: Apr 1, 2014, 09:12:56 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The UN panel on climate change warned on Monday that famine, water shortage and increased regional tension could plague south Asia, especially India, if corrective steps weren’t taken soon to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The alarmist report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was released on Monday, at Yokohama in Japan, and focuses on the global impact climate change would have on agriculture, water supply and society.

“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri said at the report’s release.

The report comes a few months before negotiators from about 190 countries are set to resume stalled talks on a global deal to cut greenhouse emissions, in Germany.

Warning that rising temperatures could induce a major drop in production of wheat crop, a staple in India and China, the report said food security may be a big problem in the region post 2030. Shrinking Himalayan glaciers are also a worry and could lead to water shortage in the area, said the report.

“The key issue as far as India is concerned is vulnerability and exposure,” Aromar Revi, one of the lead authors of the report said.

But Indian scientists aren’t so pessimistic. They said the country might at most lose 5.8% of wheat production post 2030 in the warmer regions and that the depletion of Himalayan glaciers was not abnormally high.

Rising mercury may also shift the food bowls of the world north. In India, Ladakh may become an agriculture state.

Pushing world leaders to take action, the report said that if immediate steps weren’t taken to curb emissions, world temperatures would rise by 4°C by turn of the century and result in erratic climate patterns and food disasters. Poorer nations might see their GDP drop by 2% and competition over water may even cause war.

(With agency inputs)

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
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.Read More

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