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| Jeffrey Sachs, Director, The Earth Institute and Quetelet Professor of Sustainable Development. |
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“No matter what we do,
the climate has already
changed, and will continue
to change simply by what’s
called ‘Thermal Inertia.” |
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be increased river flow for 20 or 30 years, as glaciers melt sometime in the next half century.
Many factors are going to exasperate the water stress in the country. Ground water depletion, river run off, abstraction, upstream degradation of lands (implying more flooding), changing snow melt patterns, disappearing glacier melt, etc. And, most governments around the world, including India’s, are not yet well-equipped to face such problems. They cut across many departments, involve land management, water management, ecological management, agriculture development, and so on. There is no ministry – including the water ministry – that brings the pieces together adequately.
Climate change is an even more complex problem, and is pervasive in its effects. It can have negative ramifications for agricultural productivity. If we continue to use current technologies in the way that we are presently, and if the climate worsens by another one degree centigrade (which is almost bound to do), then India’s crop productivity is going to suffer tremendously. First, the local increase of temperature would be much more than one percent (that’s a global average), and the consequences of an already heat-stressed environment |
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could be very severe because, there are sharp non-linear responses to crop productivity that come with rising temperatures.
The climate is moving several kilometres north every year, but species can’t move at the same rate. If you happen to be a species that lives on the mountain, there is no place to go once you have reached the top. Thus, ecosystems go haywire because the species ranges are completely deranged by climate change.
The basic mechanics of the problem are quite clear. There is a challenge to mitigate the greenhouse gases that are causing climate change, mainly carbon dioxide, and also methane, nitrous oxide, and some fluorocarbons. No matter what we do, the climate has already changed, and will continue to change simply by what’s called ‘Thermal Inertia,’ which implies that the world is continuing to warm, given the amount of greenhouse gases emitted into the air. There is another half degree warming, or maybe, even 0.8 to 1 centigrade degree warming happening at present, even if we did not add even one molecule of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere over the next 50 years. This is because the oceans are still catching up with the warming implicit in |
