Workshop on disaster risk reduction and climate change held in Guwahati, India

Nayan J. Bhuyan in the Assam Times (India): The National Union of Journalists (NUJ), Assam Chapter and Gramya Vikash Mancha (GVM) on Sunday organized a state-level media workshop on “Disaster risk reduction and climate change” at Hotel Brahmaputra Ashok in Guwahati. The workshop which was supported by Actionaid, was organized with an objective to sensitize the media persons over the issues of climate change and disaster.

…While Dr. Arabinda Mishra, director of Earth Science and Climate Change Division, The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) & dean of Faculty of Policy & Planning, TERI University attended the workshop as the main resource person, Dr. Dulal Chandra Goswami, former head of the Department of Environmental Science of the Gauhati University also presented a paper in the workshop titled—“Changing climate and we—A northeast perspective”.

Dr. Mishra while delivering the key note address highlighted the affect of climate change in the northeast region and said that the governments or the policy makers of the northeastern states must come up with state specific adaptation action plan to deal with the future situations that might arise out of climate change.

“There is a huge knowledge gap at local levels to understand the impacts of climate change. At TERI we have some regional climate models based on which we are trying to come up with future projections about the whole country. The projections indicate that the northeast region will have 3 to 4 degree temperature increase and that the region will have more rainfall in another 50 to 70 years. During the rainy season—June, July and August, there is a likelihood of at least 25 cm more rainfall in the region,” Mishra said while adding that these weather variations might have severe impact on various fields—agriculture, health and others…”

An Assam landscape, shot by Peter Andersen, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License