Mumbai, Kolkata most vulnerable to climate change

The Financial Express (India): India’s populous coastal cities Mumbai and Kolkata are most vulnerable to loss of life and properties due to coastal flooding in the second half of the century, the government has said quoting a UN report ahead of a key global climate conference in Peruvian capital Lima.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has warned against extreme weather events like occurrence of heatwave, heavy precipitation, droughts, floods, cyclones and wildfire that cause damage to ecosystems and human systems in various regions, Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar said.

“… India is among the top 20 countries and regions most at risk based on analysis of climate risk and coping ability. Mumbai and Kolkata will have the greatest population and assets exposure to coastal flooding in 2070,” he said.

The minister’s statement assumes significance at a time when representatives of governments are scheduled to meet in Lima from tomorrow for the Climate Change Conference to lay the foundation for an effective, new and universal climate change agreement in Paris in 2015.

Mumbai' sea-face at night

Hotter summers are coming to Mumbai, and it won't be pretty

Shruti Navindran in the Guardian (UK): By some projections, India’s financial capital, Mumbai, will experience “unprecedented heat” within the next two decades. Last June, the IPCC Fifth Assessment report warned of larger “near-term increases in seasonal mean and annual mean temperatures” in the region. That spells longer, more frequent bouts of extreme heat, elevated minimum temperatures, and warmer winters. Last month, meanwhile, the journal Nature published a meta-analysis using 39 climate models to predict “dates of departures” when local temperatures would exceed historical extremes recorded over the previous 150 years. They figured Mumbai’s date with the inferno could come as early as 2034 if there was no change in global carbon output.

Though all of us are all sensitive to heat, and quick to react when it climbs above our comfort levels, our knowledge of how it might affect our health doesn’t really go beyond sunstrokes and fainting spells. A 2008 paper by medical geographer Rais Akhtar and environmental epidemiologist Sari Kovats spells out the dubious gifts that climate-change exacerbated heat is likely to bring Asian cities. This includes an uptick in deaths from cardio-respiratory disease, heat-related illness and death, increased rates of potential transmission of vector-borne diseases like dengue and malaria, and a shrinking in the quantity and quality of available water, further amplifying the burden of disease. Researchers have also found that climate change-enhanced heat and humidity are conducive to the spread of falciparum malaria, the disease’s deadliest strain.

No one is likely to suffer the ill effects of this heat more than the 7.25 million slum-dwellers who’ve made Mumbai their home, and who comprise well over half the city’s population. “Slum-dwellers face a double burden: they face the crisis, and if they talk about it, they face evictions,” said Sheela Patel, a social worker who has helped the city’s shack and slum dwellers access suitable housing and infrastructure for two decades. Akhtar notes that slums, due to density, lack of vegetation and materials used in construction, tend to be heat traps “exacerbated by the proximity of city structures, vehicle exhaust emissions, and industrial activity”....

A slum in Mumbai, shot by Sthitaprajna Jena, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr,  under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license 

Mumbai, Miami on list for big weather disasters

Seth Borenstein in the Northwest Herald via the AssociatedPress: Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists said in a new report issued Wednesday.

The greatest threat from extreme weather is to highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe – from Mumbai to Miami – is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts.

The 594-page report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty. In the past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations, has focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming. This report by the panel is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which lately have been costing on average about $80 billion a year in damage.

“We mostly experience weather and climate through the extreme,” said one of the report’s top editors, Chris Field, an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. “That’s where we have the losses. That’s where we have the insurance payments. That’s where things have the potential to fall apart.

“There are lots of places that are already marginal for one reason or another,” Field said. But it’s not just poor areas: “There is disaster risk almost everywhere.”

An aerial shot of downtown Miami, shot by Towpilot, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license