India News | IPCC Report: Experts Call for Serious Adaptation Policies for India to Tackle Climate Crisis

New Delhi, Feb 28 (PTI) Serious adaptation policies are required for India to tackle the huge climate crisis, experts said on Monday reiterating that gaps in governance capacity and climate financing need to be addressed in order to strengthen climate resilience.

The reactions came after the release of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) latest report 'Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability', which has warned of catastrophic consequences across the globe, particularly vulnerable regions like South Asia, if emissions are not cut.

Also Read | Punjab Shocker: Drunk Man Attempts To Rape 7-Year-Old Girl in Ludhiana; Booked.

Scientist and one of the authors of the report, Anjal Prakash, said urban India is at much greater risk with its increasing share in the country.

"In the next 15 years, we will see 600 million people being added to urban spaces as it is expected that 40% of India would be urban. The urbanisation process helps in achieving economic growth for the country but cities will be at a much greater risk of climate change.

Also Read | Russia-Ukraine ‘War’: India Opens New Route Through Moldova to Evacuate Its Citizens From Ukraine, Says MEA.

"Most of the coastal cities would see sea-level rise, warming of oceans is leading to catastrophic events such as cyclones, heat waves, sea-water intrusion in groundwater bodies, etc. and this would worsen, as per the IPCC predictions. Most of the coastal cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata, Visakhapatnam, Puri, Goa are all at greater risk of rapidly changing climatic conditions,” he said.

Stressing the need for cities to be resilient to cater to some of these challenges, Prakash said Surat, Indore and Bhubaneshwar have come up with good examples of local-level adaptation and planning at the city level which is actually feeding into the largest resilience programme.

"We can also look at the architecture of our own ancient buildings which had the passive cooling infrastructure and had climate resilience technology into them. This could be married together with the modern-day requirements making our cities heat resistant," he said.

Highlighting that Himalayan hazards will increase, he said that it is expected that by 2050, “we would reach 1.5 degrees Celsius. Even the slightest change in climate will have a long-lasting impact on the Himalayan region due to its fragile ecology.”

Aarti Khosla, Director, Climate Trends, said that the report shows locked-in impacts of climate change like sea level rise, which will affect South Asia disproportionately.

"With over 7,500 km of coastline, the effects of poor adaptation to such a changing climate and coastline can only be imagined.

"It will expose a wide range of sectors from agriculture, to construction, finance and energy, but also expose people to varying degrees of vulnerabilities. Many states, nearly half of the million-plus cities, and many municipalities are making climate action plans. While India's international climate targets are set, unless multi-level climate governance is not established at local, regional, and state levels, the results for India's ambitious climate targets could get delayed,” Khosla said.

Arunabha Ghosh, CEO, Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), said the report was worrying and called for scaling up of adaptive capacity of India to combat the climate crisis.

"The latest IPCC report, in particular, worries me on three counts. We now have high confidence that the accelerating climate crisis is increasing water-related diseases. Second, we have high confidence that climate change will severely impact food production and food security. Third, droughts and heatwaves will trigger biodiversity loss, as well as human migration.

"To combat this surge of crises, developing countries like India will need to significantly scale up their adaptive capacity,” Ghosh said.

In a similar response, Abinash Mohanty, Programme Lead, Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), said that the IPCC's latest report reiterates that current adaptation-related responses are insufficient to cope with the rate of climate change.

"CEEW research has found that more than 80 per cent of Indians live in districts vulnerable to climate risk. India must prioritise the climate proofing of livelihoods and its infrastructure by scaling up investments in nature-based solutions and integrating climate risk assessments into planning at the village, district, city, and state levels.

“Further, it needs to aggressively address the gaps in governance capacity and climate financing to strengthen climate resilience,” he said.

According to Manu Gupta, Co-Founder, SEEDS (Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society), the report calls for a collaborative action at a macro level in mitigating future risks.

“The IPCC report has made the socio-economic impacts of the climate crisis abundantly clear. While it calls for collaborative action at a macro-level in mitigating future risks, there's an increasing need for working with affected communities to help them adapt to the harsh realities of the present.

“We'll need to leverage tools to prepare them better, promote local innovations to restore their agency, and create an enabling environment for them to thrive despite the worsening impacts,” he said.

(The above story is verified and authored by Press Trust of India (PTI) staff. PTI, India’s premier news agency, employs more than 400 journalists and 500 stringers to cover almost every district and small town in India.. The views appearing in the above post do not reflect the opinions of LatestLY)