India’s growth versus environment
By A K B Krishnan
CLIMATE change no longer seems an abstract and remote concept. The writing has been on the wall for decades. But every world player with vested interests either tried to turn a blind eye or pass the buck. But in the last few years, its manifestations have been many and varied, and are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore any more. The unstable ice shelves, the accelerated pace of ice melt in the Arctic and the Himalayas, unseasonal rains, debilitating drought, excessive floods, food shortage, devastating cyclones and storms, all these are warning signals that the environment in distress is sending out to humankind.
Destructive changes in temperature, rainfall and agriculture were now forecast to occur several decades earlier than thought. “We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it’s us,” Prof Parry, co-chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), said. 
R K Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, said: “Wheat production in India is already in decline, for no other reason than climate change. Everyone thought we didn’t have to worry about Indian agriculture for several decades. Now we know it’s being affected now.”
Scientists warn that we have a decade to start pulling back before ‘tipping points’ are reached. No less a figure than Nasa’s top climate scientist James Hansen — the man who first made headlines with global warming in 1978 — said, “We are on the precipice of climate system tipping points beyond which there is no redemption.”
No region of the world or community can escape the consequences of the impending peril, but some are certainly more vulnerable. Climate-driven shrinkage of river-based irrigation water supplies has been on the environmental community’s radar for some time, but the alarm put out by Lester Brown, president of the Earth Policy Institute, while invoking a “civilization-threatening scenario,” is the starkest yet. “The world has never faced such a predictably massive threat to food production as that posed by the melting mountain glaciers of Asia,” he said.
“In a world where grain prices have recently climbed to record highs, with no relief in sight, any disruption of the wheat or rice harvests due to water shortages in the two leading grain producers of India and China will greatly affect not only people living there but consumers everywhere.” Moreover, Brown predicted, in both of these countries, food prices will likely rise and grain consumption per person can be expected to fall. In India, where just over 40% of all children under five years of age are underweight and undernourished, “hunger will intensify and child mortality will likely climb.”
According to Brown, India’s Gangetic plain faced the prospect of losing the double cropping that allowed it to harvest wheat in winter and rice in summer. Water tables were also dropping rapidly in both India and China and were dangerously low in many places. “Both countries have lost momentum in the effort to raise grain production. In both countries stocks are down to minimal levels and both are wrestling with serious food price inflation,” he said in remarks that come amid convulsions already seen in the world grain market.
Mountain glaciers in the Himalayas and on the Tibet-Qinghai Plateau are melting and could soon deprive the major rivers of India and China of the ice melt needed to sustain them during the dry season. In the Ganges, the Yellow River and the Yangtze River basins, where irrigated agriculture depends heavily on rivers, this loss of dry-season flow will shrink harvests. According to the IPCC report, the Himalayan glaciers are receding rapidly and many could melt entirely by 2035. If the giant Gangotri Glacier that supplies 70% of the Ganges flow during the dry season disappears, it warned, the Ganges could become a seasonal river, flowing during the rainy season but not during the summer dry season when irrigation water needs are greater. The Ganga is the largest source of surface water irrigation in India and the leading source of water for the 407mn people living in the Gangetic Basin, a population larger than any other single country other than China. The Yellow River and Yangtze basin hold a similar position in China.
India and China have consistently pointed out that the current environmental problems are the result of the gases emitted by the industrialised nations over the past century. Most of those gases are still in the atmosphere, and without them the problem would not have been as urgent as it now is. American resident is responsible for about six times more greenhouse gas emissions than the Chinese, and as much as 18 times more than the average Indian. So applying the principle of ‘You broke it, you fix it’, the developed nations have to take responsibility for the ‘broken’ atmosphere. The richer nations are better able than less well-off nations to absorb the costs of fixing the problem without causing serious harm to their populations. The developing nations, meanwhile, should have the right to proceed with industrialisation and development, unhampered by limits on their greenhouse gas emissions. The debate goes on.
Certainly, developed countries have a deeper obligation to undo the damage. Billions of people who live in the developing countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America are faced with the hapless dilemma of environment versus development. But it is facile and perhaps irresponsible to argue that developing countries should be allowed to pollute until they reach a certain level of development. It is also difficult to morally sustain the case for total exemption. Instead, ways and means are to be found to ensure that developing countries move to a clean growth paradigm. It’s not an either/or choice between clean air and economic growth. Policy needs to factor in both issues.
Carbon emissions that are causing climate change and threatening the survival of Planet Earth have no distinct and different nationalities. We now live in a world that will have to sink or swim together. Globalisation and its attendant reliance on mobility have created an interdependent world. In many forms the 19th century concept of nation states has become obsolete. We would need universal consensus to turn the tide. There has to be more thought on what would constitute universal criteria for emissions reduction, which would be fair, equitable and acceptable to all nations.
In India, several steps are critical. Merely enacting legislation on energy conservation with a weak enforcement mechanism is grossly inadequate. The way forward is to improve systems of lighting, the architecture of buildings, and make the use of energy-saving devices obligatory. But who is in charge? The Prime Minister’s Council on Climate Change is an advisory body, but enforcement issues relate to state governments, corporates, and other entities. Redefining accountability in a meaningful way is inescapable. 
The IPCC report rings an alarm, as does the World Energy Outlook 2007. And the inconvenient truth of climate change is that even if everyone were to stop emitting greenhouse gases tomorrow, the world would still be ‘locked into’ at least 30 to 50 years of warming! We owe it to ourselves, and to our future generations, to act with appropriateness and responsibility.