India should gear up for climate change impact

New Delhi, Feb 4: India should gear up to face the challenges of rising sea level, melting glaciers, vanishing mangroves and more severe droughts and floods.

This is a message for the country in the fourth report of the UN panel on climate change released on Friday.

All this will be caused by a rise in global temperature between 1.8 and 4.0 degrees Celsius due to increasing human-induced concentration of greenhouse gases into the atmposphere.

Temperatures rose about 0.7 degrees Celsius in the 20th century.

A more warmer globe will spell greater disaster for poor countries like India who have to house and feed a huge population dependent on agriculture which itself was dependent on vagaries of weather and climate.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) headed by Dr R K Pachauri, Director General of the country's Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI), said if preventive measures were not taken soon, India will be among the major contributors of carbon dioxide, one of the green house gases, into the atmosphere.

The IPCC Report, prepared by around 500 experts from various parts of the world, was released in Paris.

Dr Pachauri, before leaving for Paris, had told UNI that India may not escape from the mandate to cut down carbon emissions when the next stage of Kyoto Protocol comes into force in 2012.

Besides cutting down carbon emissions, he said the country should formulate strategy for adaptation to climate change, which had become inevitable because of the certain rise in global temperature.

Adviser to the Ministry of Environment Subodh Sharma told UNI that regions of 'Sundarbans' were likely to be affected first.

''The mangroves of Sunderbans are very specialised ecosystems which are very sensitive to change in the temperature. The climatic changes due to global warming may result in the massive loss of vegetation, which has so far acted as a shield against disasters,'' he said.

More than the geographical features, the climatic changes would affect the socio-economic life of the country.

''That is simply because the per capita income and the standard of living was already poor and any adverse impact on agriculture due to climatics changes.

Along India, its neighbours like Bangladesh will be one of the most seriously affected nations by the global warming and rise of the sea level.

The country would face more droughts, floods and storms, especially in the coastal belts.

This time IPCC's warning about global warming is tougher in proportion to the definitiveness of its conclusion.

This time the report has said it was ''very likely'' that human activities of the past 50 years were the main cause for global warming, while in the previous report released in 2001, it had said it was ''likely''that global warming was caused by such activities.

The report said global atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide has increased markedly as a result of human activities since 1750.

The global increases in carbon dioxide concentration are due to primarily fossil fuel use and land-use change, while those of methane and nitrous oxide are primarily due to agriculture.

Carbon dioxide is the most important anthropogenic greenhouse gas.

The global atmospheric concentration of this gas has increased from a pre-industrial value of about 280 ppm to 379 ppm3 in 2005.

The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide in 2005 exceeds the natural range of the last 650,000 years (180 to 300 ppm) as determined from ice cores.

The annual carbon dioxide concentration growth-rate was larger during the last 10 years (1995-2005 average: 1.9 ppm per year), than it has been since the beginning of continuous direct atmospheric measurements (1960-2005 average: 1.4 ppm per year), although there is year-to-year variability in growth rates, the report said.

UNI

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