By Naveen P Singh, Bhawna Anand & Ranjith Computer
The year 2020 will be remembered for the grave challenges it posed to the humanity and the developmental landscape owing to Covid-19. Many of us perceive this pandemic as unexpected and outdoors our conscious radar, but it is really particular to anticipate when nature’s personal balance repeatedly gets disrupted. Be it flash floods, harsh drought and extreme heat/cold wave, their severity is straight or indirectly linked to ubiquitous harm to the Mother Nature. More so, the current 2021 huge flood and destruction brought on either by glacial burst or avalanche in Uttarakhand, to an extent, points to prolonged climate transform effects that can not be overlooked.
In this milieu, it was significantly less probable for us to precisely predict any all-natural calamity or human-induced disaster, and hence forming silvery uncertainty more than action plans to mitigate in close to and quick term. On a broader outlook, a viable tool to retain difficult-earned prosperity and developmental gains is by developing resilience and adaptive capacity across diverse spectrum.
Responses to threat
India’s regional heterogeneity and dependence on climate-sensitive sectors like agriculture, forestry and fisheries tends to make it more susceptible to climatic dangers. The Climate Risk Index (2020) tagged India as the fifth-most vulnerable nation in the planet. The current Ministry of Earth Sciences report showed that India’s typical temperature had risen by .7 degrees Celsius from 1901-2018, and warns elevated incidence of tropical cyclones, heat waves, floods and droughts in the nation. Estimates also recommend that there have been more than 5 million internal displacements in 2019 owning to climate-associated disasters.
The Economic Survey 2020-21 clearly states that adaptation efforts ought to be intensified and investment ought to be geared towards developing resilience. Also, at the current virtual Climate Ambition Summit, worldwide leaders encouraged to accelerate adaptation and resilience by allocating as substantially as 50% of sources from the pool of climate finance help. India has lengthy raised adaptation require at climate transform negotiations. Currently, at the national level, NAPCC and SAPCCs, National Adaptation Fund and ratification of the Paris Agreement have been all focused actions to operationalise and implement adaptation projects. However, inadequate monetary sources, institutional coordination and climate understanding deficits—as highlighted by various research and deliberated on a variety of platforms—continue to beset the progress to make resilience and threat reduction. As India prepares itself for the NDC targets, choice-creating each at the Centre and states ought to be conscious of adaptation organizing and finance across climate-sensitive sectors to guard lives and livelihoods of millions.
Policy pointers
For a nation with sizable socioeconomic difficulties, it is quintessential to strategise nicely to combat climate vulnerability and related dangers.
The 1st priority ought to be to make resilience, which is inextricably linked to the developmental progress and creates a fertile ground for mastering, adaptations and transformations. Its good results lies in ramping up adaptation actions and lowering regional imbalances by offering impetus to technological innovations and upgrade, livelihood diversification, human improvement, social protection systems and resilient infrastructure.
Second, the creation of powerful and dependable information platforms and data services method (hydro-met, agro-met advisory and emergency management systems) to adequately handle the threat. It is extremely desirable if village-level agro-met units are established to work each as advisory, advertising adaptation and instil resilience-developing activity at the neighborhood level. This would entail a new dawn in fostering in-depth vulnerability, threat and resilience assessments to improved leverage robust climate modelling and predictive assessment apart from appropriate S&T innovations.
Third, it is needed to upscale neighborhood-driven, bottom-up approaches for successful micro-and-macro level convergence, true-time monitoring and barriers redressal, and ensuing proof-based responses. Mainstreaming climate transform adaptation efforts into policy style, operations, developmental plans and budgetary allocation would make significant-scale resilience beginning from unit level (villages).
Fourth, the elusive nature of climate transform effects calls for alignment, prioritisation and convergence of actions across governance, sectoral agencies, departments and ministries. This aids gauge possible impacts and collate action plans to bring synergistic outcome rather than a scattered output that hinders scaling up.
Cultural fortification
Fifth, taking climate resilience to cultural platform is imminent in bringing men and women and prosperity on the similar web page. While most South Asian nations have significantly less marked distinction in cultures, their efforts by way of formal organisations (SAARC, BIMSTEC and ASEAN) ought to take concrete actions on climate-associated safety dangers.
Sixth, climate policy and governance ought to encourage non-state actors and other organisations, prioritising classic practices, rising climate consciousness, hence generating adaptive pathway. Rich cultural practices, understanding, ethos and values need to be aspect of policies such as NAPCC missions, National Disaster Management Plan and other people. ICAR’s NICRA has tailored and amalgamated such practices in enhancing resilience of Indian agriculture to climate transform by way of its strategic study and technologies demonstration across a variety of agro-eco regions.
Over the final various years it has been held that climatic dangers can not be eliminated absolutely and therefore generating sufficient capacity to their management is crucial for any nation. Most efforts are getting created towards mitigation activities and emissions reduction nonetheless, a substantial increase is essential to upscale adaptation. Thus, the starting of this decade ought to start out by embracing climate adaptation and resilience-developing that would work as a popular thread to balance the climate transform. Nonetheless, attaining a state of ‘coherence’, characterised by lowered strain and elevated resilience, is the essential to improved tomorrow.
Singh is a former PI of NICRA project at ICAR-NIAP and presently member (Official), CACP, Delhi Anand is with ICAR-NIAP, Delhi, and Ranjith is with ICAR-IARI, Delhi. Views are private