Climate concerns

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Tackling climate change is one of the most pressing issues facing South Asia. Regional leaders are meeting in Bhutan this week, but are they any nearer agreeing to an action plan? The BBC’s Navin Singh Khadka reports.

The issue of climate change is the main item on the agenda of the summit of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (Saarc) summit under way in the Bhutanese capital Thimpu.

But given the poor track record of co-operation achieved by the regional grouping over other sensitive issues in the past, will the thorny issue of climate change become bogged down in rhetoric and recriminations?

Experts say the vulnerability of the region to climate change means that there is an urgent need for concrete action.

Words not action

"South Asian countries have started to face the effects of climate change and are particularly at risk," says the United Nations Environment Programme’s (Unep) 2009 outlook.

The poor are worst affected by the effects of climate change

"Intense floods, droughts and cyclones have impacted on the economic performances of South Asian countries and the lives of millions of poor, it also puts at risk infrastructure, agriculture, human health, water resources and the environment," it says.

This is not the first time that Saarc summit has discussed the issue.

The declaration of the 14th summit in Delhi in 2007, for instance, said leaders had agreed "to commission a team of regional experts to identify collective actions in sharing of knowledge on the consequences of climate change".

A year later, the 15th Saarc summit adopted the Dhaka Declaration on climate change.

But, experts say, hardly any of these words have been matched by actions.

In its climate change national action plan launched two years ago, India – the main regional player – stressed the need for co-operation.

"We will need to exchange information with South Asian countries and countries sharing the Himalayan ecology," the plan read.

"Co-operation with neighbouring countries will be sought to make a comprehensive network for observation and monitoring of the Himalayan environment, to assess fresh water resources and the health of the ecosystem."

There have been no serious follow-up since this bold pronouncement was made.

Drought

With regional co-operation confined to academic papers, key issues like regional flood forecasting are just not happening.

"Some countries in the region are not willing to share water-related data because they regard it as confidential," says Mats Eriksson, a senior hydrologist with the Kathmandu-based International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development which has spent years trying to bring together South Asian countries for flood forecasting at a regional level.

Climate models project more erratic rainfall patterns in the future

But as millions of people in South Asia suffer from floods every monsoon, there is a worrying and growing uncertainty over the uneven distribution of monsoon rainfall in the region.

In recent years, some places have experienced heavy rainfall while others have seen far smaller amounts – and have even been hit by drought.

"Climate change could influence monsoon dynamics and cause lower summer precipitation, a delay to the start of the monsoon season and longer breaks between the rainy periods," a study by Purdue University in the US found recently.

While everyone now seems to be well informed as to the extent of the problem, questions remain over Saarc’s response to it. But not everyone is pessimistic.

"This is the first time you have a Saarc summit where the leaders of countries in the region are getting together on a very specific subject and I am optimistic," said the chairman of the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, who also heads the Energy Research Institute in Delhi.

Ainun Nishat, climate chief for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Bangladesh, is also positive.

"I believe frequent contact between the leaders is essentially the first step that will lead to some concrete action because they always want to show progress."

But recent international climate negotiations, such as last year’s Copenhagen summit, have shown that the countries in the region have different interests.

India’s fast-growing economy, for instance, wants a global climate treaty that requires rich nations – and not rapidly developing countries – to cut carbon emissions.

It also wants global temperature rises to be limited to 2C from pre-industrial levels.

Bitter disputes

Whereas least developed countries in the region that are most vulnerable to climate change are lobbying for an international treaty irrespective of who has to reduce carbon emissions.

Petty squabbles earlier hindered the climate change battle.

They want global warming to be limited to 1.5C from pre-industrial levels.

"I therefore do not expect Saarc countries to take common action in terms of dealing with climate change," says noted Indian environment activist Sunita Narain.

"I expect governments of the region to use Saarc as a meeting point in which they can put forward their respective actions against climate change."

But is that possible when major region players like India and Pakistan, for example, are engaged in bitter disputes?

One of the latest disputes between the South Asian nuclear rivals is that of sharing of water resources which, experts fear, will get worse as the climate change problem itself remains unaddressed.

About Science-Nature – Climate concerns

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It is almost halfway through the rainy season, and the monsoon in many parts of South Asia continues to remain unreliable.

In some places it has been crippling weak, while in others it has been devastatingly intense.

There are places reeling from drought, yet at the same time there are areas that have been hit by torrential rains, triggering floods and landslides in a very short span of time.

This has made the lives of millions of people difficult and has left them increasingly worried for the future.

Very little of the arable land is irrigated, and local populations depend on monsoon rainfall for agriculture.

Crops in the region are dependent upon the annual monsoon rains

The monsoon clouds have weakened in several parts of the region and the variable and erratic rains have left weather forecasters scratching their heads.

This failure of the monsoons to behave as expected has led to the question of whether climate change is to blame.

Experts differ on whether these changes are directly linked to climate.

"This year’s monsoon behaviour cannot yet be attributed to climate change as it is still within the observed natural variability of monsoon," said Krishna Kumar Kanikicharla, a scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology.

"Our assessment of climate model simulations for the current and the next century indicate no significant deviation until the middle of the 21st Century and thereafter the monsoon rainfall will continue to increase by 8-10% from current levels."

A regional research centre in Bangladesh found what it calls "cyclic changes", but has identified no effects impacts so far that can be attributed to climate change.

A gloomy forecast

The South Asian monsoon normally begins in June and lasts around four months. The Indian Meteorological Department in April had forecast an optimistic 96% of long term average rainfall.

Without the rains, young crops soon perish and die

But in last week of June, by when monsoon clouds should normally have moved northward from the Indian ocean, they were hardly moving.

With farmers in Northern India postponing their crop plantations and authorities cutting down supply of stored water for irrigation, the government had to scale down rainfall forecast to 93% of long term average rainfall.

In neighbouring Bangladesh, the situation was even worse as it saw 80% less rainfall than what was normally expected.

An unusually long dry spell fanned several wildfires earlier this year. Nepal too saw delays in the arrival of its precious monsoon clouds.

When they reached northern areas of the region by the third week of July, many places began to see heavy precipitation.

Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, saw more than 33cm of rainfall in about 24 hours – the highest record in many years.

Floods have wreaked havoc in many parts of north-east India, and nearly three dozen people have died in Nepal as a result of monsoon-triggered landslides.

At least another dozen are missing from remote Nepalese mountain areas.

Yet many areas in this region still remain parched.

Until the middle of this week, northern and south-western parts of Bangladesh have had about 40% less than normal rainfall.

Some parts in northern India have been declared drought hit by local governments.

Almost the same is the case in eastern Nepal where rainfall is around 50% less than normal.

Met officials in Pakistan say most parts of the country have remained more or less dry with average rainfall limited to only 50% of normal precipitation.

"Even where it has rained, the rainfall is around 30% less than normal," said Qamar Zaman Chaudhary, director general of Pakistan’s Met office.

"Figures [from recent years] show that monsoon rainfall is gradually decreasing – year after year."

Patchy cloud

Over the past five years, even though total rainfall has remained more or less normal in these countries, the distribution has been quite uneven.

Without the monsoon rains, farmers struggle to keep their crops alive

Some places have received heavy rainfalls while others have seen far less rain and have been hit by drought.

And dangerously unpredictable rainfall such as that which claimed hundreds of lives in Mumbai in 2005 is on the rise.

In yet another unusual development, places that received less rainfall have begun to get more rain while what used be wetter are now becoming drier areas.

Some researchers suggest that this is a natural "shift" in the pattern of rainfall.

"We studied three 30-year window periods from 1951 to 2000 and found that there is slow shifting of rainfall scenarios," said Sujit Kumar Deb Sarma, a researcher with the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) Meteorological Research Centre in Bangladesh.

"Places that got more rain are receiving less rainfall and vice versa.

"But we also found that after some time the rainfall patterns go back to what they were before and slowly start changing again. It’s a cyclic change that has been happening [for] years."

But authorities in Pakistan believe the decreasing monsoon rainfall may have been the result of climate change.

"There may have been some impacts of climate change," said Chaudhry of Pakistan Met Office.

"We know that the El-Nino events have been affecting our rainfall all these years, but climate change could be aggravating the situation even more."

Meteorologists in Nepal too think global warming may have some role in the changing monsoon pattern the country has been experiencing.

"There are so many factors including the El Nino effect that have been affecting the monsoon but we cannot say that these changes are not because of global warming," said Mani Ratna Shakya, head of the weather forecasting division.

International studies have also pointed at relation between monsoon and climate.

A study by researchers at Purdue University, US, found that South Asian monsoon could be weakened and delayed as a result of rising temperatures in the future.

"Climate change could influence monsoon dynamics and cause less summer precipitation, a delay in the start of monsoon season and longer breaks between the rainy periods."

Another report recently prepared for the Australian government has shown that potentially greater threats are abrupt changes to the ocean and atmosphere that led to irreversible switches in weather or ocean patterns, so-called tipping points.

"An example is the Indian monsoon. According to some models that could switch into a drier mode in a matter of years," the report’s author Will Steffen, executive director of the Climate Change Institute at the Australian National University, told Reuters.

The fourth assessment report of the IPCC had this to say about monsoon: It is likely that warming associated with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will cause an increase of Asian summer monsoon precipitation variability.

"Changes in monsoon mean duration and strength depend on the details of the (greenhouse gases) emission scenario."

Do the changes mean weather forecasters will have tough time ahead predicting monsoon as they have had this year?

Indian Meteorological Department chief BP Yadav admitted that could be the case.

"There are already some indications of increase in the variability of weather parameters, so when you have a high variability in any events like rainfall or temperature, definitely the work of predicting them becomes more difficult."