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“Take care of your earth, Look after its creatures.
Don’t leave your children, A planet that’s dead.”
Lakshmi Shree, India, age 12 |
UN Climate Change Conference Starts at Copenhagen on 7th Dec |
“We have evidence that by 2025 in some parts of the world including India, parts of Asia and parts of Africa, crop yields will drop from anything between 20 and 40 per cent from rise in temperatures. Large parts of land will become so bad that it would no longer be good for agriculture and new diseases and pests would come up. Unless we have new varieties of crops that can adapt to extremes of weather, we will have difficulty in feeding the world population. Shortage of water resources is one of the greatest problems the world is going face because of climate change” IFAD.TH 301109
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News Flash : |
India is voluntarily ready to reduce emission intensity (non- legally binding) by 20-25 per cent within 2020. China had claimed that it would cut carbon emissions up to 45 percent by 2020.
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Climate Change affects Development :
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| Societies have always depended on the climate but are only now coming to grips with the fact that the climate depends on their actions. The steep increase in greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution has transformed the relationship between people and the environment. In other words, not only does climate affect development but development affects the climate (Please see Notes at the bottom). |
Left unmanaged, climate change will reverse development progress and compromise the well-being of current and future generations. It is certain that the earth will get warmer on average, at unprecedented speed. Impacts will be felt everywhere, but much of the damage will be in developing countries.
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| The hastening disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers which regulate river flow, generate hydropower, and supply clean water for over a billion of people on farms and in cities—will threaten rural livelihoods and major food markets. WDR 10 |
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India’s post-1980 deceleration in the increase of rice productivity (from the Green Revolution in the 1960s) is attributable not only to falling rice prices and deteriorating irrigation infrastructure, as previously postulated, but also to adverse climate phenomena from local pollution and global warming. Extrapolating from past year-to-year variations in climate and agricultural outcomes, yields of major crops in India are projected to decline by 4.5 to 9 percent within the next three decades, even allowing for short-term adaptations. The implications of such climate change for poverty—and GDP—could be enormous given projected population growth and the evidence that one percentage point of agricultural GDP growth in developing countries increases the consumption of the poorest third of the population by four to six percentage points. WDR 10
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A third of India’s geographical area, undergoing desertification, ISRO
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A host of reasons are responsible for this phenomenon, including changes in rainfall pattern and over-exploitation of natural resources.
At least eight processes were at work, of which water erosion is the most pronounced (affecting 10.21 per cent of the total geographical area), followed by reducing vegetation cover (9.63 per cent) and wind erosion (5.34 per cent). Together 32.07 per cent of the total geographic area is being transformed by land degradation. |
State-wise, Rajasthan has the largest area (21.77 per cent of the total geographical area) undergoing land degradation, followed by Jammu and Kashmir (12.79 per cent), Maharashtra (12.66 per cent) and Gujarat (12.72 per cent).
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| Worsening Greenhouse gas Pollution |
Since an agreement to reduce greenhouse gas pollution was signed in Kyoto, in 1997, the level of CO2 in the air has increased 6.5 per cent. From 1997 to 2008, world CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels have increased 31 per cent; U.S. emissions of this greenhouse gas rose 3.7 per cent. |
| With the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference less than a week away, global leaders are urging Governments to meet the biggest challenge this generation faces by paving a way for a legally binding agreement. |
| Speaking from Capetown, Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu said the stakes for humanity were too high for the international community to fail at Copenhagen.“The final measure of a generation’s courage is the memory of what they have done,” Tutu said in a video-message. |
| Note1 : |
In about 2200 bce a shift in the Mediterranean westerly winds and a reduction in the Indian monsoon produced 300 years of lower rainfall and colder temperatures that hit agriculture from the Aegean Sea to the Indus River. This change in climate brought down Egypt’s pyramid-building Old Kingdom and Sargon the Great’s empire in Mesopotamia. |
After only a few decades of lower rainfall, cities lining the northern reaches of the Euphrates, the breadbasket for the Akkadians, were deserted. At the city of Tell Leilan on the northern Euphrates, a monument was halted half-built.
With the city abandoned, a thick layer of wind-blown dirt covered the ruins. |
| Even intensively irrigated southern Mesopotamia, with its sophisticated bureaucracy and elaborate rationing, could not react fast enough to the new conditions. Without the shipments of rainfed grain from the north, and faced with parched irrigation ditches and migrants from the devastated northern cities, the empire collapsed |
| Note2 : Climate Ant-Climax |
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.” For nearly 1 million years before the Industrial Revolution, the carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration in the atmosphere ranged between 170 and 280 parts per million (ppm). Levels are now far above that range—387 ppm—higher than the highest point in at least the past 800,000 years, and the rate of increase may be accelerating. Under high-emissions scenarios, concentrations by the end of the 21st century could exceed those experienced on the planet for tens of millions of years. |
| About 27 billion tonnes of pure CO2 are pumped into the atmosphere every year - equivalent to 7.3 billion tonnes of pure carbon. |
| Total atmospheric concentrations of CO2 are now at 387 parts per million, up from an historic average of 180 to 280 ppm. |
| Even if radical cuts were adopted by world governments in Copenhagen and adhered to, the lowest level at which they could be expected to stabilise is 450 ppm, according to scientists. |
| To prevent a further temperature rise of more than 2C, emissions would need to be stabilised around that level. (ANI) |
