Agriculture is perhaps the most climate-sensitive sector. Frequent floods and droughts caused by climate change lead to food shortages and rise in food prices. This causes hunger and malnutrition, the effects of which are felt most strongly by the poor. Along with the heightened food insecurity, climate change causes rising drinking water insecurity. The lack of clean water leads to many diseases including kidney failure. Children seem to be the worst victims.
A UNICEF report shows almost every child in his/her lifetime will now be exposed to at least one major climate change event ~ today most kids will be exposed to extreme weather much more than adults. As a result, they face both multiple and longitudinal exposures. Children invariably need more water and food per unit of their body weight for growth and development, which means climate hazards like drought and crop failures result in a long-term risk to them. As featured in the Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, it is learnt that extreme heat can stunt child growth through reduced agricultural and protein production which impacts food outcomes for children as well as causing higher risks of infectious disease and direct physiological effects.
Growth stunting in childhood is a risk factor for increased mortality, poor cognitive and motor development and other impairments in function. Children who have been severely undernourished in childhood suffer a later reduction in IQ by as many as 15 points, insignificantly affecting schooling achievement and increasing the risk of dropouts or repeat grades. Moreover, stunting usually persists, leading to smaller size and poor performance in adulthood.
The lack of water, warming and sea level rise and other crises induced by climate change have caused the fastest growing of new categories of refugees termed as climate refugees. Legally, refugees, as defined under the Geneva Convention of 1951, are people with ‘well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.’ The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, in a paper in 2019, said the Geneva Convention could be applied to persons affected by climate change, as long as they are already marginalised and are facing or are at risk of facing persecution. But this is easier said than done.
In the true sense of the term, climate refugees are not legally classified as refugees (because the definition in the Refugee Protocol requires that the source of their motivating fear be violence or persecution from other people), they are nevertheless routinely described as refugees because their migration is not voluntary. In the UN’s State of the World’s Refugees report from June 2012, then U.N. secretarygeneral Ban Ki-moon noted that the traditional causes of forced displacement, ‘conflict and human rights abuses’ are now ‘increasingly intertwined with and compounded by other factors,’ many of them related ‘to the relentless advance of climate change.’
A consensus on the legal definition of climate refugees is just the first step, as identifying the people will be the next challenge. In 2021, the World Bank, in its Groundswell report, estimated that by 2050, some 216 million people worldwide would be internally displaced due to the impacts of climate change. Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) estimated that in 2023 alone there were more than 32 million displacements because of natural disasters. The other challenge is that countries provide refugee status on an individual basis, but climate change affects entire communities or even nations. The IPCC says climate changeinduced disasters are creating a new dynamic of migration of climate refugees that will not be limited to a country’s borders.
Over time, countries would not be in a position to absorb so many climate refugees. The world is ill prepared to handle these challenges. No doubt, the impacts of warming by GHGs are becoming ever more evident. Droughts and heat waves are occurring frequently and getting more severe. In a report published in the Nature magazine on 27 November 2019, climate scientists said that nine climate tipping points, as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), are likely to be crossed sooner than previously thought. The tipping points are losses of the Amazon rain forests, boreal forests, permafrost, Artic Sea ice, coral reefs, Atlantic circulation, Greenland Ice sheet, Wilkes Basin East Antarctica ice and the West Antarctic ice sheet. These tipping points are interconnected both biologically and physically in complex ways which would mean that world would might go into a state of irreversible change.
The tipping points can also now be triggered at much lower level of global warming. Over the last several decades, governments have collectively pledged to slow global warming. But despite intensified diplomacy, the planet is already facing the consequences of climate changes. And the situation is expected to reach the point of no return. The future of the planet and of humanity itself hangs in the balance. This is because climate change negotiations always seem to have a new twist ~ the word is net-zero or carbon neutral, which could mean another attempt at creative carbon accounting. Climate change negotiators know that their so-called agreements shall not work in the severely compromised and highly climate-risked world. The decade of 2020 is the last chance we have to walk the talk. To make it right. Let us not lose it. Otherwise, humanity may wake up to reality when it is simply too late to change course decisively.
Amidst the bleakness, many of us seem to be hopeful because we have the knowledge, the technology and the collective will. But Seyyed Hossein Nasr, professor of Philosophy at the University of Tehran, in his book entitled Man and Nature: The Spiritual Crisis of Modern Man, argued that the root of the environment problem now facing humanity lies in the realm of Ideas. Modern Man has arrogated to himself an absolute authority over nature, a complete freedom to use, abuse, subjugate and dominate it as he chose fit. It is precisely the ‘domination of nature’ that has caused the unsurmountable problems. More precisely, in the words of Marya Mannes: “The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.”
(The writer is a retired IAS officer)