Will 2023 be the tipping point for the climate crisis, at least for its effects to hit home? Over the weekend, northwestern India, and especially the hill states, were pounded by sheets of torrential rain that washed away portions of a critical national highway, inundated neighbourhoods and caused landslides that cut off mountain cities and villages. In the national capital, the heaviest deluge for a July day in 21 years – classified in the ‘very heavy’ category – marooned large swathes of the city. The litany of hardships for the ordinary citizen served as yet another reminder of how unprepared our civic infrastructure is for the kind of extreme weather events that are quickly becoming the norm across seasons. This was further reinforced by the fact that spells of very heavy rain are fairly rare for the Capital, with usually just one such day being recorded in the entire year.
After recording alarming deficits for most of June, the monsoon has made double-quick time in the last week-and-a-half. This newspaper reported last week that the monsoon has behaved erratically this year, dropping to a 65% deficit in the second week of June, before making up the deficit with more than 30% above-average rainfall every day between June 26 and July 1. The weekend’s showers reinforced this trend of temporal anomalies in the spread of rainfall – trends that, if they hold for the rest of the month, will have serious consequences for the kharif sowing, and consequently, summer crops and rural incomes. Agriculture patterns and government support will need to incorporate such changes into its policy.
We have known for some time that the climate is irreversibly changing, and any effort to stave off the crisis faces an uphill challenge, especially because the world has still not found any credible solutions for the problems of climate finance and energy transition. But the increasingly arbitrary behaviour in every season shows that the impact of vagaries in the weather will be increasingly felt by the common person. That this deluge came in the same week when the world registered four consecutive days that were the hottest on record should tell policy makers that the fury of the climate crisis will be multi-faceted and unrelenting. Despite its crushing impact, the climate crisis has, till now, not become an election issue that generates significant amounts of public anger and interest in the ways that, say, law and order does. Will 2023 change that? It should.
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