Ashraf Engineer
August 24, 2024
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Hello and welcome to All Indians Matter. I am Ashraf Engineer.
Worrying as it is, it’s hardly news that the world is warming and the climate is changing more drastically than ever. This is, of course, disastrous for India and what’s even more worrying is what’s happening out at sea. Satellite observations show that the rate of sea level rise globally is increasing. This is not news either but what’s alarming is the rate of the rise. Between 2021 and 2022, the sea level rose by 0.11 inches. This is equal to a million Olympic-sized swimming pools being added to the ocean every day for a year. NASA satellite data analysis by researchers suggests that sea levels will rise 0.26 inches by 2050. The World Meteorological Organization’s ‘State of the Global Climate’ report released in May 2022 said sea levels along almost the entire Indian coast are rising faster than the global average. According to a response by the Ministry of Earth Sciences in the Lok Sabha in 2021, the sea level along the Indian coast is rising at an average rate of about 1.7 mm per year with the rise being 3.3 mm per year between 1993 and 2015.
SIGNATURE TUNE
The major reason for the rise in sea levels is the fast melting ice from the ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic regions.
The rise is not uniform across the world. In the Indian Ocean region, the rise is most worrying in the southwestern part, where it is faster by 2.5 mm per year than the global average. In other parts of the Indian Ocean region, including coastlines, the rate is between 0 and 2.5 mm per year.
The Indian Ocean region has long been described as the fastest warming ocean in the world, with a rise in temperature of 1° Celsius compared to the global average of 0.7° Celsius between 1951 and 2015.
The sea level rises being recorded are already having major consequences for millions living along the Indian coastline. Among the long-term concerns are the coastline’s erosion, land subsidence and inundation of deltas. The most apparent result of sea level rise is the flooding of coastal areas. This has been witnessed often in India. In 2022, an analysis by the RMSI risk management firm, projected that properties and road networks in Mumbai, Kochi, Mangalore, Chennai, Visakhapatnam and Thiruvananthapuram will be submerged by 2050.
In the short term, people living along the coastline will have to deal with tropical cyclones in addition to the sea level rise. When a tropical cyclone hits, the storm surge, heavy rainfall, sea level rise and high tides would make the resultant flooding much more intense.
A storm surge is the increase in the height and energy of sea waves during a cyclone. The higher the wind speed, the greater the chance of water piling up towards the centre of the cyclone. Storm surges sometimes get amplified if there is a high tide when the cyclone hits. A storm surge combining with a high tide is known as a storm tide.
Such surges and tides bring saline water into farms and people’s homes, causing tremendous damage and destroying soil quality.
Recent cyclones in the Indian Ocean region have increased in intensity, with greater wind speeds than before which has meant higher storm surges. As sea levels rise, storm surges will become even stronger and bring even more seawater into the land.
Take the case of Super Cyclone Amphan in 2020. Seawater gushed 25 km inland, swamping large parts of the Sunderbans delta which is already the most vulnerable to cyclones and sea level rise in India.
Sea levels have averaged 30 mm per year in the Sunderbans delta over the past two decades, with a 12% loss of the shoreline, according to NASA Landsat satellite imagery. This is more than six times the global average and has already displaced 1.5 million people.
Now there is data to indicate that cyclones are getting more frequent in the region, which is even worse news for residents.
With its 7,500-km coastline, the Indian subcontinent is exposed to 10% of the world’s cyclones, according to the National Disaster Management Authority. Most form over the Bay of Bengal and strike the eastern coast.
Odisha has recorded 28% erosion along its 450-km coastline and at least 16 villages have disappeared under the sea. More than 200 face a similar fate.
Affected residents said that their houses were completely destroyed and that they lost agricultural land. As the sea rushed in, they were forced to relocate farther inland.
All this has social consequences too. For instance, many say that their misfortune has meant that they are shunned for marriage. The rising soil salinity has made much of the water undrinkable, so friends and relatives avoid visiting them. So poor is the water quality that residents bathing in it fall prey to skin ailments. As a consequence, villagers have to barter grain or oil for drinking water from villages up to 16 km away.
The salinisation of farmland is perhaps the most worrying concern. As farmland is lost, so are livelihoods. This, in turn, increases rural-urban migration. Many coastal villages are now home to only the elderly, who have been left behind by the young who have moved away. Despite the migration, employment is hard to find. This increases the migrants’ distress because they find themselves in an alien city with no source of survival and no option of returning home either.
The villages that these young people left once had filled-to-capacity wells and aquifers. However, the cyclones and seawater turned the groundwater saline. This has forced villagers to rely on the monsoon for their agriculture. This means the harvest and their earnings are not consistent year to year. They vary as per the rainfall.
The official response, meanwhile, has been weak. In some areas, the Forest Department has planted casuarina forests to mitigate the impact of sea ingression. However, this is hardly a long-term solution.
The grim reality is that, if global warming is not kept under the 1.5° Celsius level, as envisaged by the Paris Agreement through a reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, sea levels will continue to rise and the Indian coastline will have ever more intense cyclones. This will make regions like the Sunderbans uninhabitable, cause massive population displacement and a torrent of social and economic crises.
Thank you all for listening. Please visit allindiansmatter.in for more columns and audio podcasts. You can follow me on Twitter at @AshrafEngineer and @AllIndiansCount. Search for the All Indians Matter page on Facebook. On Instagram, the handle is @AllIndiansMatter. Email me at editor@allindiansmatter.in. Catch you again soon.
