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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | North India a climate impact hotspot: Study

North India a climate impact hotspot: Study

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published Published on Jul 2, 2013   modified Modified on Jul 2, 2013
-The Telegraph


North India is among a small number of regions scattered across the globe vulnerable to severe and multiple impacts of climate change, a study by an international team of researchers has predicted.

The study, based on computer simulations of future climate scenarios, suggests that northern India may experience sharp drops in yields of key crops and severe ecosystem changes that may show up as altered landscapes.

While earlier studies have explored individual impacts of climate change, the new effort is described as the first to identify geographical areas where impacts from four sectors - agriculture, ecosystem, malaria and water - will overlap.

"We see climate impact hotspots with geographical overlaps of two or three impacts on all continents, but only in certain regions," said Fransizka Piontek, a team member at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, Germany, and lead author of the study. The findings appeared today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The study did not find any region where impacts in all four sectors would be severe, but the southern Amazon basin is predicted to experience severe changes in three sectors - crop yields, ecosystem patterns and water discharge.

The simulations have predicted southern Europe as the second largest hotspot with impacts with changes in water and ecosystems. The other predicted hotspots are in central America, Africa, the Ethiopian highlands and northern India.

Piontek and her colleagues defined a severe shift in malaria as an increase in the length of the transmission season from less than three months to more than three months.

None of the multiple models they used predict an increase in malaria risk in India. This disputes earlier studies by Indian researchers who have predicted the geographical spread of malaria endemic zones in India as global temperatures rise.

Scientists believe the overlap of impacts from different sectors are "likely to be of great consequence", as they may amplify effects and pose significant challenges to efforts to adapt to climate change.

The study combined productivity from four key crops -- maize, rice, soy and wheat. "In the hotspots such as northern India, the average production from maize, rice, soy and wheat in the future would be comparable to (yields in) years with extremely low production today," Piontek told The Telegraph. The study did not examine yields of individual crops which, she said, is a subject of future research.

The study, which combined several models, or simulations, of climate change, has indicated that overlaps from multiple sectors appears with an average global temperature rise of 3°C above the mean between 1980 and 2010.

The simulations predict that 11 per cent of the world population is likely to experience severe impacts of climate change in at least two of the four sectors when the temperature rise approaches 4°C.

But the researchers have cautioned that the simulations carry uncertainties. "In a low-probability, high-impact, worse-case assessment, almost the whole inhabited world is at risk for multi-sectoral pressures," the scientists wrote in their paper.

A leading Indian climate scientist, who was not associated with the study, said a major source of uncertainty in forecasts of crop yields is the inability of most simulations to capture the behaviour of pests and diseases.

"Most existing climate models are able to forecast temperatures pretty well but don't get the monsoon behaviour right," Jayaraman Srinivasan, professor at the Centre for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, told this newspaper. "That brings some uncertainty into yield forecasts but how pests and diseases will change in the future is even less understood."

In the worst-case scenario predicted by the simulations, about 18 per cent of the world's population is projected to experience severe impacts in all four sectors - crop yields, ecosystems, water and malaria.


The Telegraph, 2 July, 2013, http://www.telegraphindia.com/1130702/jsp/nation/story_17071539.jsp#.UdKOQtjcjco


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