Large parts of North India have been badly hit by nature’s fury, with heavy rains and flooding sowing destruction in many regions and killing at least 40 people and causing heavy loss of property. Landslides and flash floods have washed away houses, buildings, bridges, and vehicles. Many parts of Delhi have been affected with the Yamuna rising and rainwater inundating roads and residential areas. The worst hit region is Himachal Pradesh, which received more than 10 times its average rainfall for this time of the year. Heavy rains have lashed other states, too. Kerala is facing not only heavy rains but erosion of its shoreline by the sea. Meteorologists have attributed the present torrential rains to a confluence of cyclonic storms, called western disturbances, with the monsoon winds, and have predicted that they will continue for some days. The rain deficit in June has been more than made up by the heavy rains this month.
The monsoon has been erratic, but nature has been erratic in other ways, too. The year has seen many extreme weather events like heat waves and cyclones. Every part of the country has experienced them. It has been stated that there was one extreme climate event every day of the last year in one part of the country or the other. The Western Ghats and the sensitive Himalayan region have seen landslides and other disasters which have taken lives and destroyed property. It should be noted that the impact of the monsoon fury in the last few days has been most felt in the Himalayan states of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. If the rain excesses continue in the coming days, they will have serious consequences for the kharif sowing. If sowing is affected, that will impact summer crops and will have consequences for the economy.
But the continuing disaster is as much human-made as it is caused by climate change. In the first place, climate change is itself the result of human actions over the past many decades. The pressure of infrastructure-building in environmentally sensitive Himalayan foothills has majorly contributed to the flooding and other natural disasters in the area. No effective steps have been taken to make cities and other urban centres resilient to disasters and to equip them suitably. That is the case with the national capital, too. Lessons were not learnt from the recent floods in Uttarakhand and Kerala and in cities like Chennai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Mumbai. Disaster prevention and management plans need to be updated, reformulated, and better implemented in the face of the new requirements and challenges. Climate change is here and now. Our policies and actions have to orient to climate adaptation and resilience urgently.