Climate Change and the Water Crisis
“Jala bahule srustinasa, jala bihune srustinasa.”
(“Too much or too little water destroys creation.”)
—Oriya expression
In October 1999, a killer cyclone hit the eastern part of the state of Orissa in eastern India. The cyclone, one of the most devastating human disasters ever experienced, damaged 1.83 million houses and 1.8 million acres of paddy crops in 12 coastal districts. Eighty percent of the coconut trees were uprooted or broken in half, and all the banana and papaya plantations were wiped out. More than 300,000 cattle perished, more than 1,500 fishermen and fisherwomen lost their entire source of livelihood, and more than 15,000 ponds were contaminated or salinated. While there is no official number of the human casualties, independent observers and local workers estimate the toll to be about 20,000.
In the summer of 2001, Orissa was hit by one of the worst droughts in history, and during the monsoon season it was affected by the worst flood. More than seven million people were affected: 600,000 villages were marooned, 42 people were killed, and 550,000 hectares of standing crops were destroyed. Heavy rains in the Mahanadi catchment had forced the release of 13 million cubic meters per second of waters from the Hirakud Dam.
Water is life, but too much or too little of it can become a threat to life. The stories of Noah and Vishnu Purana are tales of mythic floods that wiped out life on the planet. While floods and droughts have always occurred, they have become more intense and more frequent. These climatic extremes are linked to climate change, which is in turn linked to pollution of the atmosphere by the use of fossil fuels.
Climate Injustice as Water Injustice
The impact of climate crisis on all forms of life is mediated through water in the form of floods, cyclones, heat waves, and droughts. Water fury can be tamed only if the atmospheric saturation by carbon dioxide is contained. While subverting international struggle to avert climate disaster makes economic sense for oil companies, it spells political and ecological disaster for much of the earth’s community. More than anything, the oil economy’s environmental externalities, such as atmospheric pollution and climate change, will determine the future of water, and through water, the future of all life.
Climate destabilization, although set in motion with the advent of industrialization, did not accelerate until very recently. In 1850, the global carbon dioxide in atmosphere was roughly 280 parts per million (ppm); by the mid-1990s, it had increased to approximately 360 ppm.1 Climate instability—in the form of more extreme floods and droughts, more frequent heat waves and freezing winters—is the result of atmospheric pollution aggravated by the wealthier regions of the world, Since 1950, 11 countries have contributed 530.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide. Of that, the United States has contributed 186.1 billion; the European Union, 127.8 billion; Russia, 68.4 billion; China, 57.6 billion; Ukraine, 21.7 billion; India, 15.5 billion; Canada 14.9 billion; Poland, 14.4 billion; South Africa, 8.5 billion; Mexico, 7.8 billion; and Australia, 7.6 billion.
As the level of carbon dioxide increases, these molecules trap more heat and global temperatures rise. Along with other greenhouse gases, such as methane and nitrogen, the impact of carbon dioxide promises to be catastrophic. Methane concentration, for instance, has risen from 0.7 parts per million four centuries ago to 1.7 parts per million in 1988.2 About 10 percent of the feed given to animals in industrial livestock factories goes into the atmosphere as methane.3 This gas is also responsible for the foul smell surrounding factory farms.
In May 1988, 50 countries held the first International Conference on the Changing Atmosphere to address the effect of industrial fuel use on atmospheric change. The conference launched the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which today consists of 2,500 scientists. The concern over climate change has continued to grow. In 1992, the Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro, where 132 heads of state approved the Framework Convention on Climate Change to promote an agreement among all nations on how to respond to the growing climate threat—more than 160 countries eventually ratified the convention.
In a 1994 report, the IPCC warned that emissions from the burning of coal and oil were trapping more of the sun’s heat than normal. The report cautioned that many serious changes had been noted “including an increase in some regions of the incidence of extreme high temperatures, events, floods, and droughts, with resultant consequences for fires, pest outbreaks and ecosystems.”4 In 1997, the Climate Change Convention was held in Kyoto, Japan, to determine targets and timetables for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
More than 1,000 scientists worked for two years to produce the recently released report “Climate Change 2001.” The IPCC now believes that the earth’s temperatures are already rising and will rise by as much as 5.8 degrees Celsius by the end of this century, almost twice the increase predicted in the group’s 1995 report. Such an increase will lead to crop failures, water shortages, increased disease, flooding, landslides, and cyclones. The Global Commons Institute has assessed that damages due to climate change could amount to $200 billion by 2005 and $400 billion by 2012. By 2050, the property damage could reach $20 trillion. This is why insurance companies are taking climate change seriously.5
The main victims of climate disasters are those who have had the smallest role in creating climate destabilisation—coastal communities, small islanders, peasants, and pastoral communities. Small island states, whose very existence can be wiped off the world map by severe hurricanes, storms, and rising sea level, have organized themselves into the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) to demand the active reduction of carbon dioxide emissions by the industrial world. Ambassador A. Tuiloma Neroni Slade of Samoa captures the spirit of AOSIS: “The strongest human instinct is not greed … [I]t is survival and we will not allow some to barter our homelands, our people, and our cultures for short-term economic interest.”6
The AOSIS calls for a 20 percent reduction in 1990 levels of carbon dioxide emissions by the year 2005.7 A number of industrial countries advocate similar cuts; Germany and Great Britain call for a 10 percent cut in emission levels by 2005, and a 15 percent cut by 2020. The most drastic proposal comes from Dutch scientists, who call for a 60 to 70 percent carbon dioxide reduction by the industrial world to stabilize the atmosphere.8
Despite the worldwide acknowledgment of climate change and a commitment to fight global warming, the United States is a vocal opponent of the Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse gases. When George W. Bush became president of the United States in 2001, one of his first decisions was to abandon the agreement and to reverse the US pledge to cut carbon dioxide emissions from power plants. Bush argued: “Our economy has slowed. We also have an energy crisis, and the idea of placing caps on carbon dioxide does not make economic sense.”9 The United States, which produces 25 percent of the world’s greenhouse gases, more than any other nation, has officially announced that it will make no cutbacks. Ironically, the United States itself is under serious threat by global warming. Rising sea levels could obliterate the East Coast, as well as the Gulf Coast states of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has estimated that a two-foot rise in sea level—caused by increased ocean temperatures and melting ice caps—would wipe out 17 to 43 percent of American wetlands. Total economic losses in North America from weather-related events were $253 billion in the period between 1985 and 1999. The estimated value of incurred coastal property loss as of 1993 was $3.15 trillion.10 The Midwest also faces a threat from droughts.
Orissa’s Supercyclone: A Man-made Disaster
The term cyclone is derived form the Greek word kukloma, which means the coil of a snake. When fully developed, a cyclone is a vast whirlwind of extraordinary violence, moving at a rate of 300 to 500 kilometers a day along the surface of the sea. When the storm approaches a coastline, the sea level rises rather suddenly and inundates surrounding areas. When the sudden rise in the sea, called a storm tide, strikes, it can devastate an area in a matter of minutes, as was the case with the Orissa super cyclone.
The 1999 cyclone was not a mere natural disaster—it was mainly a man-made ecological crisis unleashed by the combined impact of climate change, industrialization, and deforestation. Climate change is creating climatic extremes in the region. The average wind speed of past cyclones was 73 kilometers per hour; the speed recorded in 1999 was 260 kilometers per hour.11
The IPCC surmises that climate change is caused by increasing amounts of anthropogenic greenhouse gases, emitted largely by industrial and corporate activities. These gases increase the tropical sea surface temperatures and intensify tropical rainfall. Such climatic changes and the consequent sea-level rise can have adverse effects on cyclone activity. The rising sea level threatens to inundate lowlands, destroy coastal marshes and swamps, erode shorelines, cause coastal flooding, and increase the salinity of water sources. The worldwide sea-level rise over the next 100 years is expected to most severely devastate the lowlands of the Bay of Bengal. These regions, created by sediment washing down the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna Rivers, are most vulnerable to submersion. The frequency of these disasters is also expected to increase. One of the necessary conditions for tropical cyclone formation is a sea surface temperature of 26 to 27 degrees Celsius.12 Global warming is expected to raise the sea temperature and thereby increase the frequency of cyclones.
Destruction of Mangroves
Coastal ecosystems like those in Orissa have mangroves, which, along with shelterbelts, reduce wind velocities and floods. Mangroves absorb the energy of wave and tidal surges, protecting the land behind. The trees also form a barrier against wind. Destruction of coastal mangroves in Orissa, however, has reduced the buffer capacity of coastal ecosystems and allowed storm surges and cyclonic winds to wreak havoc on the region.
Mangroves are also useful in treating effluent, as the plants absorb excess nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates, thereby preventing contamination of shore waters. In regions where these coastal fringe forests have been cleared, tremendous problems of erosion and siltation—and sometimes enormous loss of human life and property—have occurred. Mangrove forests can survive in the saline wetlands because of special features such as their aerial and salt-filtering roots and salt-excreting leaves. Local communities depend on mangrove ecosystems for food, medicine, fuel wood, and construction materials. For millions of indigenous coastal residents around the world, mangrove forests offer dependable livelihoods and sustain their cultures. According to the local communities and forest department in Orissa, the mangroves in the region provide 10 major timber species.
Trade liberalization is one of the leading reasons why mangroves are vanishing. The pressures of trade liberalization and the promotion of export-driven production are promoting shrimp farming throughout the coastal regions. Significant mangrove losses due to aquaculture are especially visible along the west coast of India and in the districts of Karwar and Jumta in Karnataka state, Palghar and Shrivardhan in Maharashtra, and Valsad I in Gujarat. Issukapalli mangrove forests, which once stretched 500 hectares in Andhra Pradesh, have been reduced significantly. All over India, where mangrove forests once stood, roads and aquaculture ponds now lie.
Mangrove forests are desirable for shrimp growth, as they provide important nutrients. In the states of Orissa and West Bengal, numerous shrimp farms have been established in mangrove forests. In the Sunderbans of Bengal, shrimp ponds have been constructed on 35,000 hectares of land once inhabited by mangrove forests. In 1995, the government of Orissa invited project proposals for setting up aqua-farms. This initiative led to an unregulated expansion of aquaculture at the cost of social and ecological sustainability.
The spread of aquaculture in the coastal areas has decreased the coastal zone buffer capacity and has left the regions vulnerable to cyclones and floods and new scales of environmental disaster. In 1991, a tidal wave claimed thousands of lives in Bangladesh as a result of shrimp ponds. A similar wave in 1960 did not harm the villages, as mangroves protected the land at that time. Experts suggest that the destruction caused by the supercyclone in Orissa could have been minimized had the mangroves along the coastline not been destroyed for shrimp farming: “the (Orissa) coastline was once covered by mangrove forests and these would have dissipated the incoming wave energy”13 Mangroves export organic matter, providing nutrients to adjacent estuarine and marine ecosystems. The mangrove swamps form the base of the food chain in the sea and coastal waters. The richness of organic matter allows a number of species, both marine and freshwater, to flourish.
Floods and Hurricanes
The supercyclone in Orissa was not an isolated disaster. In the past five years alone, we have heard of hundreds of climate change-related calamities. In 1995, a flood in Bangladesh killed more than 70 people and affected nearly 10 million. In 1995, St. Thomas Island in the Caribbean was reduced to shambles by hurricanes; that same year, France and the Netherlands faced unprecedented rainfall and extensive flooding.
In 1996, the worst cyclone of the century killed 2,000 residents in Andhra Pradesh, India. That same year, a typhoon outbreak in Angola killed more than 600 people. Floods in North Korea led to food shortages for five million people. In March 1996, a deadly blizzard in the western Chinese Highlands pushed at least 60,000 Tibetan herders in Qinghai province and Tibet to starvation by wiping out 750,000 heads of livestock and drastically reducing their food supplies; 48 herders died. The snowfall was four times greater than average, and temperatures fell to –49 degrees Celsius. Also that month, 20 of Laos’s rice fields were damaged due to flooding, putting 10 million Laotians at risk of starvation. In June of that year, more than 330 people died in Yemen due to the worst floods in 40 years. The floods caused $1 billion dollars in damages. The stagnant water led to a malaria outbreak, infecting 168,000 people and killing 30.
In 1997, more than 30 people were killed and 120,000 left homeless in the Philippines due to a torrential storm. A succession of ice and rainstorms in the Pacific Northwest caused $25 million of damage that same year. In March, 100,000 farms were wiped out in Bolivia by flooding. That year, 57 people were killed, and thousands in Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia had to flee their homes, when the Ohio River rose 12 feet above flood levels. The flooding of the Bed River caused $2 billion in damages in Manitoba, Canada, North and South Dakota, and parts of Minnesota.
In January 1998, Peru received 13 liters per square meter within 14 hours. Close to 60 bridges collapsed and 530 miles of highway were wiped out in subsequent weeks. In February, 3,084 people were infected by cholera in Ecuador; 108 died in floods and landslides, and 28,000 lost their homes. In the same year, the Juba and Shabeele Rivers in the horn of Africa flooded, killing 2,000 people and millions of livestock.
Drought, Heat Waves, and Melting Glaciers
While climate change is creating more floods and cyclones, it is also aggravating drought and heat waves. There is either too much water or too little, and both extremes pose a threat to survival. The most dramatic impact of global warming is the melting of ice caps and glaciers. Although there have always been changes in climate, the scientific community and most governments agree that the present crisis of melting glaciers and polar ice caps is ecologically connected to the fossil fuel economy and atmospheric pollution. Snow cover in the northern hemisphere has been reduced by about 10 percent over the past three decades.14
Due to climate change, the earth has warmed by somewhere between 0.4 and 0.8 degree Celsius over the past century. The 12 hottest years during the past hundred years have all occurred since 1983, and the three hottest were in the 1990s. Since 1980, average annual temperature has climbed by as much as four degrees Celsius in Alaska and Siberia. In parts of Canada, ice caps are forming two weeks later than they used to, and they break up earlier than in past years.15
The rising temperatures are also leading to the melting of glaciers and ice sheets. According to John Michael Wallace, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Washington, “Permanent summertime melting of the whole Arctic could happen in a few decades if trends of the last twenty years continue.”16
During the past 40 years, there has been a 40 percent decrease in the thickness of perennial Arctic sea ice. Between 1950 and 1970, the ice boundary of the Antarctic Sea shrank by 2.8 degrees of latitude. The annual melt season has increased by up to three weeks in the past 20 years. Between 1961 and 1997, mountain glaciers have reduced by 400 cubic kilometers. The heat being accumulated through the greenhouse effect is accounting for 8,000 joules in terms of the melting of Antarctic and Greenland ice, and 1,100 joules in terms of the melting of mountain glaciers.17 The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts an average increase of global temperatures by 1.5 degrees to six degrees Celsius by 2100.
Glaciers are disappearing in the Alps, in Alaska, and in Washington State. Mount Kilimanjaro, the highest mountain in Africa, has lost 75 percent of its ice cap since 1912. All of its ice could vanish within 15 years.18 Only two of the six glaciers in Venezuela remain, and if glacial retreat continues at current rates, Montana is expected to lose all the glaciers in Glacier National Park by 2070.19 According to local people, the Gangotri glacier, the main source of perennial flows of the mighty river Ganges, is receding at five meters a year.20 The retreat of all glaciers outside the polar region is expected to have contributed to a sea-level rise of two to five centimeters.21
The year 1995 was an especially active one: Cadiz in southern Spain, an area that once received the most rainfall in the country, suffered its fourth consecutive year of drought. The rainfall had dropped from 84 inches a year to 37 inches a year. In June, temperatures in Russia reached 93 degrees Fahrenheit, melting the asphalt on roads and airport runways. Northern India also experienced soaring temperatures of 113 degrees Fahrenheit. The heat wave killed 300 people, Around the same time, a heat wave in Chicago killed about 500 people, and Great Britain suffered its hottest summer since 1659 and its driest season since 1721. Northeastern Brazil suffered its worst drought in the century, with rainfall declining by 60 percent. In June 1995, Canadian fires destroyed forests, spreading over 240,000 acres a day. Uncontrollable forest fires also destroyed 700,000 square acres of forestand rangeland in Mongolia.
The calamities were not limited to 1995. In 1996, the worst drought of the century in the United States hit Kansas and Oklahoma, destroying millions of acres of wheat. The United States’ wheat reserves dropped to their lowest level in 50 years. In India, consecutive droughts also created food and water crises in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, and Chattisgarh. While campaigning for re-election in drought-affected Gujarat in 1999, India’s home minister, L. K. Advani, was greeted by people shouting “Pehle paanni, pbir Advani” (“First water, then Advani”). In 1997, Rio de Janeiro winter temperatures rose to 108 degrees Fahrenheit. In 1998 more than 13,000 fires spread across Mexico; people were killed, airports were closed, and Mexico City was placed under an environmental alert. As the blanket of smoke moved to the gulf, Texas was put on a health alert.
In September 1997, due to fires in Indonesia and Malaysia, smoke pollution created an emergency. Schools and airports were closed. Ship collisions in the Strait of Malacca killed 29 people, and the haze from forest fires was responsible for an airline crash that claimed 234 lives. Traffic accidents due to low visibility killed hundreds more.
It is the poorest people in the Third World who will be most severely affected by climate change, drought, melting glaciers, and rising sea levels. The peasants, pastoralists, and coastal communities will become environmental refugees as rains disappear, crops collapse, and rivers go dry. The flood risk to coastal communities due to climate change is high: “In extreme circumstances, sea level rise and its associated consequences could trigger abandonment and significant ‘off island migration’ at great economic and social costs.”22
Whether water is life-threatening or life-sustaining depends to a large extent on the ability of climate justice movements to end atmospheric pollution and to get rogue countries and rogue corporations to act within the limits of ecological responsibility.
1. Aubrey Meyer, Contraction and Convergence: The Global Solution to Climate Change (Totnes, Devon: Green Books for the Schumacher Society, 2000), p. 22.
2. Paul Brown, Global Warming. Can Civilisation Survive? (London: Blandford Press, 1996), p, 57.
3. Ibid.
4. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change, 2001, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 1.
5. Meyer, Contraction and Convergence.
6. Ross Gelbspan, The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-up, the Prescription (Boulder, CO; Perseus Books, 1998), p, 109.
7. Ibid.
8. “Global Warming Much Worse than Predicted,” The Independent, June 12, 2001.
9. Jeffrey Kluger, “A Climate of Despair,” Time Magazine, (April 9, 2001): p. 34.
10. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change, 2001, p. 363.
11. Vandana Shiva and Ashok Emani, Climate Change, Deforestation, and the Orissa Supercyclone (New Delhi: Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology, 2000), p. 4.
12. Ali and Chowdhary, April 1997.
13. Shiva and Emani, Climate Change, Deforestation, and the Orissa Super Cyclone, p. 10.
14. Ibid., pp. 810-815.
15. “The Big Meltdown,” Time Magazine, September 4, 2000, p. 55,
16. John Michael Wallace, International Herald Tribune, April 19, 2001.
17. Sydney Levitus, New York Times, April 13, 2001.
18. “Climate Crisis,” The Ecologist, 29: 2.
19. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Ch ange, Climate Change 2001, p. 700.
20. K. S. Foma, The Traveller’s Guide to Uttarakhand (Chatnoli, India; Garuda Books, 1998), p. 51.
21. Brown, Global Warming, p. 87.
22. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change 2001, p. 856.