South Asia’s ‘springless’ summer

Some years ago, I met with a senior official from the administration of then Prime Minister Mian Nawaz Sharif who was on a visit to Washington to meet with his counterparts in the United States government. He was the guest of honour at a dinner given by the Pakistani ambassador.

He asked me what are some of the issues he should focus on. “Talk about climate change and global warming and ask the Americans to help with both by transferring technology and providing finance,” I suggested. His response surprised me. “It is their problem; why should we make it an area of focus for Islamabad,” he said. I asked him if he had read the recent report published by the World Bank in which the institution had listed the countries most at risk from the changes in world climate. Pakistan’s mighty rivers draw their water from the ice melt in the Himalayas. As the pace of melting increases because of global warming, there would be floods in the rivers. However, with the thinning of the glaciers, the amount of water coming down the rivers would perceptibly decline over time turning much of Pakistan into a desert.

Those who were not aware of the problem Pakistan would face should have learned from some recent weather-related events. Experts in both India and Pakistan call March and April 2022 in the two countries ushering in a ‘springless’ summer. Temperatures in parts of India and Pakistan reached record levels. The average maximum temperatures for the northwest of the South Asian subcontinent in April were the highest since records began to be kept 122 years ago. In April, New Delhi saw seven consecutive days over 40 degrees Celsius or 104 degrees Fahrenheit. According to Pakistan’s Meteorological Department (PMD) cities of Jacobabad and Sibi in the province of Sindh recorded highs of 47 degrees Celsius. The PMD said this was the highest temperature recorded in any city in the Northern Hemisphere on that day. In the Indian and Pakistani Punjabs, known as the breadbaskets of the two countries, the early arrival of heat has affected wheat output. According to Guvinder Singh, the director of agriculture in the Indian state of Punjab, “Because of the heat wave we have lost 500 kilograms per hectare of our April yield.” The same must be the case in Pakistan.

Yield declines come at a difficult time for global wheat output. The Russian invasion of Ukraine and use of heavy weaponry in the country that has been a major supplier of wheat in the world markets is already affecting global prices. The pressure is likely to increase. Moscow’s moves against Ukraine and heat waves in India and Pakistan will have serious consequences for the two countries.

The window to prevent global temperatures from rising by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius is rapidly closing. This is the warning delivered by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) in the third volume of its assessment report issued on April 4, a couple of weeks before the northern part of the South Asian subcontinent was hit by a record-beating heat wave. The latest IPPC report is the third of the series written by 278 scientists who have been working on climate change. The first of the series laid out the current state of knowledge on the physical science of climate change and the second report examined the consequences of global warming on the human and natural worlds. The most recent document provides a comprehensive set of possibilities for how mankind could stabilise the climate and avoid catastrophic global warming.

This was the fear that motivated world nations who met in Paris in 2015 to take action. The aim of the Paris Accord was to keep average global warming to between 1.5 and 2.0 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The two-degree target was adopted at the insistence of dozens of small-island nations that feared they would be wiped out by rising seas. “We need to get on with this fast and now or the goal of 1.5 degrees will slip beyond reach,” said the IPPC co-chair, Jim Skea of Imperial College London. “If there is no advance in the kind of pledges that countries are making before we get to COP27 in Egypt,” he added referring to the next United Nations climate summit scheduled for November this year, “we may well have to conclude that 1.5 degrees Celsius has indeed gone unachieved. It would be recalled that COP26 was held in Glasgow, Britain at which India refused to make a firm commitment against the use of coal for producing energy. Whether the heat wave that hit the country in April of this year would help change India’s stance is something we will know this coming November.

In spite of the dark warnings issued by the IPPC scientists, some hope was expressed that technology may come to mankind’s rescue. For instance, the cost of solar energy had dropped by 85 per cent during the 2010s, and that of wind power by 55 per cent. During the same period the market for electric vehicles that don’t run on fossil fuels grew a hundredfold. The third IPPC report noted that at least 24 countries had reduced carbon emissions over a period of at least a decade. There was hope that the number of countries taking action could possibly double in the next five years.

How could Pakistan join the group of nations that are taking some actions to deal with the global warming crisis? There are a number of steps governments at various levels in the country could take to make some contribution to the global effort. The most obvious one is to use renewable sources for generating power and reducing the country’s dependence on coal. Some of the newer plants being built would use coal as the fuel. Tax incentives could be used to make the owners of automobile assembly plants produce electric vehicles. Here China could help. It is now the largest manufacturer of vehicles powered by electricity. The federal government should make a serious effort to build water storage facilities on the country’s major rivers. The World Bank report to which I referred above suggested that the country should work on twelve water storage projects on the Indus River after it enters Pakistan. These would preserve the additional water that is likely to flow down the rivers once the ice in the Himalayas begins to melt at an increasing rate. The Bank called the recommended programme the ‘Indus Cascades’.

There is also the need enforce government’s regulatory authority in two areas: banning the burning of crop residue after the framers have harvested their crops; and ban the use of soft coal for making bricks in primitive brick-making plants that use soft coal. On a drive to the Sikh shrine in Kartarpur on which the government carried out an impressive amount of work, I drove on the road that passes through the city of Narowal. I counted a dozen such plants that were still active. The burning of crop residue and use of soft coal for making bricks won’t have a direct impact on global warming. But getting rid of these activities would positively affect citizens’ health.