Alarm bells are ringing for the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR) with yet another study drawing attention to the increasing possibility of hazards and risks owing to climate change.
All the states in the IHR, including the eight states in India’s northeastern region, have been identified as being prone to varying degrees of danger from climate change, a new climate risk index designed by researchers in the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras (IIT-M) has revealed.
The report titled “Climate-change-induced risk mapping of the Indian Himalayan districts using the latest IPCC framework” was made available to The Diplomat. “The states of Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, and Tripura in the EIHR (Eastern Indian Himalayan Region) and Jammu and Kashmir and Uttarakhand in WIHR (Western Indian Himalayan Region) are especially highly vulnerable,” it says. The report was compiled by Assistant Professor Krishna Malakar and research scholar Aayush Shah at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at IIT-M.
“The results obtained in the study indicate that the districts in the WIHR are more prone to risk overall, even though the three highest risk-prone districts fall in the EIHR. The WIHR experiences more hazards and also edges past EIHR in terms of exposure. However, vulnerability is observed to be higher in the EIHR than in the WIHR,” the study pointed out.
The IHR spans 12 Indian states spanning a length of approximately 1,550 miles from west to east and covering 16.2 percent of the country’s geographical area. Around 47 million people or 3.88 percent of the Indian population inhabit these regions. The IHR is critical for environmental safety since it provides dense forests, biodiversity conservation, key water sources and sustainable tourism sites in the country. study
The IIT-M report comes close on the heels of several studies over the past few years on the impact of climate change in the Himalayan region. Four years ago, a study by the Forest Research Institute in collaboration with other institutes on hazards in the Himalayan region found that the eastern region was more risk-prone than the west. IIT-M has concluded that while the western and eastern regions are vulnerable, the western region is more susceptible to risks due to climate change.
The IIT-M report is based on the framework developed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to examine hazards in the Himalayan region from climate change by combining both physical and socio-economic indicators. Its objective was to construct a climate change-induced risk index specifically for the districts within the IHR. The study utilized open-source data from the last census in India (2011) and other government websites for the creation of a “highly data-intensive and easily replicable index.”
The research considered hazard, vulnerability, and exposure to calculate risk for the IHR. As many as 11 physical indicators were utilized to represent hazards such as earthquakes, cold wave days, flood events, snowfall days and hailstorm days. Vulnerability is defined as the tendency to be negatively impacted. A wide spectrum of components, including sensitivity or susceptibility to harm, and the lack of ability to deal with and adapt to new circumstances have been incorporated under this component of risk. Exposure refers to the extent and intensity of significant climate fluctuations experienced by a system or the assets and population of a region that are impacted by hazards.
The study identified Shimla in Himachal Pradesh as the most hazard-prone district of the IHR followed by the East Sikkim in the Northeast out of a total of 13 districts in the category. The next category — high-hazard districts — covered a wide expanse of 32 districts from both zones; 23 from the western region and nine from the eastern region. The medium hazard districts category consists of 22 districts equally distributed between the twin zones. The fourth category which comprises the low-hazard districts, has 17 districts, of which 15 are in the east and two in the west. Twenty-five districts fall under the lowest hazard category and all are from the eastern zone.
The researchers observed that the west zone is more prone to hazards than the east, having 34 out of 47 districts in the highest and high-hazard district categories and two districts in the low-hazard district category. The eastern zone was found to be less prone to hazards with 25 districts in the lowest hazard district category out of a total of 62. There were 51 districts in the lowest, low, and medium hazard districts categories.
Overall, the study concluded that the Himalayan districts in India are highly vulnerable since 64 (out of the total of 109) districts in the IHR in the categories of highest and highly vulnerable districts were found across all the states. The highest vulnerability districts category consists of districts from nine states while the high vulnerability districts category includes districts from all the Himalayan states except Assam, since both the hill districts from the state (Dima Hasao and Karbi Anglong) considered for the study appear in the highest vulnerability districts category.
The eastern zone is more vulnerable based on the positioning of its districts as 43 out of 62 districts in the region are classified as the highest and high-vulnerable districts, while only six districts have been identified as the lowest or low vulnerable districts. Region-wise, the western zone was found to be more risk-prone than the east owing to “the high hazards and more exposure experienced by the western region compared to the eastern region.”
The adverse impact of climate change is discernible to a lesser or greater degree in almost the entire expanse of the IHR. The northeastern region comprising eight border states has been experiencing erratic rainfall patterns triggering floods and droughts. Climate change is believed to have aggravated these variations. Incidentally, in Assam, 109 people have died in the latest flood that has devastated the state since last month.
To tackle the impact of climate change, the Indian government framed the National Action Plan on Climate Change in 2010 with eight sub-missions, one of which focuses especially on the IHR.
It is evident that the plan has not been able to check the adverse impact of climate change in the Himalayan region.
The IIT-M study emphasizes effective communication with far-flung areas in the Himalayan region as a strategy to mitigate the adverse impact of the phenomenon. “By implementing this strategy throughout the region, people will be able to plan in advance and respond quickly and decisively to lessen the impact of any eventual loss. It will prove pivotal, particularly for people living in poorly constructed structures and during disastrous events such as the Kedarnath floods in Uttarakhand,” the report claimed.
The report stressed the need for greater integration of people from the Himalayan region into the mainstream on the rationale that a large chunk of the population in the zone belongs to the tribal communities living in rural areas. Increasing avenues of employment, enhancing infrastructural development, better health care facilities, availability of cleaner fuels and access to education and expanding sources of income beyond agriculture have been suggested as the means to achieve the goal.