Case4-February-2013
The fourth report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has drawn the attention of the world towards the climate change concerns and challenges. It has projected that the mean temperature of the globe may show an increase between 1.4 degree Celsius and 5.8 degree Celsius by 2100. “This unprecedented increase is expected to have severe impacts on the global hydrological system, ecosystems, sea level, crop production and related processes. The impact would be particularly severe in the tropical areas, which mainly consist of developing countries, including India” says Jayant Sathaye, P. R. Shukla and N. H. Ravindranath (2006).
Further they state “Developing countries are faced with immediate concerns that relate to forest and land degradation, freshwater shortage, food security and air and water pollution. Climate change will exacerbate the impacts of deforestation and other economic pressures, leading to further water shortages, land degradation and desertification. Increasing global temperatures will result in rising sea levels. Populations that inhabit small islands and/or low-lying coastal areas are at particular risk of severe social and economic disruptions from sea-level rise and storm surges that could destroy cities and disrupt large coastal livelihoods”.
The projected impact of climate change could not be prevented in a short period of time hence the damage created on atmosphere is very large extent. So there is a need for adaptation by human beings and other living organisms to the changing climate to survive without struggling too much.
Further, Jayant Sathaye, P. R. Shukla and N. H. Ravindranath (2006) have discussed that the most effective way to address climate change is to adopt a sustainable development pathway by shifting to environmentally sustainable technologies and promotion of energy efficiency, renewable energy, forest conservation, reforestation, water conservation, etc. Also, today there exist increasing concerns on reducing the vulnerability of the people, their natural resources and their socio-economic system to this projected climate change. We do keep hearing a lot about the mitigation and adaptive strategies for addressing climate change issues being extensively discussed and experimented worldwide.
Though the issue of climate change is global, it also requires local action by means of developing an understanding on climate change at micro level, promoting mitigation and adaptive strategies.
As the challenges posed by climate change are many, we need to ensure that the development initiatives / programmes helps in reducing the vulnerability of the people to the negative impacts of climate change and in increasing their coping and adaptive strategies to withstand any future threats. DHAN Foundation, being a development organization working on poverty reduction cannot negate the issue of climate change as it has serious implication on poverty and vulnerability.
DHAN has many thematic programmes to address poverty reduction through activities like conservation and creation of water bodies, afforestation, Coastal Conservation and DRR. Our main focus on the above themes is promoting livelihood and sustaining the activities to reduce poverty. DHAN has experience in environment friendly approach, mitigation and coping with strategies on natural resource management to sustain the resources.
Climate Change adaptation as a new theme will have lot of opportunities to deepen and strengthen our efforts in all existing programmes. Also the proposed theme of Climate Change Adaptation will give scope to address many climate change concerns and challenges, and poverty reduction. Moreover as DHAN works in various contexts like tribal (Forest) Rural (Agriculture & Water), Urban (Green house gas emission) and Coastal (Marine), there exists a compulsory need and scope to work.
Climate change affects all type development process especially in developing countries. DHAN Foundation has high relevance to adapt climate Change to sustain the development issues in different geo-hydrological contexts. New theme on Climate Change Adaptation emerged in this background.
Our recent works on DRR also helps to understand climate change aspects and its effect on the people in terms of increased no. of weather related disasters and increased vulnerability of the people. Also, it reinforces the need to understand the connectivity of the themes of DRR and climate change adaptation. The linkage reveals that the strategies proposed for DRR and the climate change adaptation has the potential to complement each other. This again gives a lead to think of the interfacing scope between these two themes within the institution.
The climate change under the Tankfed agriculture context will pose a threat to the village ecosystem. The threat to village ecosystem will be caused mainly because of the siltation and dysfunctional tanks which creates havoc on the standing crops which further affects the livelihoods of both the farmers and landless farming community. This will lead to push migration to urban areas which in turn will hamper the farming ecosystem. Thus it leads to loss of productivity, fertility and bio-diversity.
The effect of Climate change will be in the form of uneven distribution of rainfall leading to crop failure. The distribution varies as
The variations in the precipitation had led to the extinct of few cropping pattern in local areas. Eg: Groundnut in Thirumangalam and Kallupatti blocks of Madurai district.
The climate change intensifies the natural disaster (flood and cyclone) frequency which inturn affects the development process. The other effects experienced are
Extreme temperatures in both summer (maximum) and winter (minimum) causes new health problems / new illness
Though we could see the effect of climate change on agriculture, coastal livelihoods health etc, the overall effect will be more on the poor because of their increased vulnerability and this will further accelerates the poverty and affects the development process.
Many of the activities of our existing programmes (KCBP, TADP, CALL, and RFDP) will qualify as activities for addressing Climate change issues. Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation interventions and development interventions need to complement and supplement each other.
The interventions that are fortifying current coping capacity also have the power to strengthen long-term adaptive capacity. The New theme on CCA will help to understand the issues related to climate change faced by the community, their coping measures and gaps at the location and regional level. Scope exists for Climate Change Education to Action at individual and collective levels.
The programme components suggested for the new theme of CCA are list as follows. It needs to be short listed by grouping the different components.
The new theme would be piloted in Rural (Mullai, Marutham - Madurai district), Tribal (Kurunji), Coastal (Neithal -Nagapattinam and Ramanathapuram) contexts to understand the Climate Change effects at micro level and impacts for dissemination.
The outcomes of the pilots could be utilised for finalising the components and design of the programme. The new theme has to prepare proposal for implementing the theme as pilot. It is high time that we develop good understanding on the issues of climate change and its effect on poverty.