New Delhi
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The extreme heat wave of recent days in India and Pakistan, with 62 degrees on the surface and almost 50 in the airhas left behind damage that affects about 1 billion people due to impacts on human health or on crops and domestic animals essential for subsistence, according to the NGO
Alliance for Solidarity-ActionAid.
This recent increase in temperatures has especially impacted Uttar Pradesh (India), where Alianza por la Solidaridad-ActionAid has been working since 2020 with projects related to improving livelihoods through crops or small farms that were already affected in the past. February due to torrential rains and hail out of season.
The average temperature of March and April in that area was the highest in 122 years, according to the India Meteorological Department, and May has started with an intense heat wave.
“I am very sad because due to the extreme increase in temperature in our area, a baby goat that was born recently had diarrhea and died, and it was very important to us that it survive,” he said. Meena, from the village of Durgapurin the Indian district of Jhansi.
rajoo bai, in Dawani, noted: “We have saved our chickens from heat death with our own clothing and wooden sheds in the village. We have to prevent them from dying, but also protect ourselves.
“This summer the groundwater is decreasing day by day and our water sources like hand pump and well are very low so we can’t water the vegetables and the production will be low and it will affect the income we have to live,” stressed Bhagwati in a village in Salat Mahoba.
Distress
These testimonies, collected by Alianza-ActionAid, are a sample of the anguish of millions of peasants who see how their efforts to adapt to climate change are not enough in the face of the virulence of its impacts.
The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) highlights that climate adaptation is not being financed as necessary, to which is added that the damages and losses caused by climate change should be compensated. it is generating in those who have not provoked it.
India is responsible for 6.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, behind China, the United States and the EU. This percentage is mainly due to coal consumption, although the Asian subcontinent is home to more than 18% of the world’s population, while the United States, with 4% of the world’s population, causes 13.5% of the gases emitted. .
According to Indian government sources, heat stroke alone has killed 11,571 people in the decade between 2011 and 2020. In 2015, more than 2,000 deaths from heat stroke were recorded during an episode similar to the current one. The extreme heat has already claimed the lives of at least 25 people in recent days in the country. Neighboring Pakistan is suffering the same ravages from this unprecedented heat wave. Both countries have already suffered from electricity cuts and water shortages caused by this heat wave.
Extreme heat waves every few years
“Climate change makes high temperatures more likely in India,” he said. Mariam Zachariah from the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London. “Before human activities increased global temperatures, heat like the one that hit India earlier this month would only have been observed once every 50 years,” he added. “Now we can expect such high temperatures, about once every four years,” he warned.
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George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism