 Hello, you're watching People's Dispatch and today we're going to be talking about the flooding in South Asia. Now, we've all read reports of the disastrous incidents of flooding in Pakistan. Millions of people affected, over a thousand dead, huge issues of health, availability of food, etc. Pakistan is just one recent instance of a wave of similar incidents that have taken place across the South Asian region. So we have Raghunandan with us at the Delhi Science Forum and the All India People's Network Hinds Network. We're going to talk about this. Raghun, thank you so much for joining us. So as we've seen a lot of flooding and extreme weather events taking place in South Asia as a whole over the past many years, especially it's difficult to sort of bring all of this together under one umbrella because these are very diverse regions, very different weather conditions. But maybe could you take us through some of the patterns that we've seen in terms of these weather events and resultant flooding. Yeah, sure. As you say, weather patterns can vary according to several reasons. But we have seen, I think, some trends which have shown to be quite consistent in the South Asian region particularly. And that's related to the monsoon and climate scientists and meteorologists today believe that you can do all the manners of analysis and computer modeling to figure out why this trend is there. And they have come across no factor which is common to these trends other than climate change. The climate change is the only phenomenon that can explain these events, this trend over this period of time. For instance, the last 10 to 15 years have witnessed abnormal monsoons. Monsoons have come early. They have tended to be not in overall terms, the total amount of rainfall may have been plus minus 10%. But more than that, the precipitation that is the rainfall has been concentrated in just a few days. And this we have witnessed as you know in our country, in Bombay, in Chennai, in Hyderabad, right now we are witnessing it in Bangalore where almost one month's quota, if you like, of rainfall falls in a matter of one day or two days. So you're getting rainfall of 200 millimetres, 300 millimetres. Last year in Thane, just outside Mumbai, you had rainfall of 500 millimetres in just one day. And that exhausts almost a month and a half of the rainfall quota. So these are what are classified by meteorologists as extreme rainfall events. Anything more than 200 millimetres is certainly classified as extreme rainfall. And we've seen those occurring repeatedly in the last 10 to 15 years. I can't think of any two years where this has not occurred. Of course, there will be variations in region. Some years you will get this in Himachal, some years you will get this in Uttarakhand. You remember the monster rainfall and glacier melt in the 2013 Uttarakhand disaster, which washed away large parts of Kedarnath town, etc. And as you remarked, we've seen this in Nepal this year, in Bangladesh repeatedly again, but there are variations. Now, if you come to Pakistan specifically and what we are seeing this year, it follows this pattern fairly closely with one added dimension, which was also there in the other South Asian events we spoke of. And that is, you had very high temperatures and a prolonged heatwave in the months of April and May. Temperatures exceeding 40 to 45 over a period of 2 to 3 weeks continuously. Parts of Pakistan reaching 50 degrees Celsius, so very abnormal heatwave conditions. And as you may imagine, when the warmer air in the atmosphere is there because of the heatwave, the air is getting hotter and hotter, it has greater potential to absorb moisture. So, when the moisture comes, it accumulates in very large quantities in the atmosphere and therefore when it starts raining, it doesn't rain but it pours. Because there's so much moisture waiting there and when the precipitation starts, it just all comes down in a rush. So, that was part of the phenomena this year in Pakistan. And this kind of pattern, as I said, has now been associated with climate change. There is no other phenomena as you know, monsoons are modeled now using multiple parameters. You have supercomputers modeling the monsoons and they have found that no other parameter explains this other than climate change. So, we are now fairly confident that these phenomena are due to climate change. In Pakistan in particular this year, as I said, there was a heatwave that was followed by an early onset of the monsoon. And by a low pressure zone building up over the Arabian Sea, which then moved northwards. And that then these combination of these events put together resulted in this heavier precipitation, huge amounts of rainfall. But added to the rainfall is two other factors. One is the high temperatures resulted in more melting of glaciers in the northern hills of Pakistan. That is one additional factor. Several glacial lakes have also burst their boundaries and the water has come rushing down. So, all these have contributed to much heavier water in the Indus River and its tributaries, which have then flown down in Pakistan. Some local factors of Pakistan are also there. Most of the areas it has flown through are in Sindh, Baluchistan, the plains areas where the waters are going to flow down to the Arabian Sea. Pakistan does not have much by way of storage infrastructure, an extensive canal system. So, when the Indus or the tributary rivers burst their banks, there is nowhere else for the water to go, except in the fields and in the towns and cities. And what you're witnessing in Pakistan today is even though the rainfall has stopped, the water inundation continues because there's nowhere else for the water to go. One just has to slowly wait for the water to drain out into the Arabian Sea. Of course, this brings us to the question of how equipped we are across the region of South Asia to actually deal with such kind of events. Because we see flooding affecting rural areas of course, but we also see flooding affecting urban areas, some of the biggest cities in the region. So, it doesn't look like anywhere we are prepared to actually deal with the impact of this. In urban areas and as you rightly said, we have witnessed this every year, flooding in Mumbai, in Chennai, in many other cities, Delhi, not that much, but even in Delhi, a few drops of rain and the traffic is disrupted and there's water logging all over the place. The problem is the stormwater drainage system that we have in India in most cities are just not designed for this kind of heavy precipitation. Like I said, you expect a certain quantity of rainfall spread over two months during the monsoon. Even that sometimes catches us by surprise and results in waterlogging. But if you get that much rainfall following in two days, then again, there's nowhere for the water to go. It goes into the drainage system and comes back into the thing. We are witnessing this in Bangalore today. So, in fact, we will have to invest a large amount of money in relaying a new drainage system in all our cities. Because the drainage systems we have just cannot cope with this volume of water. That's one. Second is we have got haphazard urban development taking place. Land in the cities is viewed just as real estate and the builder lobby just sees so many square meters on which they can build. They don't take cognizance of the fact that there are natural drainage lines leading from higher elevation parts of the city down to the river or sea or wherever the water drains out. Buildings come up in those natural drains blocking the drainage system, which means again the water has nowhere to go and stands blocking it in Bangalore. So, this year reports are that the more expensive high-rise buildings are the ones that have suffered the most because they have been built without any reference to urban planning, what drainage there is in the city, etc. They just acquired a parcel of land and built on it. There are people who have paid for it and those areas are suffering because the drainage is back. And third, natural drainage which most of our cities have, some river passing through it. In Mumbai, you have the Miti river. In Delhi, you have the Najafgarh and other drains which used to be rivers once upon a time. In Chennai, you have the Kuwum and the Adiyar rivers. All these rivers which would carry the water from the city into the ocean are now blocked by construction, by garbage, by overgrown, overgrowth of all kinds of vegetation. So, existing drains we have blocked up. Natural drainage lines we have blocked by unplanned construction activities. And even the storm water drains that we have built are under capacity. Now, if all these things put together, it's not surprising that we are facing these problems. The important thing to realize is the longer we wait, the more it's going to cost us. I fully recognize that this is an expensive business. Raying drainage lines is not an easy task. It's not cheap. It is expensive, but it's a one-time investment that's going to carry you through for the next 100 years. Existing drainage has seen us through for 100 years now. The drainage we'll build now will see us through for the next 50 to 75 years at least. But the longer you wait, the more it's going to cost. If it is going to cost 20 crore per kilometer today, 5 years later it's going to cost 100 crore per kilometer of drainage. So, the longer you wait, the more money it's going to cost. The unfortunate part is in India, we've been dealing with climate negotiations, etc. And making our mitigation promises. We have completely forgotten about what are happening to climate impacts here at home in our country. And we have not even started taking preparations to build resilience to the climate impacts which are already hitting us. Ragwin, that context also, of course, there's been a lot of talk about Pakistan as well, which contributes less than 1% of global carbon emissions but has been identified as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. We have seen similar situations in Afghanistan also. So, for countries in this region, for instance, what really are some of the mitigation strategies? We know COP 27 is also coming up. There'll be a lot of discussions on these issues as well. So, like I said, each country will face its own unique problems. We in India have a very large peninsula area and we are facing coastal erosion in a big way. Many villages have been washed off, particularly in Tamil Nadu, Pondicherry, in Kerala. This is happening more and more frequently. In the coasts shrinking and the oceans moving in, latest computer models have shown that by the year 2030, large parts of Mumbai, Chennai, Kochi, Puri, Kolkata will be submerged under rising sea levels. You know, even in Bombay, large parts of the city are built over reclaimed land and they are at the same level as the sea. So, if the sea rises by one foot, that's it. One foot of water is then permanently covering your land, on top of which you get high tide and on top of which you will get storm surges if there are high winds, storms, typhoons, cyclones or whatever. It is extremely vulnerable in terms of sea level rise. We have seen in our country the hill regions in the Himalayas, in Himachal and Uttaraf. As it is, these are young and geologically unstable areas. So, these extreme rainfall events precipitate landslides, rock slides, which we have further compounded by using very bad techniques in road construction, in construction of bridges, infrastructure, hydroelectric projects and even urban settlements in the hills far larger than the carrying capacity of those areas. So, if there is one episode of this nature, it's going to wash away a lot of this infrastructure as we saw last year and two years ago with the Tapovan hydroelectric project and many parts of Srinagar City being washed away and so on. And then you have the eastern belt in Bengal and the Sundarbans which is affecting Bangladesh as well as India. Submergence has already started. There's been almost a foot and a half of sea level rise in the Sundarbans. There is very simple mud bunds that are being built in the Sundarbans by the local people which is not doing very much and in fact may increase overflow of the water into the villages and prevent drainage back into the drainage part. So, these have to be scientifically worked out and designed apart from the fact that we are also destroying natural protective barriers like mangroves etc in the region and on top of that our government has compounded these problems by reducing the coastal zone regulation area. It used to be that you cannot construct within 100 meters of the coast. Now that's been reduced to 50 meters. That means we are exposing more areas too. So, we are doing two things. We are engaging in developmental activities which will worsen the climate impact when it hits us. We are removing natural protective barriers and we have not started taking any action to anticipate these problems and build resilience to this in whatever way we can. Some of these will call for innovative solutions which we should be looking for doing pilot projects in different parts of the country. We need to do that. So, in fact, the Delhi Science Forum and the All India People Science Network has called for a national action plan on adaptation and climate resilience. It's time to launch that like we have launched a program for reducing emissions on climate change but we need to have a large plan in India for adaptation and climate resilience which should involve all stakeholders particularly state governments, scientific institutions, civil society organizations, local self-government bodies etc. who can bring ideas, resources, problems and solutions to the table and work them out in a cooperative spirit but recognizing that money is still only with the central government. State governments don't have money, Panchayats don't have money, nobody else has got money. So, for the funds that you require, it requires active participation of the Union government in these programs. Okay and I guess also this also brings to the fore especially for smaller countries the issue of climate financing as well on which the global north is completely failed to deliver. I absolutely agree. I'll just add a small rider. The Partisan Human Rights Commission today has spoken about compensatory finances for the disaster, loss and damage, the issue of loss and damage with many developing countries have been raising in the international negotiations for law. However, I would like to express a word of caution on this. The developed countries as a whole have pledged a hundred billion dollars a year going back to the Paris Agreement, going back to Copenhagen and the world has not seen more than ten billion dollars out of this. So, you can add reparations, loss and damage, adaptation, mitigation, funding. You can keep demanding this. Ultimately, it's a package of money which the developing countries have to give. So it doesn't really, to me, okay, you're making a political point by saying pay reparations, pay for loss and damage, see what you've done. But ultimately, it's the same kitty of money from which you're going to get the money. We've not seen that kind of money flowing yet and with what's happening in Ukraine and Russia, billions of dollars have been pledged by the western countries for this war effort against Russia. So that's less money that's available for anything else here. So although countries are demanding and rightly so reparations, etc., let's face the realities that there's a limited amount of money that's there in the kitty and out of that, the most vulnerable countries, the countries with the least amount of resources, should get first claim on those plans. Thank you so much, Raghu, for talking to us. It's a very grim picture but it's also an issue we need to keep talking about, raise awareness about. Thank you. That's all we have time for today. Keep watching People's Dispatch.