EDITORIAL 2: Not just climate change
Context
This year’s monsoon has been particularly destructive in the lower Himalaya, causing devastating erosion and flash floods in many parts of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh.
The reasons behind
- Without a doubt, rapidly rising temperatures on our planet and the increasing presence of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere pose an enormous risk to the future of life on Earth as we know it.
- However, automatically blaming erratic weather on climate change often distracts us from the real causes and consequences.
- Unfortunately, this repeated refrain has become an alternative to the old, weather-beaten phrase, “acts of god,” which insurance companies always invoked as a disclaimer.
The Himalayas and problems
- The Himalaya is an extremely unstable region that is vulnerable to the powerful forces of hydrology, erosion and earthquakes. Deforestation and other man-made environmental problems only make things worse.
- What has changed is the indiscriminate, unplanned and often illegal construction of homes, guesthouses, ashrams, hotels, Maggi points and military camps that lie directly in the path of potential flash floods.
- The scarcity of buildable land in the mountains, where level ground is hard to find, drives people to take desperate risks. Margins of streams and rivers, often filled with debris from earlier floods, present a tempting option.
- Add to this political opportunism or bureaucratic complacency and the end result becomes inevitable.
- Much of the recent construction along the Char Dham Yatra route in Uttarakhand is in response to constantly increasing numbers of pilgrims visiting sacred sites near the sources of the Ganga.
- These were once remote shrines that devotees approached on foot, but they are now interconnected by ever-widening motor roads, not to mention helicopter services.
- Without some sort of control over the number of visitors that travel through these valleys, the magnitude of forthcoming disasters will only increase.
- The annual flood of religious tourism in Uttarakhand leads to the proliferation of hotels, dhabas and yoga retreats that cater to their needs.
- The majority of these structures are erected along riverbanks where water levels can suddenly rise, washing away everything in their wake.
- In Mussoorie, where new construction had been halted for years by the Supreme Court of India, there is now a surreptitious building boom.
- Many new houses and homestays have been built on precarious foundations, often atop the rubble of earlier landslides. Of course, none of these disasters waiting to happen are the result of climate change.
- Nevertheless, when rain begins to fall and hillsides collapse, we tend to look for causes beyond our own careless greed and indifference.
Conclusion
The true consequences of global warming will be far more profound and prolonged than the natural disasters we are seeing today. Shifting weather patterns and melting glaciers in the Himalaya are certainly part of the outcome. However, by always pointing a finger at climate change, we distance ourselves from the more immediate and avoidable factors that make these crises so horrendous and painfully familiar.