Mapping India’s Climate Vulnerability — A District Level Assessment

Mapping India’s Climate Vulnerability — A District Level Assessment

Subject – Disaster Management

Context – 74% of India’s districts prone to extreme climate like droughts, floods & cyclones, says study

Concept –

• Over 74 per cent of India’s districts are vulnerable to extreme climate events, with 27 out of 35 states and union territories being affected, a study by the Council for Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) has found.
• Assam, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Bihar are the five states most vulnerable to droughts, floods, cyclones, or a combination of the three, says the study titled ‘Mapping India’s Climate Vulnerability — A District Level Assessment.’
• The most vulnerable districts are Dhemaji and Nagaon (Assam), Khammam (Telangana), Gajapati (Odisha), Vizianagaram (Andhra Pradesh), Sangli (Maharashtra) and Chennai (Tamil Nadu).
• The study measured each district’s vulnerability to climate change by examining exposure (the nature and degree to which a system is exposed), sensitivity (the degree to which a system is affected), and adaptive capacity (the ability of a system to adjust to climate change) using spatio-temporal analysis, that is, data across geographies and time.
• Of the districts vulnerable to climate change, more than 45 per cent have undergone unsustainable landscape and infrastructure changes, exacerbating the effects of extreme weather events.
• According to the analysis, India has seen over 300 extreme events in recent decades, amounting to a loss of Rs 5.60 lakh crore.
• The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report released in August had said India would see more intense and frequent precipitation and heatwaves in the decades to come due to global warming.

Vulnerability across India

• The CEEW analysis also examines climate vulnerability across various zones of the country, and finds that western and central India are more vulnerable to drought-like conditions and their compounding effects, while northern and north-eastern zones are more vulnerable to extreme floods and their compounding effects.
• The southern and eastern zones are becoming extremely prone to cyclones, floods, and droughts combined.
• While exposure to extreme weather events is linear, the impacts are non-linear, depending on the sensitivity and adaptive capacity of the affected systems.
• Only 63 per cent of Indian districts have a disaster management plan, with 32 per cent of these being up-to-date till 2019.