Chapter I: Climate change risk – time for action?

How dare you?” she exclaimed. Her voice echoed through the halls of the UN climate change summit and the minds of millions listening to her. Greta Thunberg, a 16-year-old kid, demanded justice for the millions suffering and held us all guilty as she yanked the skeleton we chose to conveniently hide in our closets as we chased our perceptions of the greater good – "Climate Change". Climate change risk!

Whenever I discuss this with some of my print industry colleagues, the first reaction is "Is it real?" followed by remarks like “doesn’t matter to my business”, “new conspiracy theory”, “why should I bother", Greenwashing and so on. Then I tell them, let’s look around.

Starting with Covid-19 to unprecedented rain and floods in Mumbai, Assam, Kerala, in recent years and months, wild storms and record-breaking temperatures seem to be all over the world news, especially in India. I vividly remember travelling from Vadodara to Chennai on last week of July 19 with extreme weather conditions variation – Vadodara sinking in flood and in Chennai people standing in queue for hours to get a single pot of water.

Duality you may call, one part of the country struggling for a drop of water and the other end sinking in water. So, how serious is this risk from climate change? Let’s take the impact on our commercial capital Mumbai.

Future climate projections show that among 136 coastal cities across the world, Mumbai is second-most at risk to climate-induced sea-level rise and extreme weather events. Guangzhou in China tops the list and Kolkata was identified as seventh-most at risk.

According to another analysis from McKinsey & Company, Mumbai could witness a 25% increase in flash-flood intensity events by 2050, with average flood depth rising from 0.46m to 0.82m by 2050, which would lead to cost escalation for infrastructure damage (capital stock damage) from the current USD 580 million to USD 920 million by 2050. Are these impacts a sign of a threatening global climate change?

Almost all the world’s scientists think so. But it’s not doomsday theory! Before we proceed further, global experts are assuring that there is still time to recover and save this beautiful world for our future generation! So, let’s try to understand climate change and its impact before discussing mitigation plans. Well firstly, climate change isn’t just our day-to-day temperature, rain or clouds.

Climate is characterised by long term and large-scale weather patterns, such as the seasonal monsoon of India. Importantly, it is driven by the sun’s heat flowing in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere. So, how is the climate changing? We need to brush up our high school science knowledge to understand this.

Our atmosphere lets sunlight and heat pass through it keeping us warm and well lit. But, certain gases in our atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide and methane, trap the heat instead and act as greenhouses, retaining the heat without letting it escape. You might think we would do good without these “greenhouse gases” in our atmosphere trapping all the heat, but their absence would lead to a temperature drop of up to 30 degrees, which would be equally cataclysmic as an increase in temperature.

For the last 150 years or so, we’ve emitted more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, primarily through the burning of fossil fuels to produce energy. As a result, the planet is getting warmer and the climate is changing. The famous 2015 United Nations’ Paris Agreement, which was signed by around 180 nations, suggests that we should limit climate warming to well below two degrees Celsius, and ideally to 1.5 degrees.

But what does a degree or two matter? Well, when we talk about “a degree or two”, we’re referring to the global average temperature. In some places it will be a bit cooler than that while in other places, such as the Arctic, it may be up to 12 degrees warmer. So, it represents a really big change and we©ve already seen average warming of one degree Celsius of the average global temperature since the pre-industrial times.

That's before we started to burn all that CO2. Based on the world’s current trajectory, we’re projected to reach almost four degrees of warming by the end of this century. This insidious warming trend has major implications for the climate patterns that we©ve always relied upon to grow food, manage our freshwater supplies and plan our cities.

If we also factor in projected sea-level rise and storms, then humans have quite an expensive and dangerous challenge on their hands. So this is all very unsettling. What can we do? We must cut out greenhouse gases emissions almost immediately to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Now, the good news is that we know how to do that. We know how to fix it. So, let’s understand the problem then? The biggest challenge is the burning of fossil fuels. Now, historically, we© ve done this to produce power, fuel transport, and ultimately drive the world’s economy.

At the same time, we’ve cleared the forests around the world, which have reduced their capacity to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Now, you may wonder if the solution is to give up electricity and all our factory-made comforts. The answer to that is “no” and will stay that way only if we start focusing consciously on mitigating climate change. More about that in the coming weeks. Goodbye, for now.