Commentary: The Heat Is On, From Poll Booths To Weather Stations

“April is the cruellest month,” wrote T.S. Eliot in poem The Waste Land. For the 30 million residents of Kerala this April was particularly cruel, with the India Meteorological Department (IMD) declaring the first ever recorded heatwave in the state. The heatwave also came at a time when Kerala, along with other parts of the country, is part of the national elections process, with campaigning, public meetings and voting happening under high temperatures. The ambient heat is expected to continue in the coming days too, while the political heat is likely to continue till June 4, and beyond.

Every year, summer comes early in Kerala, when compared to the other parts of the country. It starts in February, when the rest of the country is hesitantly shaking away the winter cold. Located at the southwestern edge of the Indian peninsula, Kerala has to pilot in the southwest monsoon. For that to happen the state has to be hotter earlier than the other parts of the country.

By May, when the rest of the country sizzles with summer heat, Kerala usually receives a few pre-monsoon showers and would be relatively cooler. In the years of the decades past, when the southwest monsoon used to come with regularity, June 1 was considered the date for its onset.

It is not the summer that surprised the residents of Kerala this year, but its intensity. Experts explain that the current heatwave is due to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) phenomenon prevalent now. By mid-year, El Niño is expected to weaken and change to La Niña. This combined with changes expected in air temperatures over the Indian Ocean by mid-year, there is a forecast of above normal monsoon in 2024. Whether this would mean the possibility of floods is not known at the moment.

However, with ENSO continuing for the coming next few weeks, the India Meteorological Department expects heatwave conditions in other parts of the country too, for which the Kerala heat is a curtain raiser.

Climate scientist Roxy Mathew Koll of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology had recently posted on social media a map that had a spread of red, indicating a heatwave, over most parts of Asia.

South Asia is a theatre for climate change

Koll, along with scientists from multiple institutions recently published a book chapter that talks of the Indian Ocean recording the fastest increase in sea temperature since the 1950s, The Indian Ocean has been warming at a rate of 0.12⁰C per decade. Due to redistribution of heat from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, the heat gain in the Indian Ocean represents one quarter of all the ocean warming since the 1990s. The prognosis, using modelling studies, is even more dire, with a 3 degrees Celsius heat increase estimated from 2020 to the end of the century.

Koll told Mongabay-India that by 2050, the heat increase is expected to breach the 2 degrees Celsius mark (from the Industrial Revolution levels). By this time, the Indian Ocean could even reach a permanent heatwave situation, with it being present for 220 to 250 days in a year, from the present rate of 20 days in a year.

The South Asian monsoon requires the land to be hotter than the sea by a certain degree to help the moisture-laden winds to move inland. If this equilibrium is disturbed with higher temperature of the Indian Ocean, the regularity of the southwest monsoonal system could get disturbed. Instead, this would be replaced with a string of extreme weather events – excessive rainfall over short durations followed by long dry periods.

In August 2019, the then IMD Director General Mrutyunjay Mohapatra told Mongabay-India that over multiple locations in the country, the number of high rainfall days (over 150 mm in a day) have increased at the cost of moderate and light rainfall days.

The statements by Koll and Mohapatra go on to strengthen the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its fourth (2007) and sixth (2022) assessment reports, which state with confidence that South Asia is on the way to becoming a theatre for climate change. Thus, this year’s heatwave – and other extreme weather events – may not be an aberration but the norm in years to come.

This has serious economic, social and political implications for the South Asian region, and especially so for India. Even after the contribution of the manufacturing and services sector increasing in India’s gross domestic product pie in the recent decades, a good agricultural harvest is still considered the starting point of the country’s annual economic cycle. Diwali spending still remains the boost from where this annual cycle begins, with the festival itself signifying celebrations after the first major crop harvest.

Erratic monsoons and extreme weather events destroy agriculture in two ways. One, standing crops could die with excessive rains or heat. Two, with carefully-bred seeds being used since the Green Revolution, the flexibility that the older, lesser producing but more resilient crops provided the farmers has disappeared. When farming suffers, manufacturing and trade suffers in turn.

Election heat in a changing climate

During elections, discontent that has been simmering for the past five years comes out into the open. That is also the time when communities get an opportunity to meet their elected representatives (or prospective ones) face to face and bring to the fore issues related to the environment and governance of natural resources. The issues are multifold, depending on geographical locations and the social, economic and political milieu of the region.

Since the election period is also a time when political parties try to convince the voters that they are sensitive to their concerns, environmental issues usually find mention in election manifestos.

For the 2024 national elections, the manifesto of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leading the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) reiterates the Lifestyle for Environment (LIFE) concept that Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced to the world. It talks about increasing energy generation from non-fossil fuels; revitalising rivers; improving air quality; promoting afforestation and agroforestry; protecting the Himalayas; developing coastal climate resilience; expanding green credit; preventing human-animal conflict; and achieving disaster resilience. There is also a chapter focussing on the environment and governance of urban spaces.

The manifesto of the Indian National Congress (INC), the lead party in the opposition alliance, has an entire section on the environment and climate change. The promises listed here include the constitution of an independent Environment Protection and Climate Change Authority; expanding the scope of the existing climate change action plan to a National Climate Resilience Development Mission; launching a Green New Deal Investment Programme to support renewable energy development; establishing a Green Transition Fund to achieve net zero targets; and promoting people’s access to water and democratic sharing of the resource.

Irrespective of whichever political grouping or combination that comes to power after June, extreme weather events will continue to become more frequent and more intense. Heatwaves, droughts and floods do not distinguish along political lines. If the destruction is across board then the mitigating action also has to be across political lines.

This requires deep, bipartisan introspection and action. Kerala had an opportunity for this a few months after the floods of 2018. The immediate months after an extreme event are usually lost in trading blames – “you should have” or “you did not” charges. It is only after around three months, after the dust settles (or, in this case the water recedes) is time for introspection on what were the systemic defects and what can be done to respond to future situations better. With the state divided politically over the Supreme Court’s Sabarimala judgement, this window of opportunity was totally lost. As a result, if another similar flood were to affect Kerala this year, the response of the state and the people would not be any better than that of 2018.

Elections are a time of such feedback loops and reality checks. It is one of the few opportunities when the political aspirants meet their voters. If this heatwave can help remind the voter and the voted on what needs to be done in the next five years, then the sweating and sweltering now is perhaps not in vain.

(Originally published under Creative Commons from Mongabay-India. Read the original article here)