Express View on Global Climate Risk Index: It’s not all gloom and doom.
Last month, the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report ranked extreme weather events as the second-most difficult security threat after armed conflicts and war. Now, one of the world’s longest-running climate impact indexes has quantified the toll taken by the crisis in the past three decades. More than 9,400 extreme weather events were recorded between 1993 and 2022, notes the latest edition of the Global Climate Risk Index (CRI). It reckons that floods, heatwaves, and cyclones claimed more than 7,65,000 lives in this period. The survey, conducted regularly since 2006 by the international think tank German Watch, estimates that the economic losses due to these extreme weather events amounted to more than $4 trillion (inflation-adjusted). The report’s findings are sobering for India — one in 10 climate casualties between 1993 and 2022 was from the country. It was the sixth worst-affected country in this period.
“There are clear indications that the world is entering an unpredictable phase of climate change,” says the report. The delayed onset of La Nina and its inability to cool global temperatures is the latest example of this phenomenon. Last month was the warmest January globally with the world recording an average surface temperature of 13.23 degrees Celsius, 1.75 degrees Celsius above the pre-industrial levels. While all parts of the world are vulnerable to weather vagaries, the report sounds a note of warning to policymakers in the hotter regions of the world, “where heatwave impacts are felt most acutely.” Climate change makes “early heat in India and Pakistan 30 times more likely,” the CRI points out. It lists the Subcontinental neighbours amongst the top nine heatwave-prone countries.
The picture painted in the CRI is, however, not uniformly grim. It makes a special mention of climate adaptation projects such as Ahmedabad’s Heat Action Plan. However, the report underlines the inadequacy of global efforts in building climate resilience. In addition to the well-known deficits in finance, it speaks of inadequate technology transfers from the North to the South. For long, the issue of climate adaptation has been left to UNFCCC-anchored negotiations. Building safeguards against floods, droughts, cyclones and heatwaves also requires engagement at other fora — at the G-20, or between neighbouring countries, for instance. The intensification of the climate crisis makes such cooperation imperative.