Climate turbulence ahead: Time to fasten our seatbelts

livemint.com:

For most well-off urban residents, the effects of climate change have mostly been viewed from afar as a problem confronted by villagers. The myriad images aiming to highlight the problem include photos from parts of rural Bangladesh evacuated because of the salination of fields where crops once grew, for example. Refugee boats reaching the shores of southern Europe from North Africa mostly carry villagers escaping the effects of heat waves.

This year’s winner of the Asian College of Journalism’s photojournalism award was a photo essay of the starkest kind. Sudip Maiti’s photos published in Frontline magazine showed the effects of hundreds of villagers displaced because of erosion caused by the Ganga and its tributaries. We may glance at such disturbing images and quickly look away.

I happened to be a judge for the ACJ award and had to resist the urge to do the same. Over the past several months, however, it is urban residents in India who have felt the effects of climate change up close. This year, there have been record temperatures in Delhi, touching almost 50° Celsius.

But, it is the south and east of India that accounted for two-thirds of all heatwave days recorded in 2023. Last week, a report was released by the Centre for Science and Environment called Anatomy of an Inferno. Among its disturbing findings was that “cities are not cooling down at night at the rate they used to" 20 years ago, and that “all cities have registered significant increase in their built heat island effect," a reference to the concretisation of cities and the use of generators and air-conditioners that add to carbon emissions and trap heat.