Will India be unlivable by 2035?
Richard Mhapatra
An important new UN report has revealed some shocking statistics and predictions about climate change and forced displacement
The rapidly rising temperatures in much of India and central Africa are exceeding human tolerance. Nearly 3 billion people live in similar climate conditions in the Sahara Desert.
At the same time, it no longer takes prophets to predict whether life will flourish on this earth in the future. Climate scientists are issuing daily warnings about the climate emergency caused by unprecedented global warming. Perhaps this was experienced 100,000 years ago in a very different climate era.
We are currently living in the Middle Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago. At the same time, for about 6 thousand years, humans and the planet’s associated environment have inhabited and prospered in a suitable temperature regime. During this period, humans living in different geographical areas have lived in more or less similar temperature conditions.
In a way, we have never had the experience of surviving in any other temperature band, but this is about to change and much faster than we expect. The question arises: Suppose if the temperature increase crosses the current band, will this planet still be habitable?
Recently, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) has released a very different assessment that tries to imagine the near future. This UNEP report is named “Navigating New Horizons”. This assessment is an in-depth exploration into the near future of planetary health and human well-being based on current scientific studies, including a survey to rank various threats.
The UNEP report emphasizes that its purpose is not to predict but to “anticipate” the future. The report forecasts possible environmental, economic, social and geopolitical disruptions; assesses when they will affect us; and what the survey respondents’ perception is about each of these.
UNEP Executive Director Inger Andersen says, “The disruptions presented in this report are not guaranteed to occur. But they can happen.”
One of the obstacles considered in the assessment of this report is whether climate emergency effects such as forest fires, floods and unbearable heat will make vast swaths of the planet uninhabitable. A related disruption is mass migration caused by climate unsuitability.
The UNEP assessment says that this disruption can be felt in the next seven years, i.e. by 2035. Nearly 90 percent of the respondents included in the survey included in this assessment believe that this disruption is “likely, very likely and almost certain”.
India is among the regions that will be severely affected by this unbearable temperature. The increase in temperature will cross the boundary known as the “human climate zone”, which is the temperature band between 52 and 59 degrees Fahrenheit.
The assessment synthesized several scientific studies to reach this conclusion, with the first saying that the situation would be felt half a century later.
It cites a study that says, “Scientists estimate that in the next 50 years, three billion people could live outside the improved climate conditions (and especially temperatures) that have served humanity for the past 6,000 years, and worse, that by 2070, in the absence of climate mitigation or migration, some regions – northern South America, central Africa, India, and northern Australia – could be too hot for human life.”
The study, released in 2020, was led by ecologists, climatologists, and anthropologists from Washington State University, Pullman, the Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, and the Centre for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World, Department of Biosciences, and Aarhus University. The study qualified its findings by saying that half a century from now, about a third of the global population will be in sub-Saharan temperature conditions.
Adequate temperatures have been a key climate condition for human migration and “out of Africa” migration. Human migrations and migrations have been a key climate condition for choosing the right place to settle since time immemorial.
Humans are facing a similar situation now. Will there be waves of mass migrations in search of suitable climate regions? Researchers concluded in a 2020 study that “populations will not simply follow changing climates, as adaptation may resolve some challenges, and many other factors influence migration decisions.
Nevertheless, in the absence of migrations, one-third of the global population is projected to experience average annual temperatures above 29°C, which is currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara.”
However, many studies attribute migrations to temperature changes that affected human survival. For example, the Little Ice Age that affected Europe and the North Atlantic the most from 1560 to 1660. The expansion of mountain glaciers and the drop in temperatures triggered mass migrations that led to population collapses in Europe.
In the current climate emergency, reports are already showing that extreme climate events are likely to be more severe.
