NEW DELHI: The Centre on Tuesday admitted that the country as a whole will be affected by the ongoing climate change affecting socio-economic life of millions of people but at the same time assured that several steps, including the Paris Convention decisions, have been taken up to effectively counter the drastic change in nature.
“Climate Change is a global problem that affects all countries and requires concerted action by all to combat its adverse effects,” MOS, Ministry Environment, DR Mahesh Sharma said. He was replying to a question from Wansuk Syiem, Rajya Sabha MP from Meghalaya, about the recent World Bank Report on climate change in India.
India has undertaken a series of programmes, plans and actions to mitigate and adapt to the effects of climate change and submitted the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) under Paris Agreement for 2021-2030, Sharma said. The Paris Agreement also has an in-built mechanism for ratcheting up future NDCs, which will address some of the concerns highlighted in the World Bank report, he said.
The statistics presented above are under a carbon intensive scenario, where the implementation of Paris Agreement has not been factored in and other actions to adapt or mitigate the effects of climate change are also not being considered, the minister pointed out. The report also does not consider technological changes and the rapid expansion of renewable energy in different parts of the world, he added.
The World Bank Report titled “South Asia’s Hotspots: The Impact of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards” cautioned that “hotspots predicted under the carbon-intensive climate scenario will reduce projected per capita GDP by 2.8 percent in India”.
Altogether “1,324.2 million people would be living in areas that are projected to become severe, moderate and mild hotspots” by 2050, it had predicted.
The World Bank had no predictions about the North East but other reports had cautioned that climate change will affect the region the most. Wansuk also raised questions about the erratic rainfall going on in the country including in the North East.
