- As you are aware, environmental degradation is a real threat to humanity, affecting our daily lives is stating the obvious. The erratic weather vagaries being witnessed globally are a matter of grave concern for every leadership. The resultant debilitating outcome in the form of unseasonal rains, hailstorms, floods, droughts, famine, and related weather vagaries has singed the global community considerably. The government authorities are battling it out to ensure people are provided with succour from the relentless discomfiture caused by the natural occurrences. Little wonder that every country is seriously contributing to addressing this growing natural challenge in ways and means best suited to them.
PC: BioVoice News
- Not only that, but the global consortium also formed for the purpose has been brainstorming to reduce the carbon footprints caused by fossil fuel burnings, leading to an increase in temperatures. The rise in temperatures has had a cascading effect on other aspects, triggering unprecedented natural calamities, claiming scores of innocent lives, and damaging a humongous number of properties. While these extreme weather-related occurrences have become a norm rather than an exception, India too is facing similar challenges when two tragedies within days were reported. How can the Indian government change anything at all? Cloudbursts are no longer to be considered as freak events.
PC: NDTV
- Flash floods in Kashmir’s Kishtwar come barely 10 days after a similar extreme weather event in Uttarakhand’s Dharali. Such sudden, intense downpours over a small area have increased in recent years due to climate change – glofs, flash floods, and landslides are the terrible new normal. But the fact is, the damage suffered on the ground is also due to unplanned development in mountainous areas. There is nothing muddy about the impact of climate change; the hydrological system is out of whack, and mountainsides are destabilized with construction activities. One feeds into the other. Dharali yesterday, Kishtwar today, another one awaits. It rains in violent bursts, glaciers are melting faster, and aquifers are draining without recharge. The impact is global.
PC: The Hill
- The maximum June temperature in Portugal breached 46 degrees. Almost 2,000 have died in Europe’s heatwaves this year. Wildfires across the US through Jan – beyond the fire-season of dry Aug-Sep – burned over 1,000 acres of land, displaced thousands. Meanwhile, it is business as usual of reckless construction, carbon trading, gassing on emissions, and drawing sustainability-flavoured pies in the sky in corporate boardrooms with almost the same fervour that marks the inaction on climate, across govts. It is essential to stop activities that result in making the impact of freak weather more severe. The search and rescue in Dharali and Kishtwar are another sobering reminder that we are not to lurch from one Himalayan crisis to another.
