Climate crisis

A global wheat crisis has been caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the ongoing war there, which has drastically reduced Ukraine’s wheat production and exports, while the resultant international sanctions have also somewhat reduced Russian production. Now, there is yet another complication, as the fertile wheat-growing regions of North India have been hit with drought and a severe heatwave.

Young wheat plants don’t do well with extreme heat. So the wheat crisis just got worse. India is the world’s second-largest wheat producer. While it exports little, using the crops to feed its 1.3 billion people, it will now have to import to make up for the loss, increasing demand at a time of shrinking supply.

While India has a hot climate and heat waves have struck it before, this time it is different. India hasn’t seen anything like the temperatures in March for at least a century and a quarter, and probably not for millennia. Global temperatures were cooler before we began pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere with the Industrial Revolution. This heatwave is part of the global climate emergency.

India’s governments – first the colonial British and since 1947 the independent state – have been keeping temperature records all over the country for at least 122 years. 2022 is crashing through many previous records. This was the hottest March since records began being kept.

Aniruddha Gosal at ‘AP’ notes that a Lancet report last year found that India’s vulnerability to extreme heat increased 15 percent from 1990 to 2019. India and Brazil are the two countries where most people die annually of heat exposure.

A recent article by Mariam Zachariah et al. in Geophysical Research Letters finds that: “The three states of Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh in the Indo-Gangetic Plains are the largest wheat producers in India, playing a crucial role in ensuring food security of this densely populated country. Wheat, a winter crop, is reported to be sensitive to heat stress because of rising temperatures and climate change. However, in previous studies, the sensitivity of wheat yield has been mainly explored with respect to the magnitude of temperature. Here, based on statistical analysis of observed temperature and actual wheat production data, we show that the magnitude, frequency, and areal extent of agricultural heat stress events are increasing in India’s wheat belt, with frequency showing the most pronounced trend... Under climate change, chances of below-average wheat production rise by 8 percent–27 percent in the worst-case scenario.”

So the authors are saying that high-powered modeling shows that not only increased average temperatures in India but also more frequent extreme heatwaves have the potential of reducing wheat yields by as much as 27 percent. They say this is a worst-case scenario, but at the moment we are heading for the worst case scenario of the climate emergency, since nobody is significantly reducing their carbon dioxide emissions, which jumped up last year.

Excerpted: ‘Climate Emergency: India’s Unprecedented Heatwave Adds to Global Bread Shortages’.

Courtesy: Commondreams.org