Most of our coastal cities will be under water very soon. Kerala, which has one third of the landmass very close to the sea, will be submerged under water
By Binu Mathew
On the morning of July 30, a huge landslide occurred at Mundakkai, in the mountainous district of Wayanad, Kerala. More than 170 people have been confirmed dead and hundreds are still missing.
It is the worst landslide in the history of Kerala. Perhaps one of the worst in the history of India.
A whole village was washed away in the flood with the rapid flow of earth and rocks. A government higher secondary school and a bridge got washed away. Rescue operations are still going on.
According to data released by the India Meteorological Department, the district of Wayanad received as much as 7 per cent of its entire seasonal rainfall in 24 hours (from Monday morning to Tuesday morning). The Mundakkai region received 572 mm of rainfall in the past 48 hours prior to the landslide. This clearly points to an extreme climate change-induced disaster.
Experts like Madhav Gadgil are saying that it was due to the environmental degradation that the disaster occurred. The fact of the matter is that the landslide happened inside a deep forest which was not affected by human intervention.
The disaster area belongs to the Western Ghats, a UNESCO world heritage site, which is an ecologically fragile and sensitive area. This is also a region which is prone to frequent landslides.
The Western Ghats, starting from the southern tip of the Indian subcontinent to the Konkan region, is home to about 50 million people. In the parts belonging to Kerala, at least 5 million people live. Indeed, human habitation has caused a lot of ecological damage to the region.
After the liberalisation of Indian economy, tourism has become a major industry in the region. Lots of tourist resorts have come up in the last 30 years, leading to stone-quarrying in a major way. The stones from Western Ghats are used to build new roads, bridges and houses even in the lower land area, including the Adani port in Vizhinjam, Trivandrum.
If you look at the history of the Kerala part of Western Ghats, it was the Britishers who started huge tea, coffee and rubber plantations, starting from late 19th century. It has caused huge environmental degradation in the region.
Now, Tata and Harrison Malayalam are the big planters in the region. They behave like feudal lords. They give paltry sums as lease to the government and encroached on government lands. They plant mono crops. The landslide-affected Mundakkai is also a tea estate owned by the Harrison Malayalam company.
The farmers migrated to Wayanad and other parts of the Western Ghats of Kerala during the independence period due to acute famine. The government promoted the migration of farmers. It is the descendants of these farmers who have been killed by the landslide. They are the unsuspecting victims of an unchecked development model and climate change caused by the Global North.
No place can withstand the kind of rain that flooded the landslide area. Yes, of course, wrong development model and environmental degradation has contributed to the disaster, but it is not the root cause. It is climate change caused by global warming for which the Global North is primarily responsible.
The present CO2 level in the atmosphere is 421 parts per million (ppm). This is similar to the CO2 level of Pliocene Epoch which was a period in Earth’s history that lasted from 5.333 million to 2.58 million years ago. During the Pliocene epoch, CO2 levels in the Earth’s atmosphere were between 380 and 420 (ppm) during the warmest period.
The global mean sea level during the early Pliocene Epoch was around 17.5 ± 6.4 meters which means that we are locked in for a sea level rise of at least 6.5 meters — 17 meters being the upper limit. Also, CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising 2.9 ppm per annum. This also means that we are moving into an un-chartered territory in the climate crisis.
Most of our coastal cities will be under water very soon. Kerala, which has one third of the landmass very close to the sea, will be submerged under water. As the ocean warms, more and more drastic climate events like Mundakkai will be a regular phenomenon.
As Himalayan glaciers melt, the rivers originating from the Himalayas will dry up. Most of North India will be a desert.
As the permafrost melts in the Arctic, Methane, which is 28 times more potent than CO2, will be released into the atmosphere. We will lead to a feedback loop, meaning more and more greenhouse gases will be released into the atmosphere without any human intervention.
Another dangerous scenario is that as the permafrost melts, viruses and bacteria, buried millions of years ago, will be released into the atmosphere, causing pandemics like COVID. And forest fires will be a regular occurrence in the dry season.
Based in Kochi Bindu Mathew is Editor, countercurrents.org Photo courtesy countercurrents.org