Put words into action, fight climate change
The skies opened up on coastal Libya this week. Unprecedented rainfall claimed more than 6,000 lives in the eastern port city of Derna. The city’s mayor said that at least 20,000 others are still missing. The week before, the same rain clouds had caused widespread floods across the Mediterranean in Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. At the same time, an earthquake flattened 50,000 houses and killed 5,000 in Morocco. Nature is in no mood to relent this El Niño season. But what aggravated the blows were shoddy construction, crumbling infrastructure like dams, and unready local governments.
Similar downpours played havoc in Himachal Pradesh earlier this year. More than 300 people died over three months as a direct result of rain-wrought devastations. Dozens of bridges were washed away, scores of buildings collapsed, and sliding hillsides piled tonnes of rock on highways. Hundreds of hill villages are still without the full service of roads that are their lifelines. Here, too, similar administrative failings were on display. Roads were broadened without firming up hillsides, houses were erected on untested soil, and low-slung bridges were built without accounting for such extreme events. Several regions of Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand remain imperilled.
The next calamity is a question of when, not if. While the fight to slow down climate change is a global, multi-generational grind, disaster planning and resilience testing of infrastructure can be improved right away. The benchmarks they are tested against can be upgraded. Earlier this year, India led the G20 nations in setting up a disaster risk reduction group. Its five action areas of early warning systems, infrastructure resilience, financing, reconstruction, and ecology-focused risk reduction need to avoid the analysis-paralysis such multilateral efforts are prone to. We cannot just be global thought leaders on the subject, we need to lead the battle on our own ground first. In July, the Council on Energy Environment and Water, a think tank, told us that Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu and Karnataka were among 12 states that were least prepared for extreme floods. This week, the National Disaster Management Authority tested an emergency phone alert system across the country and found several gaps. It reminds us that as the climate changes at its inexorable pace, we need to change faster