A new UK foreign office-funded study has found extreme climate events like cyclones, storms, floods and drought are driving residents in Odisha’s coastal Kendrapara district and Jharkhand’s Palamu districts to migrate. Alarmingly, the social protections available are increasingly stretched beyond capacity to accommodate the increasing climate events, driving residents to migrate and in turn, increasing their vulnerabilities to trafficking.
Although Kendrapara has historically been a verdant and economically prosperous place, climate extremes have proven to be too much for even stable economies based on healthy ecosystems to survive. Clearly this speaks to examples of the loss and damage from climate change impacts thousands in India are now suffering.
The joint NGO study found “the vulnerability of people in Kendrapara has increased tremendously, primarily due to climate change. More frequent cyclones and floods coupled with sea-level rise and sea water intrusion have caused loss and damage of livelihood assets, soil erosion and land degradation. Consequently, socioeconomic problems such as decline in income, unemployment and indebtedness have cropped up in the last few decades.”
Head of migration at Aide Et Action Umi Daniel and one of the authors of the study found, because social protection programs are inadequate and under-covered, “as a result, vulnerable sections of the area are forced to migrate and prone to trafficking.”
The study found that about 85% of migrants in both Kendrapara and Palamu migrated once or twice a year for less than six months.
At the same time, an extreme heat wave has been impacting thousands across India and Pakistan, which the World Weather Attribution says is 30 times more likely because of the effects of climate change, and in fact, “would have been extraordinarily rare without human-induced climate change.”
In a new study from the body’s group of scientists, temperatures analyzed during March and April in north-west India and south-east Pakistan saw March recording the highest temperatures in India since record-keeping began 122 years ago.
In a statement, the scientists said the extreme heat conditions were having devastating consequences for public health and agriculture, resulting reducing “India’s wheat crop yields, causing the government to reverse an earlier plan to supplement the global wheat supply that has been impacted by the war in Ukraine.”