The Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) has warned of above normal temperatures in most of the regions in North, Northwest, Central and East India during the summer this year.?
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Over the past decades, such high temperature extremes have become more prevalent. Twelve out of the 15 warmest years recorded in India since 1901 were during the past 15 years--between 2006 and 2020.?
According to climate scientists, large parts of India, except for the Indo-Gangetic plains, have seen significant warming over the past six decades. In fact, they found 25 per cent more occurrences of hot days from 1976-2018 against 1951-1975, suggesting a human-induced shift in climate.?
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And because of that severe heat waves are becoming more frequent and are lasting longer.?
If little or no action is taken to curb carbon emissions, the coming decades would see fatal heat waves that could affect hundreds of millions of people in India and other South Asian countries, says a new study led by international climate change scientists.
Such extreme heat events can create unsafe labour conditions in major crop producing parts of India, such as Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal, as well as coastal regions and urban centres like Kolkata, Mumbai, and Hyderabad.?
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Heat stress events are considered unsafe for labour when 'wet bulb' temperatures exceed 32 degrees and potentially deadly when they remain above 35 degrees for three or more days.?
According to the research, with two degrees Celsius of warming, there could be 774 million exposures to potentially unsurvivable heat by 2050.?Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, on the other hand, will likely reduce that impact by half, affecting nearly 423 million.
ˇ°Presently, the world is already 1ˇăC warmer than the pre©\industrial period, and it may reach 1.5?C level by 2040, reflecting an imminent need for out of the box adaptation measures in South Asia,ˇ± the report added.?
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About 6,167 Indians have died of heat waves over eight years to 2018. However, the official figures only count those deaths caused by direct exposure to the sun and leaves about deaths due to high ambient temperature. The deaths, according to an IndiaSpend report, are grossly under-reported and captures only 10 per cent of the real figure.?
According to the World Bank report, around 800 million South Asians--almost half of the regionˇŻs population--live in ˇ°hotspotsˇ± or geographical areas that will experience fewer crop yields, worse health outcomes, and declining productivity.?
?As a result, the already suffering region will see a further decline in their living standards with incomes projected to drop by 9.8 per cent in India.?