- Monday, February 24, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
THE Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has sounded alarm for India saying glacial retreat in the Hindu Kush Himalayas in the north along with rise in sea level, intense tropical cyclones causing floods, an erratic monsoon and intense heat stress are likely to affect India in the near future.
It also said that most of these impacts are irreversible even if greenhouse gas emissions come down dramatically.
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The IPCC report titled ‘Climate Change 2021: The Physical Science Basis’ released on Monday (9) said heatwaves and humid heat stress will be more intense and frequent over South Asia in the 21st century.
The #IPCC released its latest #ClimateReport today, #ClimateChange 2021: the Physical Science Basis.
“The role of human influence on the climate system is undisputed.” – Working Group I Co-Chair @valmasdel
Report ➡️ https://t.co/uU8bb4inBB
Watch the video, ? ⬇️ pic.twitter.com/hZOSU1xWQR
— IPCC (@IPCC_CH) August 9, 2021
The report, which has come from 234 scientists and is over 3,000 pages, said global warming is already accelerating a rise in the sea-level, shrinking ice and worsening extremes such as heat waves, droughts, storms, floods, etc.
The Indian Ocean region along with the Arabian Sea and Bay of Bengal, has warmed faster than the global average, the IPCC said with “very high confidence”. The oceans fact sheet that the IPCC released on Monday said that sea-surface temperature over the Indian Ocean is likely to go up by one or two degrees Celsius when there is 1.5 to two degrees of global warming.
The IPCC added that snow cover has reduced over high mountains in Asia that include the Himalayas and glaciers have thinned since the 1970s. The Karakoram glaciers, though, have not seen any major retreating trend, it said.
Snow-covered areas and snow volumes will continue to reduce during this century while snowline elevations will rise and glacier mass is likely to decline further as emissions go up. The IPCC warned that rising global temperature and rain can cause more glacial-lake outburst floods and landslides over moraine-dammed lakes.
India has recently seen a surge in coastal storms as well as flooding in the plains and landslides in high mountains of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh in which several hundreds of lives are lost and properties damaged.
