Climate Change and India / Puja S. Pawar

Climate change is happening! Not now but since a very long time. A broad scientific consensus holds that climate change is already occurring and is bound to continue, even under the most optimistic scenarios. The current pace of change in the world's climate is unprecedented in human history. The 1990's was the warmest decade, and 2005 the warmest year on record since 1800. The impacts of higher temperature are already being felt and will continue to intensify. Although crucial mitigation of greenhouse gas commissions can help to alter dramatic long-term impacts, most of the changes projected for the coming decades can no longer be avoided. Climate change is a problem that the world will have to confront.

India is a large developing country with nearly 700 million rural populations directly depended on climate sensitive sectors like (agriculture, forests and fisheries) and natural resources (such as water, biodiversity, mangroves, coastal zones, grasslands) for their subsistence and livelihoods. India's environment problem goes much beyond climate change. It is a challenging task to raise awareness on the issue not as an esoteric concept but a subject rooted to the ground through action related to their daily lives. Climate change is a key intellectual and practical challenge for today's science, economics, politics, sociology and ethics. Human activities cause climate change due to the production of greenhouse gases and the land use patterns. Human beings will be affected by climate change in many ways: including shifting shorelines, declining agriculture productivity, crisis of food supply, availability of water, the health of populations and extreme weather events and so on. This paper mainly highlights the impact of climate change in India and the possible strategy to overcome the problem.