Although slightly variable across study sites, the SARs of India have experienced accelerated warming trends between 1971 and 2007. Mean daily temperatures have increased marginally faster than the national average (0.02 oC/year).
Rainfall patterns for the same period have been highly variable across SARs of India, and the country in general. Across the ASSAR states, the average summer monsoon rainfall has decreased by 0.01-1.40 mm/year, and the monsoon onset and rainfall patterns have become more erratic.
Extreme weather events are expected to increase in most of India and some semi-arid regions are considered to be high vulnerability areas. The SARs are particularly prone to flash floods, and have witnessed a noticeable increase in hot days and heat waves between 1961-2010, lasting as long as 12–16 days in some areas.
Critical sectors (e.g., agriculture, forestry, water resources) will be affected as drought and flood hazards intensify the demand for land, food, water and livestock forage.
Heat-stress related impacts will be more severe for rural and urban communities as thresholds on livestock, crops and infrastructure will be reached sooner.
India faces rapid and unplanned urbanization, resulting in poor quality of urban life. Migrants are more vulnerable due to a lack of access to public services and limited livelihood options. Extreme weather exacerbates existing locational risks through urban flooding, heat stress and disease dynamics.
The way forward:
- through rainfall variability, drought, and flood hazards, climate change presents many risks to human livelihoods and wellbeing in the semi-arid areas of India. These risks include: resource degradation and conflict, food insecurity, human health, and plant and animal diseases. However climate change is only one of the major stressors, and there are other global and regional drivers such as spread of introduced invasive species, unsustainable exploitation of ground-water, CO2 fertilization and nitrogen deposition that could have major impacts on semi-arid ecosystems in the future
- in rural and urban India climate change necessitates a multi-institutional and multi-sectoral response. A spectrum of factors that includes market forces, emerging development dynamics, depleting natural resources and climate change leaves communities fractured and vulnerable
- to enable effective adaptation, there has to be a recognition of, and response to, multiple governance regimes – including the need for governance to engage with relevant actors and institutions, links between planning and execution, engagements in both top-down and bottom-up planning, and the involvement of state, civil society, citizens and private sectors
- the existing base of impact studies are limited in scope and restricted to the water sector and major agricultural crops. Additional research is needed to understand climatic impacts in addition to other global change drivers on these social ecological systems. Additionally, improved understanding of the northeast monsoon behaviour will have major policy implications, especially for southeastern India. Assessing climatic risks—and the corresponding climate impacts—at much finer scales is crucial