Food scarcity, Ganga alert

The Telegraph 
April 03, 2018

New Delhi: Extreme weather events driven by global warming may raise the risk of food shortages in many countries, including India, says a study released on Monday that also forecasts a doubling of the Ganga's flow if the average global temperature rises by 2°C.

The study has predicted the highest increase in the hunger climate vulnerability index (HCVI) - a measure of the risk of food insecurity in a country under global warming - in Oman, followed by India, Bangladesh, Saudi Arabia and Brazil.

Scientists who used multiple computer simulations to generate future climate scenarios said all simulations projected an increase in India's HCVI due to an increase in the risk of floods that outweighs the beneficial impact of decreased drought length in the affected areas.

"Climate change is expected to lead to more extremes of both heavy rainfall and drought with different effects in different parts of the world," Richard Betts, a climate scientist at the Exeter University and the Met Office Hadley Centre in the UK, said in a statement.

The study has projected the average length of flood events - the number of days on which cumulative rainfall excess is exceptionally high - to increase by four days or more in India and Bangladesh and two to four days in Brazil.

The wetter conditions expected under global warming are expected to have their biggest impacts in South Asia and East Asia, while the areas worst affected by droughts are expected to be southern Africa and South America.

The simulations consistently project the flow in the Ganga to increase by 30 per cent up to 110 per cent under a 2°C global warming, Betts and his colleagues said, reporting their findings in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A.

However, the study projects inconsistent impacts on the Amazon river, with some simulations predicting that the flow in the South American river will increase by three per cent and others predicting the flow will decrease by 25 per cent.

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