Need To Better Leverage Data To Fight Climate Change: Climate Expert Arunabha Ghosh

The climatic conditions of the world have changed completely. While heavy rains caused floods in Dubai recently, several Indian states are experiencing heat waves. This has impacted both agricultural activities as well as economic activities. Crops are getting impacted by unseasonal rains while outdoor activities come to a standstill due to soaring temperatures. 

“About 40% of the districts are showing trends that are swapping. What used to be a flood-prone area is becoming drought-prone, or vice versa. These are all patterns that we are now beginning to see,” Arunabha Ghosh, founder and CEO of the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW) told The Core.

Responding to changed climatic conditions would need a data-driven scientific approach towards secular trends, instead of assuming that such heat wave conditions can be taken care of with above-normal rain. “(We need) to look at those changes, connect those dots from what the past is indicating, the deviations from the past averages, and then use that for better predictive analytics and policy and practitioner responses into the future,” Ghosh said.

In The Core Report: Weekend Edition, financial journalist Govindraj Ethiraj speaks with Ghosh to understand how policy and data together are required to address the challenges that come with changing climatic conditions.

Edited excerpts:

Indian Meteorological Department (IMD) said that they were forecasting more extreme weather events, more specifically heat waves, this summer, as compared to ever before. Subsequently, we've actually seen those heat waves happen and we are experiencing them right now, including in Eastern India last week. We are also seeing extreme weather events elsewhere in the world. Heavy rains in Dubai. What are we seeing that we are perhaps not connecting or not connecting the right dots, at least at this point? 

I think you've asked a very pertinent question because the challenge we are facing with regard to understanding climate risk is that we still treat discrete events as discrete rather than as becoming a part of a pattern.

Now, to understand patterns, you can do it in two ways. You can look at the past and you can look at the future. Looking at the future becomes more challenging. But we are often, even in connecting the dots, not looking sufficiently at the past. If you just take the example of the heat waves, this year, the IMD is predicting between 10 and 20 days of heat waves this summer. The past indicates that our normal is 4 to 8 days of heat waves. More than a doubling of the heat stress that’s going to come to us.

Now, when you combine that with the fact that we've also, from CEEW (Council on Energy, Environment, and Water) analysis, we know that three-quarters of our districts have now become hotspots for extreme climate events, that is floods, droughts, and cyclones. About 40% of the districts are showing trends that are swapping. What used to be a flood-prone area is becoming drought-prone, or vice versa. These are all patterns that we are now beginning to see. 

The first thing we have to do is, in connecting the dots start looking at the historical averages and then seeing in the recent decades or even in the last decade, how we have deviated from those historical averages. 

And the second thing we have to do is that we have to start mapping these shifts more at a hyper-local level. The example you gave of Dubai, it's not enough then just for even a UAE assessment of climate risk or heat waves or flash floods. You've got to bring your assessments down to a city level, sometimes down to a neighbourhood level.

These are the two minimum things we have to start changing our mindsets towards understanding shifts from, or deviations from the past in order to better predict the future and get more granular in our risk assessments. 

I'm going to come to data in a moment, since you do a lot of it apart from other external sources of data, including the government. So you talked about the 40% of districts where you're seeing complete reversals happen. And is that something that we've been observing before? And what is it doing to the topography and the region in these kinds of places? 

One way to understand vulnerability is to look at the exposure to a particular event, look at the sensitivity of the economic structure and the people and the communities there to such events, and then look at the adaptive capacity. Now, beyond this so-called theory, the exposure is the patterns you're seeing from the extreme events. But the sensitivity, now suppose you were an area where you grow, say, rice, which requires a fair amount of irrigation water, and if that is the district that is also now shifting more towards water stress, then the nature of your economic structure itself is becoming impacted. Your sensitivity is high because you're reliant on a certain type of natural condition for the economic structure and economic activities you want. 

And then comes the adaptive capacity, that is of the administration, it is of the enterprises, it is of the people. That might also vary between whether you are in a more prosperous area versus you have a more resource-constrained area. Ultimately it's not just the changes in the physical event, the way it will impact you and your economic structure, your household consumption, your ability to handle the stresses, the ability to bounce back, and the pressures it will then put on the district administration, on the state budget or even on the national budget, will depend on the kinds of areas where this is happening and the kinds of economic structures they have. 

Therefore, I often say that now, resilience is a prior condition to all kinds of other climate action, and resilience itself is something that has to become hyperlocal. 

If we were to pick the example of the United Arab Emirates, was there any data that could have shown that this was coming? Number two, in the Indian context, where again you've talked about the reversals in 40% of districts, is there any data that shows that something like this could happen which would help people prepare?

Regarding the United Arab Emirates, unfortunately, I have not studied whether there were any predictions or forecasts done in advance, but it's a good question we should ask ourselves. But for India, I can certainly say: that just a few months ago, my organisation CEEW, brought out an assessment of how precipitation patterns have been changing over the last 40 years. And not even at a district, national, or district level, but at a sub-district level. India has more than 4,500 sub-districts which are called tehsils. We see that in 64% of the Indian sub-districts or tehsils, there's been an increase in the frequency of heavy rainfall events during our main monsoon, the southwest monsoons, over the last decade. That's 2011 onwards compared to the baseline from the early 1980s. These tehsils also saw an increase in seasonal rainfall. But while 11% of tehsils saw that increase, 87% of the tehsils witnessed a decline, especially in June and July when the summer crop that has been sowed requires that first rain shower for irrigation. 

Now, having established this very hyperlocal trend, what should we be preparing ourselves? If the IMD is suggesting that this year we are likely to see above-normal monsoon, that might be correct and we will see at the end of the southwest monsoon whether that prediction is correct or not. But that does not give us a reason to be sanguine for the two reasons I've highlighted. 

One is that the average increase, average above normal monsoon might come in the form of very heavy flash floods, flash rains in a shorter time period. 

Secondly, in many parts of the country, it might be the case that you will have still an overall decline, or especially a decline or the absence of rain at the time that the crop has been sown. Therefore, averages are no longer sufficient, or single seasonal rainfall predictions are no longer sufficient to build the resilience that I am talking about. Therefore, we have to start asking ourselves the question, is there a secular change in the precipitation trends? If so, which are the more vulnerable areas where we must pay attention? Therefore maybe build more water recharge structures there, etcetera, in advance should there be a decline in rainfall? Or better water drainage structures should there be cloud bursts and flash floods? 

And thirdly, do we need to start changing the cropping pattern, or changing the sowing season, or the weeks or the dates in which. The agricultural ministry will then have to send out that kind of information to farmers about when is it a better time to sow versus not sow.

It becomes a much more data-driven scientific approach towards responding to these secular trends, rather than feeling comfortable that this year it's going to be above-normal rain. That is not at all a reason to sit back and relax. 

You're also saying, therefore, that we are not currently alerting people at the hyperlocal level with these kinds of data points? 

To an extent we do. We certainly send out alerts. There are soil cards for farmers, there's rainfall predictions, etc that happens. But it is on a seasonal-by-season basis. What I'm trying to basically, change I'm suggesting is that we start understanding that it's not just one season good, next season bad, next season good. You can't just hope for the best. We have to start preparing for the worst. That requires us to look at those changes, connect those dots from what the past is indicating, the deviations from the past averages, and then use that for better predictive analytics and policy and practitioner responses into the future. 

All I'm saying is that we build on the systems we have of early morning, build on the systems we have of relaying messages to farmers through text messages, etc. But leveraging better data, more predictive analytics, and keeping in account that one season's good outcome is not setting the trend for the future necessarily. 

At this point, you're saying that most farmers are using more intuition to understand climate change and its impacts. I mean, that's what our reporting also seems to suggest. 

Between 55% to 60% of Indian agriculture is rain-fed. It is not irrigation. Ultimately, yes, farmers are reliant on their lived wisdom, their lived experience, and their inherited wisdom. But how can we then use the data and the analytics that are being developed to inform them better, to provide that information in a way that is more salient? I cannot ask a farmer to go read a CEEW report, and then figure it out on their own. This is where, from the data collection to the analytics to the Met department, the agriculture department, the irrigation circles, within states, and the district administration, everyone has their role with the end sort of consumer being the farmer. The farmer can also become a co-creator of some of that information by generating local information on how patterns are changing, not changing what kind of crops they are therefore planting, not planting.

And so you're saying that this is not happening to the extent that it should be happening, particularly in light of the new strains of data or the new flows of data that we are seeing, particularly of the kind you are processing right now?

In light of the kind of shifts that we are likely, we are already experiencing and likely to experience more in terms of climate-induced variations in precipitation, not just natural weather variations. I think we will need to leverage the platforms we have, but with better analytics and better outreach, prepare to change some of the patterns that we've been used to. 

Precipitation is one key indicator. Are there any other key indicators for potential changes in weather patterns?

Yeah, I think heat, you started with heat. And heat matters for outdoor activity, of course. Agriculture is impacted, but it also is impacting cities. Let's take again some recent work that we've been doing at CEEW on heat action plans. There are over 100 cities in India that have developed heat action plans, and that's already a positive sign. However, there's a two-part challenge. 

One is that 97% of these heat action plans lack integration of heat risk with vulnerability, especially when you look at different types of neighbourhoods and different sorts of demographic structures. The old will be more exposed to heat stresses, or areas where there's more outdoor activity will be more exposed to heat stresses where worker productivity might decline, or certain areas will be vulnerable to heat stress from physical infrastructure that has to be mapped better. 

What we have been trying to do is two things. One, develop heat action plans at a ward-by-ward level. This is what we've done for Thane in Maharashtra. You get a neighbourhood-by-neighbourhood approach to this to get a sense of better sense of the vulnerability. And number two, combine heat with humidity. This is often also missing. In coastal areas where we see that when you combine heat with humidity, then the felt heat is upwards of four to five degrees above normal, rather than one or two degrees above normal. That then has a major implication for the ability to work outdoors. The integration of the infrastructure, the productivity of the workforce, and therefore the economic impact that is going to be felt. 

On top of that, the increase in the power load from cooling demand. India is going to present the fastest rise in cooling demand over the next two decades. That implies the integrity of the power grid. It becomes a chain of events that we have to start preparing ourselves against when we start doing heat plus humidity plans and heat and vulnerability plans based on much more hyperlocal assessments. 

This is a second thing that is, I think, very much needed as we start preparing for the future in a more scientific manner. 

Is policy also looking at it the same way when it comes to finding solutions? 

I think the solution writers might be doing their respective things in their respective areas or domains, but we perhaps need a little bit more dot-connecting. And let me illustrate this with a couple of examples. Let’s take a cyclone warning. India has invested heavily in cyclone warnings to prevent loss of lives and livelihoods over the last two decades. The Odisha Super Cyclone 1999 resulted in about 10,000 lives lost. The Super Cyclone 2019 resulted in less than 70 lives lost. When we look at early warning coverage, something that the UN Secretary-General has been highlighting a lot for the world as a whole, we have 100% coverage of early warning for citizens exposed to cyclones. 

When we look at urban flooding, then we see that is a more recent phenomenon, the way this is emerging because of climate-induced risk. Therefore, the early warning coverage then is to 33% of the exposed population. This gives you an example: let's build on the learnings of early warning around coastal areas to start spreading that early warning coverage even inland, where flood exposure might happen. That's one thing. 

Another thing that requires some dot-connecting is the physical infrastructure risk. The more India develops as it should, the more physical infrastructure is going to be built. The cost of the loss of such physical infrastructure, therefore, is going to be much higher. When a bridge gets washed away, an iron and steel bridge gets washed away, the economic loss, not just to the communities on either side of that, say, that river, but also the capital investment into that asset is far higher than that if there was just a pontoon or a footbridge over that same area. The more we invest in hard infrastructure, the more we also ought to be investing in assessing the long-term, nonlinear climate risk that that infrastructure is going to face. 

The third thing that has to happen is insurance, deriving from the first two. Today, a lot of things in our insurance policies, with our homes, etc, are the act of God. But if the act of God is going to become so frequent that we start to stop thinking about it being an act of God and rather something that is demonstrating a certain pattern, this is a challenge, not just India is facing. We are seeing this even in the developed world. In Florida, the prices of home insurance have shot through the roof because of the changes in flooding patterns. The prices of home insurance in California shot through the roof because of the risk of getting burned down by forest fires. The insurance industry has to massively upscale its ability to assess these risks rather than just leave it to Acts of God. 

The fourth thing that has to happen is then how the state responds to these disasters. For instance, a cyclone is something that disaster management responses will have authority over, and then the state disaster manager authority can respond to, etc. However, heat stress is not considered under that legislation. If you have just a one-off, heat stress is something manageable. If you have 20 days of heat stress, and if you have that year after year after year, suddenly heat stress becomes something akin to a natural disaster. There need to be legislative changes; that then have an impact on the way allocations of resources, and fiscal allocations are made if a particular part of the country is impacted, how tax revenues are shared, etc. 

The 16th Finance Commission might have to look into this stuff a lot more carefully about how we then incorporate these risks into the way resources are shared. Several things have to therefore change. 

Early warning, physical risk assessments of hard infrastructure, changing the way insurance companies are looking at these risks, changing the way our national legislation, the state legislations are looking at the risk, looking at how revenues are shared. This just shows you that even if a lot of work is going on, the nature of climate risk requires us to start connecting those dots more comprehensively, rather than just leave it to a disaster responder, first responder on the coast somewhere, and an insurance company left on its device, or a village which has been cut away from a bridge left to its own devices. This is the dot-connecting that needs to now happen.

On a scale of one to ten, in terms of a sense of urgency in addressing all of this, where do you think we are? 

I would say we are at a six. I mean, it is a subjective scale, but I would say we are at a six, in part because we have invested quite a bit in these individual building blocks that I was referring to, early warning in some places, the fairly robust architecture of national and state disaster management agencies, etcetera. And on top of that, we have been talking a lot about risk and resilience. But there has been a fair degree of work that India has done on investing on the mitigation side.

I mean, just today's news. If you look again, our report came out yesterday for the first time, the share of coal-based power has fallen under 50% of the total power capacity. Having said that, I think the move from 6 to 10 is going to be the hard one. It's not just the distance between 1 to 2, and 2 to 4, and 4 to 6 is going to be lesser than the move from 6 to 8, and 8 to 10. Because this is the hard work of better predictive analytics. It’s not easy, just because we wish it didn’t happen. And this is not about political will or something. This requires investment in analytical capability, data gathering capability sensors, and so on. It requires reorienting administrative structures. Back to the point about local administrative adaptive capacity. 

You might have a very robust system of an administration or a district that will be dealing with droughts in that area, but how does it then reorient itself to deal with floods? That requires an updation of the district disaster management plans. Then reorienting the insurance industry is solving for a mega market failure globally, not just in India. So this is why the distance between six to ten is going to be hard. It's going to be a long slog.

And there are many policy interventions. Some may yield faster returns or faster action. Let's say the Reserve Bank disclosure framework on climate-related financial risks, which obviously makes everyone alert to the fact that any project that they're lending to has to have a climate risk factor built in or in an extended way, a disaster resilience factor built in. That’s one nudge or trigger, as I am seeing it. What, in your mind are some of the other nudges and triggers at this point in time, which will also hasten things along and maybe start moving us from that six to seven and so on? 

One is this disclosure norm is one thing, but in addition, the recent decision of the Reserve Bank to hold interest rates. And one of the reasons given was that climate-induced risk will be one of the factors that might create some challenges on the supply side, which then has inflationary implications, which is why they're holding interest rates. This is a good early sign that they are, as a Central Bank, internalising the nature of the risk, that this is not just episodic seasonal bad luck, and that this might be something more secular in nature in terms of the trends.

However, I would push that argument a little further. The ultimate role of any central bank anywhere in the world is the integrity of the financial system. It is not to solve climate change. But if climate change is internalised as one of the biggest shocks, if not the biggest shock to the economic structure, then it cannot be an afterthought or a delayed thought. It has to become an integral part of assessments of the integrity of the financial system. 

Another thing that I would recommend, which goes beyond just the financial system, is an assessment at a political level. And I would recommend that at least in one of the three parliamentary sessions and equally in the state legislatures, there should be an annual report submitted at a national level and at state levels on the latest evidence available for how private risks are impacting, and that should be debated. 

This is not about finger-pointing at the government versus the opposition. As political representatives representing the country as a whole or a state, I think an annual assessment and a debate on that scientific annual assessment will help to inform the conditions under which the development plans are being made, the infrastructure plans are being made, the way the budget is being allocated, the kinds of vulnerabilities that are likely to come. I would urge that this can be an area where government and opposition, both at the national and at state levels, can come together on because this is going to impact all of us. It's like how we have to think about national security. 

The third thing I would argue is that in addition to disclosures, I talked about how Central Banks operate, and how legislatures operate. But I think the corporate side also has to take this on much more seriously than just one more disclosure filing to be done, because ultimately your savings and my savings, we are investing it in mutual funds, whatever…all of this is dependent on the resilience of the economy and the resilience of private investment. So it can't be left alone to just paper filing of disclosures. It has to become a much more serious consideration, not just for large, heavy capex investments. Even if you were running a mid-sized electronics assembly unit and that gets flooded, as it happened in Southeast Asia a few years ago. You might say what has a flood got to do with the electronics industry? But it immediately impacts the exports of that part of the world which depended heavily on electronics. 

If India is now under major construction, is heat stress going to reduce your work ability, the hours on which workers can work on construction sites, or reduce their productivity while they are on the construction sites? That has an impact on the pace at which roads are built or homes are built. This is not just about complying with disclosure. It is now a business requirement. It is just like a CEO has to think about do they have the right finances in place. Do they have the right team in place? Do they have the right strategy in place? Do they have the right creditors in place? They will also have to think about whether they have the right risk assessment and resilience plan in place. Because that is now becoming a fiduciary responsibility of executing on your role. 

I'll pick up a line or two from your Hindustan Times column recently. And you said that if nine of the last ten years have been the hottest on record and extreme weather events have led to about 5.6 lakh crore rupees of damages in recent decades, then climate action must move from the margins of our consciousness to the mainstream of India's economic discourse. Give us an illustration of what that mainstream would look like. Of course, you also said we should start this summer. 

I think there should be a climate risk assessment in any major infrastructure or economy-related sector. This means that whether your ministry of roads and highways, how might climate risks impact coastal flooding and the integrity of our ports? Because in a very different context, you saw what happened in Baltimore. So a bridge breaks down, and your entire shipping lane is blocked. That's not a climate risk. But now imagine a climate-induced cyclone that then impacts your port infrastructure. 

But you have the Panama Canal where water levels went down because of which only one ship could pass at a time.

Whether you're dealing with roads, whether you're dealing with ports, whether you're dealing with airports, you've seen what happened to Dubai, a major hub for international travel and aviation. But India is the fastest-growing aviation market in the world. We have to do a climate risk assessment for our airports. I mean, it can't be a choice. It should now be a compulsion. If you're the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, each one has to do climate risk assessments. That is one way in which what I mean by shifting climate from the margins to the mainstream economic discourse.

The other way is what I said about the businesses themselves, what they have to do. And I think the bigger point I'm trying to make here is we've got to our mental shift has to be away from climate as just about tree-planting or soil conservation here and there and stuff like that. That is all extremely important. It contributes to climate action. Climate is the economy now and if we are not factoring that into our calculus at a household level, business level, sectoral level, or macroeconomic level, then I don't know if ostriches do hide their heads in the sand. But to use the metaphor we would be ostriches.