Sanjiv Singh lives in Sagar island and is one of the many people affected by sea level rise: "When storms come, I get scared. I go to the roof top and I eat puffed rice and sugar ". © Greenpeace / Peter Caton

The India Meteorological Department released its end of season report on the southwest monsoon of 2009. Despite the document’s pragmatic tone, it cannot hide the critical facts: the 2009 monsoon was the worst in recent memory and our forecasting models are now grossly inept at predicting monsoon behaviour.

Throughout the monsoon season, the Met. department repeatedly and staunchly denied that the 2009 monsoon was a failure. Now that they must finally confront that failure in a report, their verdict is typically understated. An excerpt reads:

“As a whole, the long-range operation forecasts issued for 2009 south-west monsoon were not very accurate. However, it may be mentioned that other centres in India and abroad preparing experimental forecasts for monsoon rainfall were also could not [sic] forecast the 2009 deficient monsoon rainfall correctly.”

Certainly, ‘not very accurate’ is one way of putting it: the Met’s first forecast on 17th April predicted an all-India rainfall of 96% of the Long-Term Average (LPA), plus or minus a 5% variation coefficient. On the 24th of June, faced with the prolonged hiatus in the advance of the weak monsoon, they revised their prediction to the lower figure of 93% of LPA, give or take a 4% variation. The actual rainfall received from 1st June to beginning of September was just 77% of LPA, the lowest recorded rainfall since 1972.

The Met’s defensive statement that others were also unable to predict the amount of monsoon rainfall is hardly comforting. Finger pointing will not get us anywhere: our monsoon is becoming more and more erratic, and it is a terrifying sign of climate change.

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune, the autonomous Government body that is the leader of research into monsoon meteorology of India, have calculated that the effects of climate change have already made the monsoon twice as difficult to predict. The exact changes that will be seen in the monsoon are therefore not certain, but it is generally accepted that the patterns of monsoon rainfall will change as the monsoon becomes more variable. Within a monsoon season we can expect to see an intensification of ‘active’ and ‘break’ events – wetter extremes of weather (‘active’) followed by intense periods of drought (‘break’). The fact that this may add up to an overall similar amount of rainfall as previous years is of little consequence to India’s agricultural sector, which supports 70% of the working population and accounts for around a third of GDP. Crops require a steady feed of the appropriate amount of water, and the pitch and lurch of this year’s rainfall has already resulted in major losses in the Kharif crop and is currently threatening the Rabi crop. More than 60% of the cropped area in India still depends solely on apposite monsoon rainfall.

These intense extremes of dry and wet weather are already being witnessed. The unprecedented floods in Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh that have killed at least 300 people and left 1.5 million homeless swept in to districts that, only weeks before, were facing drought. This year, 299 of India’s 625 districts have been declared as drought-hit. Perversely, nineteen states have experienced floods.

There is also a strong consensus amongst scientists that the active/break cycles will be seen on a year-to-year basis, as well as intra-seasonally: years in which the monsoon rainfall is notably deficient, interspersed with years in which it is in excess. Both can spell disaster for an economy as finely tuned to the southwest monsoon as that of India.

Other expected features of a monsoon being forced by climate change are a decrease in monsoon depressions and cyclones, but an increase in that number of cyclones that are classified as severe. Cyclone Aila, which devastated the Sundarbans region in May this year, killing over 200 people and condemning thousands more to refugee status, can certainly be classified as severe.

There is even some forecast that India may lose the southwest monsoon entirely. Climate change is causing the Indian Ocean to heat up. While this creates more moisture for convection over India and so is essentially the reason behind the increased intensity of rainfall events, there is also a danger the continued rise of the ocean’s temperature could be terminal. A paper released by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in August studied the temperature difference between the Indian subcontinent and the Indian Ocean: the driving force behind the sweep of the southwest monsoon. The findings were that this difference was significantly and ‘alarmingly’ decreasing. There is, write the authors, a possibility of it tending towards zero.

Some of these scientific studies are conflicting, and all admit the exact extent to – and nature in – which the monsoon will change cannot yet be fully determined. What these studies cannot show, yet what is certain, is the human suffering that lies behind these changes. The costs to India of a changing monsoon are of a scale we simply cannot afford, whether they be financial, emotional or societal. The southwest monsoon is integral to all of these.

We must take action to halt climate change. The future of the monsoon depends on our actions today, and in the agreement that our leaders reach at the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen in December.

Just as finger pointing and attributing of blame makes no difference to the underperformance of the monsoon, neither will it help us in halting these changes. Historically, India has done little to cause climate change, but her people will be one of the first to suffer, and we cannot afford to delay in both mitigating and adapting to climate change. We have a responsibility to these people, to ourselves, and to generations that will follow to ensure that India’s economy continues to develop, but in a sustainable and intelligent fashion that does not exacerbate climate change through the release of greenhouse gases.

The Indian Government has already made laudable first steps towards mitigating climate change, for example in the outlining of its Solar Mission. It must now utilise both this ambition and its influential position amongst developing countries to ensure that an ambitious, fair and binding deal is reached in Copenhagen. Our monsoon depends upon it.

Further details of how climate change is expected to impact the Indian Monsoon can be found in the Greenpeace report, ‘Monsoon Wager,’ available online at http://www.greenpeace.org/india/press/reports/monsoon-wager

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