(The Conversation) – Sadly, 2023 has been a violent one on the global stage. War broke out between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, leading to the deaths of thousands of Palestinians and hundreds of Israelis, including many children on both sides. And the bitter war between Russia and Ukraine continued with no end in sight.

As a result of the focus on these two conflicts, other countries have dropped off the radar for many people. Some of these nations have been dealing with simmering unrest, however, which could erupt in 2024 and seize the global spotlight.

So, where should we be watching in the coming year? Here are five places where I believe civil conflicts or unrest could worsen and potentially lead to violence.

Myanmar

Myanmar descended into chaos in 2021 when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected government led by Aung San Suu Kyi and sparked widespread civil protests that eventually morphed into an armed resistance.

The country, home to 135 ethnic groups, has rarely known peace. For years before the coup, there was a ongoing, low-grade civil conflict between the military and several minority ethnic groups who have long sought control over natural resources in their regions and independence from the state.

This exploded after the coup as ethnic militia groups joined forces with pro-democracy fighters from the Bamar majority protesting the junta.

Their resistance escalated in late 2023 with a coordinated northern offensive dealing the military its most significant losses in many years.

Insurgents won control of towns and villages on the northeastern border with China, including control over key trade routes. This led to renewed fighting in western Rakhine state, as well as in other areas.

The tenacity of the resistance of these minority groups, paired with the refusal of the military to compromise, suggests the country’s civil war may worsen considerably in 2024 and regain international attention.

Mali

In Mali, a nation in the turbulent Sahel region of Africa, tensions escalated throughout 2023 and now threaten to erupt into full-scale civil war.

Mali has long battled insurgent activity. In 2012, Mali’s government fell in a coup and Tuareg rebels, backed by Islamist militants, seized power in the north.

A United Nations peacekeeping mission was established in 2013 to bring stability to Mali. Then, in 2015, key rebel groups signed a peace agreement with the Mali government.

After two more coups in 2020 and 2021, military officers consolidated their power and said they would restore the state’s full territorial control over all of Mali. The regime insisted the UN peacekeeping mission withdraw from the country, which it did in June 2023. Subsequently, violence broke out between the military and rebel forces over future use of the UN bases.

In November, the military, reportedly backed by Russia’s Wagner Group, took control of the strategic northern town of Kidal which had been held by Tuareg forces since 2012. This undermines the fragile peace that has held since 2015.

It is unlikely the military will regain complete control over all rebel-held areas in the north. At the same time, insurgents are emboldened. With the 2015 peace agreement now all but dead, we can expect increased volatility in 2024.

Lebanon

In 2019, widespread civil protest broke out in Lebanon against leaders who were perceived not to be addressing the day-to-day needs of the population.

The situation continued to deteriorate, with a reshuffled government, escalating economic crisis and a massive port explosion that exposed corrupt practices.

Aljazeera English: “0:04 / 2:21
Israel carries out air strike on Bint Jbeil as violence on Lebanon border grows ”

The International Monetary Fund criticised Lebanon in September for a lack of economic reform. The Lebanese government has also failed to reach agreement on appointing a president, a post that has been vacant for more than a year.

This risks undermining the fragile power-sharing arrangement in Lebanon in which the key political posts of prime minister, speaker and president are allocated to a Sunni-Muslim, Shia-Muslim and Christian Maronite, respectively.

Most recently, the war between Israel and Hamas has threatened to spill over to Lebanon, home to the Hezbollah militant group, which claims to have an army of 100,000 fighters. Importantly, this jeopardises tourism as a key hope for Lebanon’s economic recovery.

These factors may precipitate a more serious economic and political collapse in 2024.

Pakistan

Since Pakistan’s independence in 1947, the military has played an interventionist role in politics. Though Pakistani leaders are popularly elected, military officials have at times removed them from power.

In 2022, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan fell out of favour with Pakistan’s militant leaders. He was subsequently ousted from power in a parliament vote and later arrested on charges that his supporters claim are politically motivated.

Violent demonstrations broke out nationwide after his arrest – a display of anger against the military that was once unthinkable.

Pakistan also faces spillover from instability in neighbouring Afghanistan and increased terror attacks. These security challenges have been compounded by a struggling economy and ongoing costs from the devastating 2022 floods.

Pakistan is expected to hold parliamentary elections in February 2024, after which the current military caretaker government is expected to transfer power back to civilian rule. Many are watching the military closely. If this transfer of power does not take place, or there are delays, civil unrest may result.

Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka faced a debilitating economic crisis in 2022 that led to critical fuel, food and medical shortages. Civil protests caused then-President Gotabaya Rajapaksa to flee the country. He was quickly replaced by current President Ranil Wickremesingh.

Stability returned in 2023 as Sri Lanka began implementing economic reforms as part of a bailout agreement with the International Monetary Fund. However, widespread dissatisfaction with political elites and the underlying drivers of the country’s economic hardship have not been addressed.

Elections are also due in Sri Lanka by late 2024. While Wickremesingh, the incumbent, is likely to run for a second term, he has low trust with the public. He is viewed as too close to corrupt political elites.

This dissatisfaction could lead to renewed protests – particularly if the economy stumbles again – in a repeat of the situation that led to Rajapaksa’s ousting in 2022.

Jessica Genauer, Senior Lecturer in International Relations, Flinders University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The other bombing hit a mosque in Hangu in Khyber Pukhtunkhwa Province. The mosque was known to be frequented by members of the local police. The suicide bombers had tried to hit the police station first and been repulsed, so they turned to a soft target. There have been 300 attacks in this province this year.

The insurgent movement in the tribal areas of northern Pakistan, the Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan (TTP), denied involvement. The TTP is closely allied with the Taliban who now again rule Afghanistan, and there are frictions between the Taliban and the current Pakistani government.

That the attack in Mastung targeted worshipers commemorating the birthday of the Prophet suggests that the perpetrators were members of ISIL, the so-called “Islamic State” group. When ISIL was ruling northern Iraq and eastern Syria, they banned celebrating Muhammad’s birthday as a sinful “innovation.” Their views on the matter are in accord with the fundamentalist Wahhabi branch of Islam in Saudi Arabia, where jurists such as Abdel Aziz Bin Baz (d. 1999) also forbade honoring the Prophet’s birthday. Small ISIL cells have carried out terrorist attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan, and have occasionally hit targets in Pakistan itself. In Baluchistan, the so-called Islamic State- Pakistan Province is active, whereas in Khyber Pushtunkhwa the rival Islamic State – Khurasan carries out attacks. The latter was likely the perpetrator at Hangu.

Pakistan’s own security has declined because of infighting among the country’s political elite since Prime Minister Imran Khan was unseated in a vote of no confidence on April 10, 2022, in which 20 former supporters in the parliament defected. Khan has castigated the parliamentary maneuver as an illegitimate plot, and is now in jail on corruption charges that his followers say are trumped up.

I’d say 98% of the Muslims in the world approve of commemorating the birthday of the Prophet Muhammad, which is usually given as the twelfth day of the third month of the Islamic calendar, Rabi’ al-Awwal in 570 CE, nearly six centuries after the birth of Jesus of Nazareth.

I wrote a book about the Prophet Muhammad, in which I discuss the likely circumstances of his birth, but more importantly his teachings on peace and reconciliation.

Purchase

It is a great shame that some do things in his name at which he clearly would horrified.

Admittedly, historians do not think large public celebrations of this day began until about the 1100s CE, some 500 years after the Prophet. Since that time, poetry and hymns have been composed for the occasion, and people have developed customs like giving children toy horses or staging parades in the streets and putting up illuminated chandeliers and lanterns over city streets. That is why some scholars consider it an innovation. But most of those see it as a good innovation. The fundamentalist Wahhabi and Salafi tendencies, in contrast, tend to see all later innovations not present at the beginnings of Islam as illegitimate.

In Pakistan, most people celebrate the entire Muslim month of Rabi` al-Awwal as the birth month of the Prophet. Marching bands, rides on caparisoned camels, and other activities of public “fun” are popular.

It is widely celebrated among American Muslims.

The major Sunni religious authority, the al-Azhar seminary in Cairo, Egypt, has repeatedly upheld the legitimacy of such celebrations. The considered legal ruling or fatwa says, “It is not permissible according to Islamic law to challenge the legitimacy of celebrating the anniversary of the Prophet’s birthday due to the forbidden things that may occur during it. Rather, we denounce the evils that may surround it, and we warn those who commit it – with wisdom and leniency – that these evils contradict the basic purpose for which these honorable occasions were held.”

Sufis, Muslim mystics, have sometimes engaged in ecstatic rituals on this anniversary of which the more sober clerics disapprove. You could compare this difference to one between, say, mainstream Presbyterian clerics and Pentecostalists.

Still, there is a broad consensus in both Sunni and Shiite Islam that commemorating the birth of the Prophet is a good thing, a moment of joy and celebration.

The ISIL terrorist group, which has wrought a vast swathe of destruction through Muslim societies and has also committed terrorism in Europe and the US, has a policy of acting harshly, “like wild beasts” (tawahhush). By attempting to outlaw perfectly innocent and uplifting religious practices like the birth of the Prophet, they set themselves up as superior to other Muslims and can use such prohibitions as a means of asserting power over others. Hence the bombing of the procession outside a mosque in Mastung. The good news is that the Muslims themselves have waged a concerted and brave campaign to root out this wicked heresy that has created so many orphans.

Pakistan is a nuclear-armed country of some 220 million people, the fifth most populous in the world It has a nominal GDP per annum of some $350 billion (in the same general range as South Africa, Egypt, Iran and Chile). Its most fertile regions comprise the Indus River basin. Water is the country’s lifeblood, and it is estimated that some 74% of the Indus Valley run-off derives from Himalayan snowmelt and glacier melt. It is likely to decrease by 5% to 12% by 2050. The melting of the glaciers and the retreat of the snow cover there at the top of the world are therefore an existential issue for Pakistan.

Image by lutz from Pixabay

If the world goes on putting 36 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year and doesn’t pull back significantly, actually the melting could be twice as bad. And under the worse case scenario, where human beings just do nothing to fight climate change, by the end of this century, 2081-2100, fully 80% of the lower-lying Himalayan ice will be gone.

These findings, by the way, pertain not only to the lower levels of the Himalayas but also the European Alps, the Rockies, and the Andes.

The reason for the melting of the surface ice in the Hindu Kush Himalayas is obvious. Glacier mass changes have been accelerating because of increased heat owing to human-induced climate change. Temperatures have been going up by an average of +0.28 °C (about half a degree Fahrenheit) every decade since 1951.

The rate of mass loss in the ice between the 1970s and 2019 has increased 65%. Even just in this century, the amount of ice mass lost in 2000-2009 was -0.17 meters water equivalent. But in 2010-2019 it jumped up to -0.28 meters water equivalent.

Seasonal snow cover in the Himalayas is decreasing at an alarming rate. At the lower elevations, there has been a loss of 5 snow-cover days per decade since the 1970s.

The Asian Exchange Union was established in 1972 and was intended to decolonize the banking system and allow member states to trade with one another without going through the old imperial powers. It never has, however, amounted to much, though it may suddenly be a bigger deal if Iran’s plans are implemented.

In the end the representatives voted to explore the formation of a non-dollar basket of currencies, to bring into being a digital currency controlled by the central banks of member states, and setting up an international banking exchange to rival the US-dominated SWIFT. The US has kicked both Iran and Russia off of SWIFT and interdicted their use of dollars, which has hurt their trade and foreign exchange reserves.

The non-dollar basket of currencies to be used as an alternative to the US dollar as a reserve currency would initially consist of the Chinese yuan, the UAE dirham and the Russian ruble, according to the plan voted on.

The United Arab Emirates’ central bank took part last year in a trial of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) using mBridge technology directed by the Bank for International Settlements and looking at the potential use of CBDC’s for “international transactions.” The study’s participants also comprised “the People’s Bank of China (PBoC), the Bank of Thailand, and the Hong Kong Monetary Authority with participants hailing the results of the study,” according to Coingeek.

The third resolution was to set up an alternative to the SWIFT bank exchange. According to Investopedia, “The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT) system powers most international money and security transfers. SWIFT is a vast messaging network used by financial institutions to quickly, accurately, and securely send and receive information, such as money transfer instructions. ”

Mohsen Karimi, the International Vice President of Iran’s Central Bank, said at the Tehran summit, “The interbank messenger replacing SWIFT will be implemented within the next month among the members of the Asian Exchange Union.” He said that Iran has designed a new exchange that will message members of the Asian Exchange Union’s banks and allow currency transfers among them. He said this method will be cheaper than SWIFT.

For many reasons, the dollar is likely to remain the world’s reserve currency for some time, and the SWIFT banking exchange will remain central. Still, it may be possible for this rival basket of currencies to replace the dollar in Asia for some purposes, and a new banking exchange that allowed South Asian countries to deal with Iran and Russia in ways that the US cannot easily sanction would have its attractions. It is certainly the case that Washington’s over-use of financial sanctions is likely sooner or later to cause other countries to move away from the US-dominated banking exchange and from the dollar, which is a Trojan Horse for the Office of Foreign Asset Control of the US Department of the Treasury.

Despite progressive laws protecting their rights on paper, transgender people in Pakistan are overlooked in disaster responses, and shut out from government relief

Trans people affected by floods in Pakistan’s Balochistan province gather to receive aid from the non-profit Al-Khidmat Foundation, in partnership with Unilever Pakistan (Photo courtesy of Al-Khidmat Foundation)

( The Third Pole) – This winter was very hard for Bunti, a transgender woman, or Khawaja Sira as trans people are known in Pakistan. When floods hit her village in Nowshera district of north Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province in August 2022, Bunti’s home was inundated and all her belongings damaged or washed away. But Bunti was unable to access the relief disbursed by the government for those affected by the floods. With her bedding and quilts lost to the floodwaters, she spent the season shivering in the biting cold of the night.

“Others living here received 160,000 Pakistani rupees [USD 564] as compensation for damage to their homes, but we trans persons did not get a single penny from the government due to technical barriers in proving our identity,” Bunti tells The Third Pole.

Bunti’s experience, mirrored across Pakistan in the wake of 2022’s devastating floods, demonstrates how Pakistan’s trans community remains uniquely vulnerable to the impacts of disasters – which are set to become more frequent and severe due to climate change.

Barriers to accessing relief

Nargis, a trans woman who lives in a dilapidated house on the banks of the Swat River in Charsadda, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, lost her cow and goat in last year’s floods. “The deluge swept away my belongings and any hope for survival, leaving me empty handed with no other option except begging to earn a living,” Nargis says.

Farzana Riaz, a trans rights activist in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and president of rights group Trans-Action, says that Bunti and Nargis’ stories “depicts the plight of hundreds or even thousands of transgender people who suffer due to climate-induced disasters and face neglect in the distribution of relief and rehabilitation services.”

RecommendedSindh still struggling with aftermath of floods, seven months on

Article continues after bonus IC video
Transgender in Pakistan | DW Documentary

Riaz says that due to social exclusion and challenges in finding stable work, many trans people in Pakistan live in remote localities and slums, where extreme weather events like torrential rain, heatwaves and hailstorms hit much harder due to lack of proper infrastructure. Exacerbating this vulnerability are the barriers many trans people face in accessing government support in the wake of disasters. Access to relief and compensation is dependent on provision of an official identity card, which most trans people in Pakistan do not have, explains Riaz.

“Obtaining an identity card is almost impossible for transgender people in prevailing circumstances, [as it] requires registration of the family tree by NADRA [the National Database Registration Authority],” says Muskan, a young trans woman from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa’s Kurram district, who moved to Peshawar in her teens after facing rejection from her family members. Muskan performs at wedding functions for a living, but struggles to make ends meet.

Muskan says she went home for her sister’s wedding a few years ago, with the intention of reuniting with her family, but the response was heartbreaking. “I was conveyed the message that my presence can cause insult and humiliation for the family, especially the bride in front of her in-laws, and it would be better to go back to the [trans] community [in Peshawar],” she recalls in a choked voice, wiping away tears. “I came back with a heavy heart, thinking that I should not have to face such disrespect and insult from my own blood relations. We are not acceptable to our relatives and considered a shame for them, so how can we be included in the family tree?”

Nargis stands outside her home in Charsadda, which still bears marks of damage from last year’s devastating floods (Image: Adel Saeed)

“Almost 90% of transgender people [in Pakistan] are abandoned by their families and live away from home with community members, and it’s not possible for them to fulfil the very basic prerequisite of NADRA regarding inclusion of their names in the family tree,” explains Farzana Riaz. “[As] relief and rehabilitation after any emergency solely depends on identification of applicants, this makes 90% of transgender people ineligible because they do not possess identity cards due to exclusion from families and omission of [their] name from official records to avoid disgrace in society,” she elaborates.

Riaz adds that the majority of trans people in Pakistan are reluctant to accept the government’s offer of marking their gender as ‘X’ on their ID cards – an option which would force them to declare themselves ‘eunuchs’, a term considered taboo. There is a fear in the community that this would attract further backlash and disrespect from relatives, she explains. 

Trans rights in Pakistan – on paper and in practice

On the surface, recent years have seen momentous wins for trans rights in Pakistan. In 2018, Pakistan’s parliament passed the Transgender Persons Act, which theoretically gives the community basic protections. The law guarantees trans persons’ right to safety, respect, property and inheritance, and criminalises harassment and discrimination against trans people. But the reality of being a trans person in Pakistan remains fraught with challenges. Rejected by their families and ostracised by much of society, many trans people in Pakistan live in fear of violence, harassment and extreme economic hardship. Many are forced to beg on the streets or engage in sex work.

Pakistan’s Sixth Population and Housing Census, conducted in 2017, estimated the number of transgender people in the country as 10,418. But independent estimates place the number in the hundreds of thousands.

A research paper seen by The Third Pole on the impacts of Covid-19 on the transgender community in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, published by Trans-Action Pakistan and non-profit organisation Blue Veins, states: “There is significant concern about underrepresentation of the number of trans population across Pakistan due to insensitive and non-inclusive data collection mechanisms. The community across Pakistan rejects the census figures and claims that in KPK [Khyber Pakhtunkhwa] alone, house around 50,000 trans community members.”    

“Transgender [people] do have concerns over their under-representation in the population census which excludes the majority of them from availing of any welfare-oriented policy for the community,” says Katrina, an activist based in Peshawar who heads REST, an organisation that offers vocational training to trans people.

Devastating floods compelled our community members to resort to door-to-door begging

Bindiya Rana, Gender Interactive Alliance

This lack of representation translates into disaster management planning and assessments of damage, in which Pakistan’s trans community is often overlooked. “A large number of trans people lost their homes in the [2022] floods, but there is no official data available on this,” says Nayab Ali, a prominent trans rights activist who works at the Islamabad-based Peace and Justice Network.

Tania Hamayun, former programme manager of the Gender and Child Cell at Pakistan’s National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), admits that trans people are not addressed in the national disaster management guidelines developed in 2014. “The guidelines cover children, women, elders and people with special needs or disabilities as vulnerable segments of society. Unfortunately, transgender [people] did not get any mention in this list,” says Hamayun.

Quick to add that “we have never discriminated against transgender [people]”, Hamayun says the community is “neglected” because the particular vulnerabilities faced by trans people had received little recognition when the NDMA’s National Policy Guidelines on Vulnerable Groups in Disasters were drafted in 2014.

Disasters exacerbate vulnerability of trans people in Pakistan

Bindiya Rana, president of the Gender Interactive Alliance, an organisation that advocates for equality and civil rights for trans people in Pakistan, emphasises how disasters often hit trans people particularly hard, as many are already living in poverty.

“More than 250 transgender people migrated to Karachi in search of livelihoods from districts submerged by floods in Sindh Province [in last year’s floods],” Rana says. “The economic stress [placed] on transgender people due to climate disasters is much more than material losses [due to] a slump in business – devastating floods compelled our community members to resort to door-to-door begging,” she adds.

The aforementioned research paper on the impacts of Covid-19 on transgender people in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, which interviewed 271 trans people, found that 17% of those who had previously not engaged in sex work turned to it as an option to handle economic stress caused by the pandemic.

An advertisement disseminated by the Government of Pakistan in 2022 invites the trans community to register with the government in order to benefit from the country’s largest social welfare scheme. Though billed by the government as a ‘landmark achievement’, the funds disseminated via the scheme can only be accessed by those with a NADRA-issued ID card. (Image: Blue Veins)

Movements for change

Mehnaz Bibi, a gender specialist at the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Social Welfare Department, says that government departments are working to register trans people in order to issue them with identity cards, having realised the huge gap between official figures and the ground reality. “We have 416 trans people registered who are entitled to any initiative taken by the government,” Bibi says, referring to welfare measures like protection at shelter homes or distribution of food.

Questioned about the problems trans people face in getting identity cards due to being disowned by their families, Mehnaz says a proposal is under consideration to issue identity cards on the assurance of their ‘gurus’ – mentors in the trans community. In 2018, a former chief justice took interest in the challenges faced by the trans community and directed government officials to help them, but the community continues to struggle to obtain formal documents as the proposal to recognise gurus’ assurance is not yet formalised.

Farzana Riaz of Trans-Action welcomes the proposal. “This is a suitable solution which, if implemented, can help a lot in making transgender people eligible for the government’s welfare-oriented schemes in the wake of any calamity, and also to claim their inheritance rights, as well as travelling internationally, especially for religious pilgrimage of Hajj and Umrah,” Riaz says.

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In 2022, Pakistan’s National Commission for Human Rights (NCHR) constituted a task force which brings together transgender rights organisations, government departments and UN agencies to address the barriers trans people face in accessing government support, especially the lack of official data that leads to exclusion of trans people from disaster management, Rizwanullah Shah, deputy director of the NCHR, tells The Third Pole. 

Meanwhile, according to Shaukat Ali Khan, deputy director of Pakistan’s general population census, the country’s ongoing Seventh Population Census includes a special section on transgender people in order to redress this neglect in official data.

“Pakistan is ranked among the top 10 countries most vulnerable to climate change,” says Qamar Naseem. “Considering the severity of climate-induced disasters, it is time to act much more rigorously for the safety of people, including the neglected transgender community of Pakistan.”

The heatwave sweeping across Asia has forced schools in India to shut. With our children already paying a terrible price for climate change, we must act to protect their future, urges an IPCC scientist

Aditi Mukherji

( The Third Pole ) – When heatwaves disrupt our children’s education, it is time to demand climate action. I am writing this as a climate scientist and a mother of two young children. I was a member of the team that wrote the latest climate report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in March 2023, which was endorsed by 195 governments including India. The report warned of debilitating heatwaves that would test the limits of human endurance.

Those heatwaves are happening right now all over Asia. Heat records have been broken in many parts of the continent, with multiple cities in India surpassing 44 degrees Celsius (111F.). One consequence is that all state schools and colleges in the Indian state of West Bengal, where I live, have been closed, with multiple other Indian states also shutting schools or shortening the school day.

Via Pixabay.

After pandemic-related shutdowns, yet another closure of educational institutions is further affecting the education of millions of young children, with disproportionate impacts falling on children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Our children have inherited a much warmer world than the one we were born in due to human-caused climate change, and their future depends on the actions we take today. What can governments, civil society, and we as individuals do to ensure a liveable future for our children?

Source: IPCC Synthesis Report, Figure SPM 1

1. Transition quickly to renewable energy

As much as 95% of West Bengal’s 10.7 gigawatts of installed power capacity comes from fossil fuels like coal. The burning of fossil fuels is the main driver of climate change. The state has plans to generate 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2030, which is too little, too late. Some states in India already generate 40-45% of their electricity from renewable sources, and there is no reason why West Bengal cannot be a leader in this space, especially when the state is already facing unbearable climate impacts like the heatwave unfolding right now.

The roofs of the very schools and colleges that are closed today due to heatwaves can quickly become a source of cheap and clean energy

Achieving a more ambitious target for renewables is doable because we have the technology and it is affordable. It is now cheaper to generate electricity from solar energy than from coal-based thermal plants. What’s missing, though, are proactive policies, such as attractive net metering policies that encourage institutions and households to invest in solar rooftop systems and become energy producers. The roofs of the very schools and colleges that are closed today due to heatwaves can quickly become a source of cheap and clean energy – almost tomorrow if the government provides support for individuals and the private sector to invest.

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Similarly, the existing 250,000-300,000 electric irrigation pumps in West Bengal can be solarised and connected to the grid, with farmers incentivised to sell excess electricity produced. Research by the International Water Management Institute (which has not yet been published) has found that farmers with grid-connected solar-powered pumps have strong incentives to reduce groundwater pumping, leading to more sustainable outcomes.

Effective net metering policies are the need of the hour, along with rapid investment in upgrading the grid so it can handle large volumes of renewable energy being injected during the day. A major impediment to an effective net metering policy is a mindset that struggles to reimagine electricity consumers as producers of electricity, leading to restrictive grid connection policies which are not as commercially beneficial. When mindsets stand in the way of our children’s future, it is best to let go and embrace the inevitable reality that we need rapid, deep, and sustained emissions reduction now.

2. Decarbonise and improve public transport

This is a space in which the state of West Bengal has already shown excellent leadership. The city of Kolkata has the largest fleet of electric public buses anywhere in India. Per capita ownership of private cars is also lower in West Bengal than the average for India, which is partly a testament to its effective public transport system. Keep it this way and improve public transport by enhancing local train services and adding to the number of electric bus fleets. Trams – the heritage of Kolkata – need to be brought back again, as we need more, not fewer, options for clean transport.

A tram in Kolkata, in India’s West Bengal state. “Clean public transport is a true climate solution,” says IPCC author Aditi Mukherji (Image: Sharon Schneider / Flickr, CC BY NC SA)

For those who own cars, including private taxis, make ownership of electric vehicles more affordable and make charging stations ubiquitous. But remember that clean public transport is a true climate solution.

3. Bring back ‘sponge cities’

The term ‘sponge cities’ is used to describe urban areas with abundant natural features such as trees, lakes and parks, as well as design features, that can absorb rain and prevent flooding. Kolkata, by virtue of its location on the banks of the Hooghly River and the wetlands that surround it, was a sponge city long before the term was used by climate scientists.

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Yet poor urban planning, encroachment on wetlands, and neglect of our natural spaces have meant that our sponge city is now denuded, and less able to cope with both extreme heatwaves and extreme rainfall events. Preventing further encroachment on water bodies and bringing back green spaces by planting trees and creating pockets of urban forests is the need of the hour. Here, local municipalities and individuals can play an important role in demanding that we bequeath cleaner and greener cities to our children.

4. Remember that the individual actions of the top 5% matter

If you are reading this in India, on your way to work in an air-conditioned car or in the drawing room of your own apartment, it is almost certain that you belong to the top 1-5% of Indians in terms of income. A monthly income of INR 25,000 (about USD 300) will put you in this highest income bracket. While these numbers are modest by international standards, and at 1.9 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita per year, the typical carbon footprint of an average Indian is a fraction of that of an average American (14.2 metric tonnes of CO2 per capita per year), the fact remains that there are deep income disparities within our country. This gives the wealthiest 1-5% a larger carbon footprint than 95% of the population.

Show me stories of ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things to make our world more liveable

It is therefore also our moral responsibility to reduce our carbon footprint through responsible consumption decisions. As parents, we need to inculcate responsible consumption habits, such as reducing, reusing and recycling. Society and in particular the media need to stop glorifying the unsustainable consumption of the rich and famous. I, for one, do not want to read about how lavish and wasteful the wedding party of India’s richest man’s daughter was. Instead, show me stories of ordinary citizens doing extraordinary things to make our world more liveable. We, as parents, owe it to our children.

It was a pandemic yesterday, it is a heatwave today, and it will be a devastating flood or cyclone tomorrow, when the schools will be closed again. Our children are already paying a terrible price for climate change, and now it is up to us to ensure that they have a liveable future. The window of opportunity for climate action is rapidly closing, and there is no time for further delay.

I had written about this catastrophe, “The massive monsoon floods that affected 33 million people in Pakistan, destroyed 1.3 million homes, turned the southern province of Sindh temporarily into a new inland sea nearly 70 miles across, and killed off 80% of the country’s livestock was in part fueled by the human-caused climate emergency. So argues a new paper by Friederike E. L. Otto et al., “Climate change likely increased extreme monsoon rainfall, flooding highly vulnerable communities in Pakistan,” is up at World Weather Attribution.

Some 45% of the cotton crop has been lost, along with billions of dollars in food crops, raising the specter of widespread starvation. $30 billion in damage has been done. 11 million people in Pakistan are newly food insecure.

Climate scientists are very careful about attribution. But these scientists wrote, “we found that the 5-day maximum rainfall over the provinces Sindh and Balochistan is now about 75% more intense than it would have been had the climate not warmed by 1.2C, whereas the 60-day rain across the basin is now about 50% more intense, meaning rainfall this heavy is now more likely to happen.”

The heating of the surface temperature of the earth to 2.16 degrees F. above preindustrial norms has been caused by burning coal, petroleum and fossil gas, which sends heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pakistan is only responsible for about 1% of that carbon dioxide, and historically the bulk of it was put into the atmosphere by the United States, Britain and other early-industrializing states. Pakistan is nevertheless stuck with the bill for this orgy of greenhouse gas production. That imbalance has led to calls for debt relief and even reparations for the disaster-struck country.

The scientists are confident that the maximum five-day rainfall during Pakistan’s monsoon has been turbocharged by heating up the earth and its oceans.

They note, “The record rainfall that fell between 1st-31st August over Sindh and Balochistan were 726% and 590% of the usual totals for August in the respective regions … Pakistan as a whole received 243% more rainfall than usual during this period.”

So here is the talk:

IAGD Masjid: “Climate Change and its impact on Pakistan | Professor Juan Cole”

And here are some slides:

Some 45% of the cotton crop has been lost, along with billions of dollars in food crops, raising the specter of widespread starvation. $30 billion in damage has been done. 11 million people in Pakistan are newly food insecure.

Climate scientists are very careful about attribution. But these scientists wrote, “we found that the 5-day maximum rainfall over the provinces Sindh and Balochistan is now about 75% more intense than it would have been had the climate not warmed by 1.2C, whereas the 60-day rain across the basin is now about 50% more intense, meaning rainfall this heavy is now more likely to happen.”

The heating of the surface temperature of the earth to 2.16 degrees F. above preindustrial norms has been caused by burning coal, petroleum and fossil gas, which sends heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Pakistan is only responsible for about 1% of that carbon dioxide, and historically the bulk of it was put into the atmosphere by the United States, Britain and other early-industrializing states. Pakistan is nevertheless stuck with the bill for this orgy of greenhouse gas production. That imbalance has led to calls for debt relief and even reparations for the disaster-struck country.

The scientists are confident that the maximum five-day rainfall during Pakistan’s monsoon has been turbocharged by heating up the earth and its oceans.

They note, “The record rainfall that fell between 1st-31st August over Sindh and Balochistan were 726% and 590% of the usual totals for August in the respective regions … Pakistan as a whole received 243% more rainfall than usual during this period.”

The paper notes the heat wave this year, which saw temperatures as high as 122F (50C), contributed to an “an intense depression from the Arabian Sea, bringing heavy rainfall to the southern regions.” That heat wave is estimated to have been made 30 times more likely by human-caused climate change.

Repeated monsoon depressions in the Bay of Bengal, which usually sends rains to North India, headed like an express train for Sindh and Balochistan provinces of Pakistan. Eight such depressions sent this wet air over to Pakistan, where it fell as torrential rains.

Pakistan always has summer monsoons, and there has sometimes been some flooding. But this flood is like the one that Noah boarded his ark to escape. It is massive, with millions of people vulnerable to cholera and other diseases carried by dirty water. One of the big problems with flooding is that dirty water invades the drinking water. I didn’t boil my water enough during the monsoon in India one time and came down with hepatitis. It knocked me out for three days and I lost 75% of liver function. There will unfortunately likely be a lot of such cases in Pakistan in coming months. Oxfam has been working in the country for decades and will be sorely needed this time.

There’s an old joke about the fellow who has his left foot in a bucket of ice water and the right in a bucket of hot water, so that his overall temperature is average. That seemed to apply to the climate during 2022’s northern summer of extremes.

Global warming is undoubtedly a factor, but just how the increasing extremes – heat waves, droughts and floods, sometimes one on top of the other – are related can be bewildering to the public and policymakers.

As a climate scientist, I’ve been working on these issues for more than four decades, and my new book, “The changing flow of energy through the climate system,” details the causes, feedbacks and impacts. Let’s take a closer look at how climate change and natural weather patterns like La Niña influence what we’re seeing around the world today.

The Northern Hemisphere’s extreme summer

Summer 2022 has indeed seemed to feature one climate-related disaster after another.

Record-breaking heat waves baked India and Pakistan, then monsoon flooding left about a third of Pakistan under water, affecting an estimated 33 million people. Temperatures exceeded 104 degrees Fahrenheit (40 Celsius) for prolonged periods in many places, and even broke 122 F (50 C) in Jacobabad, Pakistan, in May.

The Asian heat helped to melt some glaciers in the Himalayas, elevating rivers. At the same time, three times the normal annual rain fell in Pakistan during the weekslong monsoon. More than 1,500 people died in the flooding, an estimated 1.8 million homes were damaged or destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of livestock were lost. Food for the coming seasons will be in short supply.

Extreme heat in Europe led to wildfires, especially in Spain and Portugal. The drought in Spain dried up a reservoir, revealing the long-submerged “Spanish Stonehenge,” an ancient circle of megalithic stones believed to date back to around 5000 B.C. Electricity generation in France plummeted, with low rivers reducing the ability to cool nuclear power towers, and German barges had difficulty finding enough water to navigate the Rhine River.

In the United States, the West and the Midwest suffered through intense heat waves, and the crucial Colorado River reservoirs Lake Powell and Lake Mead hit record lows, triggering water restrictions. Yet, the country also saw major disruptive flooding in several cities and regions, from Death Valley to the mountains of eastern Kentucky.

In China, heat waves and drought stretched over eight weeks and dried up parts of the Yangtze River to the lowest level since at least 1865 – until parts of the same area were inundated with flooding rains in August.

Climate change exacerbates the extremes

Yes, these are all manifestations of climate change brought about by human activities.

Climate change for the most part does not directly cause the rainfall or drought, but it makes these naturally occurring events more intense or severe. Carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, largely from power plants, vehicles, buildings, industry and agriculture, trap heat in the atmosphere, heating the planet.

In addition to raising temperature, global warming increases evaporation of surface waters into the atmosphere, drying areas that have had little rain. Warmer air increases the amount of water vapor the atmosphere can hold, and the thirstier atmosphere sucks moisture from the surface.

That extra moisture is carried away by winds and eventually flows into storms, often a thousand miles distant, that rain harder. Atmospheric moisture has increased by 5% to 20% in general compared with the pre-1970s. The increase in water vapor, a greenhouse gas, further amplifies warming. When water evaporates, it absorbs heat, and when it later falls as rain, that heat is released back into the atmosphere. This extra energy fuels storms, leading to more intense systems that may also be bigger and last longer, with up to 30% more rain as a consequence of warming.

On average, precipitation falls on only about 8% of the land globally at any time. It is the intermittency of precipitation that leads to the exaggerated extremes, resulting in localized heavy rains and widespread dry spells.

So, with the accelerated water cycle, wet areas get wetter, and dry areas get drier, while over the oceans, this results in salty waters becoming saltier and fresh waters becoming fresher.

Infrastructure isn’t ready for the consequences

The impact of these events and whether they turn into disasters depend in part on how prepared communities are for the changes. Most infrastructure, forests and farms are adapted to a previous climate.

Whether heavy rains result in flooding depends critically on drainage systems and surface water management.

When populations grow, as Pakistan’s has, more people become vulnerable when they settle in flood plains. It takes time for surface waters to evaporate, and flood water runoff is affected by rising sea levels that slow and may even reverse stream and river flows to the ocean.

Natural variability also plays a major role

While the observed increases in extremes are a consequence of climate change, the weather events themselves are still largely naturally occurring.

Two naturally reoccurring weather patterns are important to understand: La Niña and El Niño – the two opposite phases of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation.

In 2022, we are likely headed into a third year of a La Niña event, in which cool waters dominate the central and eastern tropical Pacific. The pattern affects atmospheric circulation, keeping the main rains over southern Asia and the Indonesian region, and with associated record-breaking marine heat waves in the North and South Pacific. In North America, it typically means the southern half of the U.S. is drier than normal.

In the Southern Hemisphere, that marine heat wave over the South Pacific led to the warmest and wettest meteorological winter (June-August) on record in New Zealand, with several major floods. Rain was 141% of “normal,” and nationwide temperatures averaged 2.5 F (1.4 C) above the 1981-2010 average. The exceptionally high sea surface temperatures not only contributed to warmer temperatures on land, but also fed atmospheric rivers and provided extra moisture to onshore winds and storms.

The La Niña cooling in the tropical Pacific can readily reverse, with an El Niño pattern effectively pumping heat out of the ocean and into the atmosphere. A preliminary analysis colleagues and I conducted suggests that the global ocean heat content is at record-high levels. Exceptionally warm deep waters in the tropical western Pacific right now suggest prospects for the next El Niño event in 2023, potentially resulting in more global temperature records in 2024 as some ocean heat returns to the atmosphere.

All La Niñas are not the same, however. Because of how sea temperatures responded to the heat in the extratropics, the environment today is very different than it was two years ago. Warmth in the North Pacific could have consequences for the “pineapple express” and other West Coast U.S. storms this coming winter.

The natural variability component means that we should not simply expect more of the same every year. As we likely go into an El Niño next year and global temperatures get a boost, extremes will shift to new locations.

This article was updated Sept. 15, 2022, with the Pakistan death toll rising to more than 1,500.

Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Scholar, NCAR; Affiliated Faculty, University of Auckland

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.