Nagpur: The average temperature and instances of heatwaves in Nagpur have been on a constant rise since last two decades. This and many other worrying facts have come to the fore in the latest environmental status report for the city, which for the first time scientifically establishes that the city is severely getting impacted from climate change.
Prepared by the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute (Neeri) for Nagpur Municipal Corporation, the climate change section of the report is based on an in-depth analysis of Regional Meteorological Centre’s data.
To establish the effect of climate change, scientists studied weather patterns of around 49 years. “The bigger the data, the better is the analysis. So we found the mean temperature of the time period 1970-2019 and compared average temperature of every year to this mean,” said Suvha Lama, scientist at the climate and strategic urban management division at Neeri.
According to the report, the average annual temperature for the last two decades is higher than the 50-year mean with an increasing trend. “80% of the years in 2000-2019 decades have their annual average temperature higher than the baseline value,” the study stated.
Considering the same baseline mercury level, scientists quantified the instances of severe heatwaves in the city. While the number of instances of extreme heatwaves between 1980 to 2000 was 2, it went up drastically to 19 between 2000 to 2019. “The overall number of heat days and nights for 2010-2019 decade saw an increase of 9.3 % in comparison to the 1970- 1979 decade,” the study stated.
As per scientists, increasing concretisation and reducing green cover are the main causes behind extreme events.
The report further highlighted how rainfall pattern has been impacted. Interestingly, while the yearly average of rainfall has not much changed much between 1970-2019, the number of rainy days has significantly reduced. “The total number of rain days has reduced by 16% for the 2010-19 decade in comparison to the baseline data,” the report stated.
This, according to scientists, is bad news. “It shows that we are getting intense rains — same amount of rainfall in less number of days. This can give rise to problems like flooding, water-borne diseases like cholera, typhoid, vector-borne diseases like malaria, dengue and infrastructural damages,” said Lama.
The report further established that climate change has had an overall impact on agricultural production too.
Stating that the city has a reason to worry, Neeri director Rakesh Kumar said, “The city has high population density and the impact of any kind will be felt by larger population. The other positive side however can be that Nagpur can use its resource to bring resilience to itself for combating climate impacts. Specific areas could be to create specific health modules for climate change-related diseases, just the way we did for Covid-19.”
Kumar added that to curb extreme events of flood, new norms of storm water drainage design should be adopted.
Stressing that the time has come to make a roadmap for mitigation, Atya Kapley, senior principal scientist and head of director’s research cell said, “We need to be ready for climate adaptability. Policy-makers need to make climate resilient urban plans by taking experts’ opinion into consideration.”