by Sunil Amrith
A further driver of regional climate change is rapid changes in land use. Over the last 150 years, forest cover over most parts of Asia has declined dramatically. The intensification of agricultural production in India, and the use of more water for irrigation, have affected the moisture of the soil, its capacity to absorb or reflect heat. Crops reflect more solar radiation than forests, which tend to absorb it; the greater reflexivity of land planted with crops makes it cooler, once again weakening the temperature differentials that drive circulation and rainfall. Tropical meteorologist Deepti Singh points out that climate models have often failed to predict the monsoon’s behavior in part because they are too abstract to take into account the “complex topography, temperature and moisture gradients in the region that can influence the monsoon circulation.” The models omit, that is, precisely the details of landscape and microclimate that the meteorologists of a century earlier were so deeply interested in, which they depicted in their detailed local and regional maps of India’s climate.59
We are left with the most bitter of ironies. Many of the measures taken to secure India against the vagaries of the monsoon in the second half of the twentieth century—intensive irrigation, the planting of new crops—have, through a cascade of unintended consequences, destabilized the monsoon itself. When the geographers of the early twentieth century wrote of “monsoon Asia,” they saw the monsoon as sovereign—it shaped the lives of hundreds of millions of people, who waited on its every move. Monsoon Asia means something quite different now, when the monsoon’s behavior, increasingly erratic, responds to human intervention.
AT ONE LEVEL, THE STORY OF HOW THE MONSOON HAS CHANGED since the 1950s is a story of India’s resilience. India has experienced more droughts since the 1940s than in the half century before that, a half century that saw so many devastating famines. Even on a shorter timescale, there are signs of progress. In 2014 and 2015, India experienced two successive years of drought that were as severe as the monsoon failures of 1965 and 1966, which—as we have seen—India could only ride out with massive external aid. In 2014–2015, there was no noticeable drop in agricultural production, which observers attribute to better planning—but also to much better forecasts, enabled by the advances in meteorological understanding, and technology, that took root in the 1970s and 1980s. Intraseasonal oscillations—the MJO and the Boreal Summer Intraseasonal Oscillation—have become more amenable to prediction, improving forecasts on a timescale of two to four weeks. Alongside a general drying trend, the monsoon has grown more prone to extremes over the past several decades. If India has received less rain overall, more of it has come in torrents. Between 1981 and 2000, wet spells have been more intense, while droughts have been more frequent but less intense.60 From the nineteenth century, understanding and predicting the fearsome cyclones that visit the Bay of Bengal with regularity prompted the development of meteorology in India—just as the menace of typhoons spurred research in the Philippines and along the China coast. Predictions of the impact climate change will have on the development of cyclones are as uncertain as those that seek to model the overall behavior of the monsoon. The same countervailing forces are at work: warming seas are, in theory, likely to produce more cyclones—but not if the seas are warming faster than the land. A more definite finding is that the Bay of Bengal’s cyclones have grown in intensity in recent decades, as have hurricanes in the Atlantic and tropical storms in other parts of the world. In the Bay of Bengal, scientists predict that climate change will, in the coming century, lead to fewer but more powerful cyclones—though it is possible that the Arabian Sea, not known for cyclones, could see an increase.61
Nowhere in the world have tropical storms affected more lives than in Bangladesh. In the 1860s and 1870s, severe cyclones in that region of eastern Bengal, then part of British India, spurred the development of meteorological science. In the second half of the twentieth century, cyclones have been more frequent and just as devastating. Approximately 40 percent of global storm surges in the last fifty years have hit Bangladesh, including the two with the highest death tolls, in 1970 and in 1991. Five of the ten worst storms to affect any part of Asia in the twentieth century have struck Bangladesh.62 But the past twenty years have witnessed a dramatic reduction in cyclone mortality in Bangladesh. Cyclone Sidr, which struck Bangladesh in 2007, was as severe—in terms of wind speed and rainfall—as cyclone Bhola of 1970, but the death toll was one hundred times smaller. An estimated five hundred thousand people died in the cyclone of 1970; in 2007, that number was below five thousand. In part this is a tribute to improvements in forecasting. The Bangladesh Meteorological Department’s ability to track cyclones as they develop in the Bay of Bengal improved significantly, with assistance from a Japanese satellite as well as data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. After the fearsome cyclone of 1991, the Bangladesh government embarked on the construction of thousands of cyclone shelters, which have saved millions of lives. Cyclone warnings have become more effective, helped greatly by the spread of mobile phones to even the poorest villages. Changes in the landscape have also played a role. Coastal embankments have kept floodwaters out, although their impact on local ecology has been more controversial. An extensive program of mangrove reforestation has helped to restore one of the most effective natural flood defenses to parts of Bangladesh’s low-lying coast.63 But in Bangladesh, as in India and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, real gains in protecting people from tropical storms contend with a series of new risks—risks that the weather will become more extreme and less predictable, and manufactured risks in the form of unregulated coastal construction, rising population density, and galloping social inequality.
Research is underway into what governs the increasingly erratic, increasingly extreme behavior of the monsoon. It likely stems from the interaction, on multiple levels and over different timescales, of planetary warming, regional climate change, and natural variability. Recent advances in the oceanographic study of the Bay of Bengal make clear how much the sea’s chemistry itself affects climate. The bay is less salty than most bodies of water because of the vast discharge of freshwater from the Himalayan rivers, and because it receives more rainfall than any other sea. This has implications for ocean circulation, temperature differentials, and the interaction of ocean and atmosphere, but the forces at work are still the subject of intensive research.64 Some of that research looks to the deepest past for clues about the future. Satellites allowed for a new appreciation of climatic forces in the late twentieth century; now the seabed is the next frontier. In 2015, the 470-foot vessel JOIDES Resolution, equipped with a 200-foot drilling tower, collected sediment cores from the sea floor under the Bay of Bengal. Scientists seek a record of the monsoon’s behavior going back 15 million years, embedded in the sunken fossils of microorganisms known as plankton foraminifera that once inhabited the surface water and now lie buried. The project aims to use that deep historical data to predict the monsoon’s future behavior under conditions of global warming, by examining how the monsoon has responded to historic changes in temperature, salinity, sea level, and atmospheric carbon. It is ironic, perhaps fitting, that the Resolution was once an oil-drilling vessel, now converted to the more benign purpose of oceanographic investigation.65
ON JULY 26, 2005, 37.2 INCHES OF RAIN BATTERED THE CITY OF Mumbai, most of it between 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. A third of the city was flooded. Cellular phone networks crashed. The airport was shut when its runways flooded. Close to 150,000 people were stranded in stations on Mumbai’s massive commuter rail network, which came to a standstill. Almost one thousand people died, tens of thousands were made homeless. The government was completely unprepared when faced with this extreme amount of rain, even though such downpours were not completely without precedent in Mumbai’s history. To many observers, this was a freak of nature—or an act of God.
Map of Mumbai, showing it flanked by the Arabian Sea to the west and Thane Creek to the east—much of contemporary Mumbai sits on reclai
med land. CREDIT: Illustration by Matilde Grimaldi
But a citizens’ commission assembled by the city’s nongovernmental organizations to report on the floods reached a different conclusion. The commission argued that Mumbai had put itself in harm’s way. After decades of relentless growth and expansion, Mumbai had few natural drainage channels left. They had been concreted over. There was nowhere for the water to go. Storm drains were clogged with waste, tidal flats had been built upon. What environmental regulations there were on paper could not rein in a boom in unauthorized construction—in a city where prime real estate was worth more than in New York or Hong Kong. The destruction of the mangroves of Mahim Creek—which stretched to seven hundred acres as late as 1930—for highway construction and urban development robbed the city of a natural buffer between land and sea.66
A taxi under water during the Mumbai floods of July 26, 2005. CREDIT: Hindustan Times/Getty Images
Beyond the suffering that the storm caused, it also provided a stark warning. If, as scientists predict, the “once-in-a-hundred-year” storm is likely, in the future, to materialize every ten or twenty years, or perhaps more regularly than that, Mumbai is acutely vulnerable, along with so many cities at the water’s edge. The threat to the coasts, once again, comes from the sea—fueled no longer just by natural patterns but also by human activity that is once regional and planetary in its sources and its effects.
The prospect of the next big storm hitting Mumbai is the alarming picture that Amitav Ghosh sketches, powerfully, in his nonfiction work on climate change, The Great Derangement. Ghosh forces us to imagine Mumbai in a superstorm:
At this point waves would be pouring into South Mumbai from both its sea-facing shorelines; it is not inconceivable that the two fronts of the storm surge would meet and merge. In that case the hills and promontories of South Mumbai would once again become islands, rising out of a wildly agitated expanse of water.
But in the face of catastrophe that is “inconceivably large,” Ghosh argues that most states, like most human beings, are guided by “the inertia of habitual motion.”67
In recent years, the view that we should live with and adapt to the natural hydraulic risks of littoral zones—to say nothing of how these risks are worsening with climate change—has infiltrated the worlds of architecture and design. Mumbai architects and urban theorists Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha insist that the colonial and postcolonial practice of drawing a firm boundary between land and water in Bombay stems from a fundamental misreading of the fluid coastal landscape. Mumbai during the monsoon demands to be seen “in cross-sectional depth,” they argue, not in the two dimensions of maps and plans. When the monsoon comes, “there is too little time and too much water to make an orderly exit through courses delineated on maps.” In their vision, the city in monsoon becomes a fluid, mutable organism at the boundary between land and water, shaped by the interplay of “the monsoon clouds above through the labyrinthine world of creeks, to the web of aquifers beneath.” Only if we understand this, design for it, adapt to it, they argue, can we live with, rather than trying to engineer away, risk.68
Working within a tradition that goes back a century—to Blanford and Isis Pogson and Ruchi Ram Sahni—Indian meteorologists have a distinctive understanding of the climate risks facing India today. However much patterns of rainfall may be changing, they suggest, the monsoon has always presented a risk to South Asia: the fundamental source of escalating risk today lies in foolhardy policies.
This is what emerged in my conversations with S. Raghavan, formerly a senior officer in the Indian Meteorological Department, now retired in Chennai, where we met at his home. His father was a large farmer in an arid tract of rural Tamil Nadu. Raghavan grew up with an intimate knowledge of water and crops; long before he became a meteorologist, he recognized the rhythms of the monsoon. After taking a degree in physics at Madras University, Raghavan received three job offers: one from All India Radio, one from the auditor general’s office, and one from the meteorological department. With little knowledge of meteorology, he took that option, excited in part by the chance to work with the latest technology, including the radiosondes he had seen on display at a stall in his college’s engineering fair. At the height of the Cold War, Raghavan was sent to the United States on a government scholarship to study radar technology. When Delhi’s Safdarjung Airport received its first radar in 1957, Raghavan was put in charge of its operation. In 1972, he returned to Madras to take charge of radar meteorology there, equipped with a cyclone warning radar purchased from Japan, which arrived only after a long tussle with the customs department at a time when India had stringent restrictions on imports and foreign exchange. That year, a serious cyclone struck the coastal town of Cuddalore. It was the first cyclone in India to be tracked by radar as it approached; with accurate information and early warnings, casualties were minimal. It was then, Raghavan said, that “I realized that I was doing some service to society.”
But just as forecasting capacities improved, in the 1980s, the risk posed by extreme weather in India multiplied. The cause was manufactured, not climatic, he said. The reason so many millions who live in coastal India are in danger, he told me, was because governments, planners, developers, and citizens had completely neglected the ordinary climatic risks that coastal South Asia faces. “Time and time again, we put ourselves in harm’s way,” he said. Raghavan does not believe that the risks of cyclonic storms, for example, can be engineered away; at best they can be prepared for. He believes in early warning, and for that there is no substitute for the patient observation of weather fronts developing in the Bay of Bengal. His mission in retirement is the production of a Tamil lexicon of climatological terms, in the same way that the colonial meteorologists of the late nineteenth century were not averse to collecting local proverbs. He regularly gives talks to schools and residential societies about climate and weather. He described the destruction of cities’ natural drainage and storm defenses. As late as the 1940s, he remembered seeing Chennai’s Cooum River busy with traffic, including boats carrying salt from Andhra; it had become a “cesspit,” he told me. Drains were blocked by a “plastics explosion”; the destruction of mangroves had taken away natural protection against storm surges. “Our own actions are responsible” for the crisis, he said.
The soft-spoken Mr. Raghavan was careful and precise in his judgments; as we talked, he often turned to his shelves to find a book, or to consult a folder of press clippings that he had maintained over many years. The day after we met he sent me a PowerPoint presentation he had made for a recent lecture. But there was no mistaking the emotion in what he said—he was both sad and angry at the way the risks of a monsoon climate had been disregarded. His was a view of the weather, and the climate, that was rarely about control—it was about adapting to known and felt risks. The long quest of India’s meteorologists to understand the monsoon continues to shape their responses to a changing climate.
THESE ARE NOT, FOR THE MOST PART, THE LESSONS THAT ARE BEING learned. The map of cities at risk resembles a series of beads on a necklace threaded along the coastline of Asia. One study predicts that by 2070, nine out of the ten cities with the most people at risk from extreme weather will be in Asia—Miami is the only non-Asian inclusion. The list includes Kolkata and Mumbai in India, Dhaka in Bangladesh, Guangzhou and Shanghai in China, Ho Chi Minh City and Hai Phong in Vietnam, Bangkok in Thailand, and Yangon in Myanmar.69 Each one of these cities will confront any change in the interaction of land and water, winds and rain over Asia’s oceans. Just two years after the Mumbai floods, it was the turn of Jakarta, the Indonesian capital and the fastest-sinking city in the world, pulled down by the weight of construction, by the extraction of groundwater, and by the rising sea. Jakarta is sinking by between three and six inches every year. The storm in 2007 washed over the sea walls built to protect the city. Half the city was underwater, displacing 340,000 people from their homes. In Jakarta and in each of Asia’s coastal megacities, climate change
compounds a cavalcade of risks that are severe in and of themselves—hasty development driven by property speculation and new forms of middle-class consumption, crumbling health and sanitary infrastructures, and a lack of preparedness and precaution, are all symptoms of profound social and economic inequalities both among and within nations. Of all the countries in the world, few are more directly under threat than low-lying Bangladesh.70
IV
The struggle for water transcends Asia’s borders. The Himalayan rivers, dammed and diverted and vulnerable to changes in glacier cover, flow through many nation-states on their descent to the sea. Planetary warming is a result of the historical emissions of fossil fuels—initially and cumulatively by the wealthy and industrialized countries of the world, but also, and increasingly since the 1980s, by China and India. Global warming interacts with and compounds the effects of regional climate change. Aerosol emissions from the Gangetic plain or from fast-industrializing areas of China have effects far beyond India’s or China’s borders, creating a series of brown clouds that blanket the Indian Ocean and affect rainfall far away. Climate change creates problems of distance—between the source of pollution and its consequences—but it also creates new forms of proximity in the form of shared risks and interdependence. The image of the Himalayas as “Asia’s water tower” conveys both the scale of the hydraulic system that binds much of Asia, and the scale of the threat that they face from the destabilization of that source of so much water. By the 1960s, the sea itself was a form of territory. The Bay of Bengal was the crucible of the earliest monsoon science in the nineteenth century; it remains the crucible of monsoon science today. But it is a very different sort of space. It is crowded. It is contested. It is walled off by borders in the sea as much as on land.71 Even international cooperation in oceanographic research on the monsoon has to confront the reality of borders at sea. A major project between 2013 and 2015 set out to investigate the Bay of Bengal and its role in monsoon circulation; it brought together American, Indian, and Sri Lankan scientists. Their research vessels roamed the Bay for two years, taking an enormous number of measurements of ocean salinity, temperature, currents, and chemistry. Yet the map of their voyages, a dense set of tracks that the ships followed over those years, is divided up by a thin line marking the extent of territorial waters and exclusive economic zones; some, like the border of Myanmar, the ships could not cross for political reasons.72