AHMEDABAD : Imagine if Gujarat breaks away into six to seven islands due to floods with sea water gushing inland through the Gulf of Kutch, Gulf of Khambhatt and other coastal areas.
Former UN undersecretary general, Nitin Desai put forth this possibility of 200 years later, while highlighting the perils of global warming at his inaugural address at the fifth biennial conference of the Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE) at Gujarat Vidyapith.
Signs were already showing with the net sown area of the country dropping even where canal network existed, as Professor YK Alagh of Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA) warned.
"Each Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment has been more alarming than the earlier one. IPCC takes steps to prevent things from happening to get governments to act now" said Desai.
Desai said, "There has to be a systematic procedure to handling uncertainties. The challenge now is that the scale and the depth of interactions have increased from local to regional to global impacts."
He compared mitigating climate change to taking insurance. "Lower costs now for greater benefits tomorrow. There are chances of things being worse than things being better," he said.
According to him balancing diversities of impact, domestic compulsions, poverty, energy requirements is a global governance challenge. Instead of looking at the historical culpability, there has to be fairness in handling available environment space in the future.
Alagh warned how urbanisation and changing land use patterns were putting pressure on available cultivable area.
"Land and water context is worse than earlier estimates. There is a debacle in irrigation and cropping intensity. The pressure of urbanisation is more and the energy sector is a mystery of growth without energy" said Alagh.
"In the 1990s it was hoped that 141 million hectares of net sown area would increase with better irrigation facilities, but it has failed," said Alagh
According to him, "With the eleventh plan the crisis is now official. Without a dynamic agriculture, inclusive growth becomes a mirage."
India's net sown area is under stress, area under canal irrigation has fallen for the first time in history. The irrigated area under shallow tubewells is falling and groundwater is under stress,'' he warned.