ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

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Climate Change and International Relations 207 Now with serious security implications of climate change becoming more real, it is time for security forces and defence planners to analyse how best the military can be a catalyst for mitigating environmental threats and global warming. National security consequences of climate change should be fully integrated into national security planning and national defence strategies. Defence forces should enhance operational capability under challenging climate conditions by adoption of improved processes and innovative technologies that result in improved military efficiency. Weather forecasting techniques must be modernised to vastly improve the capacity to monitor patterns of climate change and also develop reliable early warning systems for extreme weather conditions for the country. Some advanced countries are known to be already working on the possibility of using weather as a weapon in the future, although for now it is only at a simulation exercise level. However, the potential of climate change as a threat to security needs to be recognised in all its dimensions and factored into national security planning. Water and Food Security for India: Impact of Climate Change India has 16 percent of the world’s population but only 4 percent of the total available freshwater and water resources that vary widely by season and by region, within the country. Per capita water availability in India has fallen by almost 70 percent since 1950. This is due to increase in water usage by all categories of water users and rising demand posed due to economic growth and an increasing population, which not only restricts potential uses of available water but also threatens future use. India’s main water resources consist of the annual monsoon rainfall and melting Himalayan glaciers in its river flows. The annual extraction of groundwater in India is one of the highest in the world as it provides for over 60 percent of the irrigated land. The growing dependence on groundwater has considerably lowered water tables and this has had an adverse impact on the quality and quantity of rural drinking water. While demands for energy and food keep growing as population grows, uncertainties and risks associated with fresh water access are bound to get aggravated under adverse climate changes. Building dams, reservoirs, irrigation channels and flood barriers are indeed important options for addressing water issues, but these are meant to complement nature’s own reservoirs, watersheds, wetlands, aquifers and floodplains. However, man-induced climate changes are likely to weaken these natural infrastructures and make water management much more difficult in the future.
208 Role of Technology in International Affairs India gets an average 1,197 mm of rainfall every year. This amounts to a total precipitation of 4,000 billion cubic metres. However, 3,000 billion cubic metres are lost due to runoffs, and only the remaining 1,000 billion cubic metres are available as surface and ground water sources. Water accessibility differs between different user groups. Access to water is often guided by social status and over 16 percent of the rural population and 4 percent of the urban population still lacks access to drinking water. Numbers are more alarming with regard to water for sanitation facilities. 46 percent of the urban population and 59 percent of the rural population have no direct access to sanitation facilities. India has only about 200 cubic metres of storage capacity per person. 19 The National Water Mission, which was established under the National Action Plan on Climate Change, aims to tackle this problem by generating 20 percent improvement in storage capacity. The average per capita availability of water, currently estimated at 1,600 cubic metres per year, is expected to fall to around 1,000 cm per year by 2025, based on current population projections. Per capita water availability in India is expected to decline to as little as 1/30th of per capita availability in the United States. According to the assessment of the IPCC on the vulnerability of India to climate change, key challenges are most likely to be surface warming, rise in sea levels, decreasing water availability due to glacial retreat, significant reduction in crop production and loss of flora and fauna. Climate projections indicate inescapable temperature increase by over 2°C by 2050 and even relatively small climatic changes can have a huge impact on water resources, particularly in arid and semi-arid regions such as northwest India. 20 Glaciers form the main source of water for key perennial rivers such as the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra. Almost 67 percent of the glaciers in the Himalayan mountain ranges have retreated in the past decade and will continue to retreat further, diminishing flow and leading to severe water shortages. The frequency and intensity of extreme weather events such as heat waves, droughts and floods, have increased over the past two decades and will increase further due to climate change. With rising sea surface temperature in the range of 2-4°C, cyclone intensity can increase by 10-20 percent and rising sea levels will lead to salt intrusion into coastal fresh water sources and threaten water availability. Signs of sea level rise are already there along vast stretches of the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove wetland in the Ganges-Brahamputra Delta. Coastal megacities, such as Mumbai, Kolkata and Chennai are suffering
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Acknowledgements As a defence techn
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PART I Role of Science and Technolo
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3 Defence Technologies: Game Change
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Defence Technologies: Game Changers
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