We sat in a plush climate-controlled room and deliberated climate change as the outside world collapsed around us.. It could have been a scene straight out of Michael Crichton's book, 'State of Fear', where a group of renegade environmentalists engineer massive 'natural' disasters to secure funding for climate change. Only this time, the disaster was frightening and frustratingly real. I am, of course, referring to the massive floods that occurred in Uttarakhand between the 15th and-19th of June, which have left an estimated 10,000 people missing or dead.
It is against that backdrop that government officials and civil society workers from across India met in the beautiful and relatively unscathed town of Mussoorie to learn how climate change will affect their work. The goal of this workshop - organised by the National Institute of Administrative Research - was to sensitise people working in water, sanitation and hygiene to climate change and provide them with the tools they need to recognise and manage its impact. Officials from Uttarakhand were conspicuously absent, as the entire government machinery was focussed on the rescue and rehabilitation of those affected by the floods.
Some things hit a little too close to home. Kala Azar (Visceral leishmaniasis, an often-fatal disease spread by the sandfly), was once confined to Bihar, and even there was being beaten back by a concentrated effort. Since 1982, it has cropped up in Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh, with the last two cases being at Garampani, a scarce 20 km from my home.
The increase in extreme weather events, climate-induced migration, and collapsing infrastructure highlighted the importance of mapping the various vulnerabilities we could be faced with. This will help adequately judge which areas will be hardest hit by climate change and help design relevant strategies to meet the crises.
These strategies need to be of two types - mitigation and adaptation.
Later, the workshop delegates were split up into smaller groups to put some of what we learnt into practice. I was part of the group that tried to ensure water security in a fictional village. The solution? Risk diversification! We planned that the village water supply system should derive its water from multiple sources such as rainwater harvesting, tanks, and groundwater. This would ensure that even if one system failed (for example if there was no rain), the others would still work. Other groups wrestled with creating State Action Plans, using GIS for vulnerability mapping, and developing systems for managing water supply, distribution and waste disposal in an integral manner.