The Himalayan farmers paying the price for climate change: ‘I’ve never seen this kind of weather’
- Unprecedented rains and pest attacks have destroyed crops and caused landslides in India’s Himalayan range, affecting deliveries and incomes
- Global warming is being felt more profoundly in the Himalayas Indus basin given its topography, with infrastructure compounding its effects
Som Dutt, 67, has been cultivating exotic vegetables and flowers in India’s Himalayan mountain village of Sekuri since his childhood, but for the first time this year he lost nearly all his crops to unprecedented rains and pest attacks.
“It rained so hard that it washed away many of our crops. Then the temperature rose suddenly, causing pest attacks,” he said. “I have never seen this kind of weather.”
Floriculture and cultivation of vegetables such as red cabbage and iceberg lettuce have flourished in Sekuri – surrounded by a protected forest area in Himachal Pradesh’s Chail – for decades because of an ambient climate.
But climate change has hit the Himalayan range hard, disrupting the lives of over a billion people in South Asia living in the mountains as well those in plains dependent on river basins originating in glaciers.
India’s June-September monsoon, which brings 70 per cent of the country’s rainfall, ended at a five-year low of 94 per cent of a long period average this season. But more worrying than the drop in volumes has been its erratic pattern.
After a sluggish start in June, rains rebounded above average in July, followed by one of the driest months in history in August. Unusually heavy showers in September wiped out a seasonal deficit, but hit the ripening crops close to harvest.
The intense burst of rain also caused landslides, flash floods and houses to collapse. In northeastern India, a glacial lake overflowed and burst through a dam this month. Forty people died and thousands were forced to flee their homes.