As part of YKA’s ZeroSeHero campaign, we organized a ZsH workshop The cost of living crisis is a climate justice issue with Ms. Prathijna Poonacha Kodira, Senior Consultant, Indian Institute of Human Settlements as the key speaker. She raised some critical points about our strategy to safeguard the cost of living and cope with climate change.
Here are ten takeaways from the Workshop :
1. Climate change is a “poly-crisis” - a cluster of related global risks with compounding effects, such that the overall impact exceeds the sum of each part.
2. Increasing temperatures combined with shifting precipitation patterns can dampen agricultural productivity, leading to a decline in consumption expenditures for households dependent on agriculture.
3. Increasing temperatures and wet conditions can increase the propagation of vector-borne and other infectious diseases, resulting in lost productivity and income
4. India is already experiencing the consequences of 1.1°C of global warming. Extreme heat waves, heavy rainfall, severe flooding, catastrophic storms, and rising sea levels are damaging lives, livelihoods, and assets across the country. Looking forward, the human and economic costs of climate change will only increase
5. With only about 9% of the world's arable land, agriculture in India feeds about 17.2% of the global population. Over 56% of the country's total agricultural area is rainfed, meaning India's food security and agricultural livelihoods depend heavily on the monsoon, which makes it particularly vulnerable to climate change. Therefore, there would be years of crop failure, causing food insecurity, income loss, and/or displacement.
6. Groundwater depletion - at rates exceeding 2 cm per year in the Indo-Gangetic aquifer - is straining the limits of these resources, leading to lower agricultural production and loss of related benefits, including effects on the adaptive capacity of communities.
7. Negative impacts on agricultural GDP and trade are projected. Climate change is projected to reduce agricultural GDP through declining crop yields and increase consumer prices, with fourth losses associated with higher warming
8. Welfare losses caused by decreases in food production increases in food prices and decrease in food consumption cannot be adequately compensated through trade and fiscal policies.
9. Green infrastructure or nature-based solutions are identified as one of the key ways of achieving the triple goals of sustainable development, human well-being, and climate action through fostering biodiversity, maintaining air quality, regulating water resources, providing food and nutrition, improving public health, and building psychosocial values that improve non-material well-being.
10. Urban Agriculture holds the potential to contribute to multiple sustainability and well-being outcomes through targeted approaches for different income groups. There are opportunities for multiple policy convergence to promote urban agriculture and scale impacts for health, food security, green jobs and livelihoods, and sustainable urban development.
Join ZsH to get information on such crucial issues for transforming into Zero se Hero by making India a net zero Country.