In India, Global Warming Sparks Fears of Epic Floods

BASAHI, India — When the monsoon comes each summer to this poor Indian village, it brings misery.

Raindrops as wide as nickels fall straight and hard. They pool in fields and churn dirt lanes into mud. They creep under doors and force residents into makeshift tents on higher ground.

As they keep falling, they swell the nearby Budhigandak River, a tributary of the Ganges, which 200 miles to the east brings more flooding and misery to Bangladesh before emptying into the Indian Ocean.

That is how things always have been.

But many of the 2,500 residents of Basahi, a village in India's northeastern Bihar state, say something has changed, fears confirmed by many in the scientific community who say India's floods are getting worse as global warming alters the earth's climate.

This year's monsoon was the heaviest anyone here can remember: In the past, the rains were always interrupted by glimpses of the sun. But this year 20 straight days of rain dumped 3 feet of water, a record for most of the state.

Together with increased runoff from glaciers in Tibet and Nepal, the water swelled the Budhigandak River and in early August it breached a levee and sent giant waves crashing through the village, killing 22 people and adding to a death toll of more than a thousand in Bihar, India's least-developed state.

For India and the world, the suffering is a warning of worse to come, many scientists say. As the earth has warmed over the past century, evaporation has increased and the atmosphere has become wetter, leading to heavier storms and more floods, which generally are caused by heavy rainfall but can be made worse by factors including deforestation, poor government planning and population growth.

Globally, the number of floods has increased six-fold since 1980 and this year affected more than 250 million people, according to a report released last month by Oxfam International, a nonprofit group based in Oxford, England.

Many scientists link global warming with recent record-breaking floods in the midwestern United States, England and Mexico, where five days of torrential rains in November left most of the state of Tabasco under water and damaged the homes of "nearly a million people," the Oxfam report stated.

Humanitarian groups worry that together with more droughts and hurricanes expected because of global warming, the increase in floods could set back efforts to eradicate the world's worst poverty.

Speaking earlier this month about the future of the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 agreement that requires most industrialized countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions, U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that climate change "affects us all, but it does not affect us all equally."

"Those who are least able to cope are being hit hardest," he said. "Those who have done the least to cause the problem bear the gravest consequences."

With a four-month monsoon season and hundreds of millions of poor farmers, India and neighboring Bangladesh are arguably the world's nations most at risk to increased flooding and some observers say the impacts of climate change already are obvious.

Partly, India has experienced a shift in where floods occur as parts of the country have warmed faster than others and weather patterns have changed.

While monsoon rains "had been very predictable in the past," in recent years, rainfall has become more variable, said Murari Lal, a New Delhi-based climate change scientist who has worked for the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). "Regions that were not prone to droughts and floods are now prone to them," he said.

In India's northwestern Rajasthan state, 5 districts that were flooded for more than two months last year had never experienced flooding while its northeastern Assam state remained mostly dry between 2004 and 2006 but "used to be under water for 4 or 5 months every year," said Neel Kamal Singh, director of information for the Indian Red Cross.

"You can't predict the floods," he said. "They could happen anytime and anywhere."

Extreme downpours also have become more common. A study by Indian scientists published last year in the journal Science found that while the total amount of rain dropped by the monsoon over central India had remained roughly constant over the past century, the number of "very heavy events" – defined as at least 5.9 inches of rain in a day – had more than doubled since 1951.

At the same time, increased runoff from the Himalayas has intensified floods in northern India. Himalayan glaciers – together the world's largest ice mass outside the North and South Poles – are "receding faster than in any other part of the world," according to the IPCC. The glaciers are likely to disappear by 2035 if the world continues to warm at its current rate, the panel warned in an April report.

As the glaciers have melted earlier and faster, they have increased the river flows in India by as much as 20 percent, climate change scientist Lal said.

"There has been a shift in the climate cycle," he said. "The society needs to be made aware and change in a big way."

Basahi offers testament to the power of floods.

On the evening on Aug. 2, two days after this year's monsoon rains ended, the swollen Budhigandak River breached an enforced embankment and sent water roaring into town.

Ram Kumar Mahto remembers the flood as a series of waves – first waist-deep, then, seconds later, to his chest.

When the first wave hit he helped his wife and one daughter to safety on a nearby hill. But within minutes, the torrent of muddy water was too deep to cross, and when his mother tried to help Mahto's second daughter reach the hill, the water pulled the girl away and she drowned, one of 22 villagers killed that night.

As in thousands of other flooded communities in Bihar, the tragedy was only the beginning of a long struggle.

In the days after the levee broke, the district government delivered wheat and rice and about $5 in cash to each family. But there was no clean water and villagers drank from the slow-moving flood. Bloated animal carcasses often floated by and dysentery killed hundreds of people in the district and an untold number in the state.

The long-term economic impact of the flood may be more damaging. Heavy with silt, the river carried sand onto the fields, making planting impossible for at least a year, and many men are moving to nearby cities to look for work.

But with few jobs available, most families rely on sporadic aid from the government and relief agencies. In August, the United Nations warned that child malnutrition could worsen in Bihar.

Standing in the center of the village, Mahto summed up the tragedy this way: "When I weep, I know we all are weeping."

To varying degrees, Basahi's problems are shared by millions of people across Asia. In August, the United Nations called this year's monsoon floods the worst in living memory and the Red Cross estimated that 41 million people in India, Nepal and Bangladesh were affected.

Humanitarian groups have highlighted the high toll to argue that the poor will suffer the worst impacts of climate change.

"Action is needed now to prepare for more disasters, otherwise humanitarian assistance will be overwhelmed and recent advances in human development will go into reverse," said Jeremy Hobbs, director of Oxfam International.

Kemal Dervis, director of the United Nations Development Program, warned last month that a rise in the world's temperature of more than 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit could cause the Bahamas to be submerged, Mexico's harvest of rain-fed corn to fall by up to 60 percent, cities in Peru to face water shortages as glaciers shrink, and the range of disease-carrying mosquitoes to grow.

In India, which has warmed an average 1.2 degrees Fahrenheit over the last century, the increase in flooding already has taxed the Red Cross: Since 2003, the group has doubled its flood relief budget and more than tripled the number of states where it stores emergency flood supplies, changes that spokesman Singh called a "sea change" for the organization.

Yet in Basahi few people blame global warming for their plight.

Instead, they focus on things easier to understand: The government must fix the embankment before the monsoon rains begin next year, they say.

By the ruin of a former government office, villagers have built a shrine to Vishnu, a Hindu god they believe offers protection. On a recent evening, Mahto stood in front of the tiny structure and muttered a quick prayer.

"Maybe you can pray for us, too," he said.