http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/goa/Preparing-for-the-inevitable-Goa-in-the-age-of-climate-change/articleshow/42380437.cms
Heart-breaking images from Kashmir dominate the news. The fairytale Himalayan valley is drowning under the worst floods in memory. The Jhelum river burst bunds, and waters quickly rose dozens of feet. While the Army has rescued many, hundreds of thousands more remain marooned, entire neighborhoods huddled together on rooftops that have become like lifeboats. Devastation is everywhere. It is a long way from Srinagar to coastal Goa, where record rains also fell a few days ago, but without triggering disaster. Though many areas were troubled by rising water levels—and some low-lying houses evacuated—there were no flash floods of the kind that shocked and overwhelmed Canacona residents in 2009, when hundreds of crores of damage occurred in a matter of hours. But the distant Himalayas and Goa's Arabian Sea waters are actually directly linked by a web of climate and weather patterns. All available evidence indicates a dramatic shift is taking place in both areas, with an impact that will have to be reckoned with across the subcontinent. These findings underlie an important research paper published earlier this week in one of the world's leading scientific journals, Nature Communications, co-authored by Goa's own Helga do Rosario Gomes and Joaquim Goes (of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory), as well as Prabhu Matondkar of the National Institute of Oceanography (NIO) and Subhajit Basu of Goa University, among others. Over the course of three missions on the Dona Paula-based NIO's research vessel, Sagar Sampada, Gomes et al discovered a giant, recurring "dead zone" spread across hundreds of thousands of square kilometers in the Arabian Sea where an unusual dinoflaggelate, the bright-green Noctiluca Scintillans has completely taken over the bottom of the traditional food chain, thus disrupting the other participants in a pyramid of predators that eventually yields the fish we like to eat. This phenomenon, says Gomes, "could be devastating to the Arabian Sea ecosystem over the long-term." One cause could be the climate system that connects Kashmir and rest of the Himalayas to Goa and the rest of the Arabian Sea. Gomes et al write "the systematic decrease in spring snow persistence over large parts of southwest Asia and the Himalayan-Tibetan Plateau" has "enhanced the land sea pressure gradient, which in turn has strengthened southwest monsoonal winds resulting in an intensified wind-driven coastal upwelling favouring enhanced phytoplankton blooms during summer." Another major probable cause has plagued Goa for years—uncontrolled flushing of sewage into the sea. The NIO long ago warned that all of this state's coastline and rivers are so heavily polluted with E-coli bacteria that they're unsafe even for swimming, but the same is rapidly becoming true of the entire Arabian Sea coast of India and Pakistan, where Mumbai's population alone has doubled in the past decade—sending "63 tonnes of nitrogen and 11 tons of phosphorus into the Arabian Sea each day"—and Karachi's "15 million people send 70% of their wastewater into the sea untreated." Says Goes, "All of these cities are growing so rapidly they don't have the capacity to treat their sewage. The amount of material being discharged is humongous." What are the implications for Goa within the research paper by Gomes et al? First the obvious: a number of inter-related phenomena—from sewage to overfishing to altered weather patterns—is remaking the ecology of the Arabian Sea in unprecedented ways that will inevitably impact health, wellbeing and food security in Goa. No doubt about it, this is going to happen. But this important new research paper also tangentially confirms that climate change is remaking the world as we have always known it: land masses warming, glaciers and ice caps melting, snowfall decreasing. The corresponding rise in ocean levels is a slow-motion disaster less dramatic than the floods in Srinagar, but will be no less impactful in the long run. Gomes et al comprehensively demonstrate the size and scale of the problem—it affects the entire Arabian Sea basin (with similar problems in the rest of the world)—so Goa is hardly alone in facing an extremely worrying scenario. But the problem in India's smallest state is policy continues to be made as though climate change, food chain disruption, rising ocean levels and increasingly haphazard extreme weather do not exist, and no strategy is needed to cope. In fact, Goa urgently needs to prepare for what is coming—there is far too much to lose. -- #2, Second Floor, Navelkar Trade Centre, Panjim, Goa Cellphone 9326140754 Office (0832) 242 0785