South Asia is paying for sins of the West

The region comprising India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal and the Maldives has found time to discuss everything under the sun, but never the environment, ecology or climate.

Yet this is where global warming affects the most. The disappointing part is not the lack of knowledge. It is the lack of interest. I am not aware of any effort in the region to fight global warming.

The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) at Brussels has predicted dire consequences: 30 per cent of species will be wiped out, 3.2 billion people will face water shortage and a large-scale melting of the Himalayan glaciers will play havoc in the Gangetic plains.

An increase of a mere one foot of sea water can endanger Mumbai and Kolkata as much as it could Karachi, Chittagong and Colombo. Even if the rise is not that much, the countries in the region cannot afford to wait and watch.

How to tackle the impending disaster coolly and collectively is the question stares us. India set up a Department of Environment in 1981. Similar official establishments exist in the other countries as well. Alas, all of them are lost in trivialities.

They have never budgeted anything for steps to fight against the challenge hurled at them. Nor have they planned anything as a region. The famous Sunderbans in West Bengal has lost 10 per cent of its area as well as some rare species to the rising water.

Some experts in the West say that glaciers are melting, raising the surface of seas. Because new glaciers are not taking the place of the old ones, many rivers have less water than before.

Environmentalist Sunder Lal Bahuguna who has been living not far from the source of the Ganges, Gangotri, says that during the span of three decades he has seen the river shrinking.

It appears that this is the story all over the region. The worst may happen in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka in that order. Change in the climate may turn fertile lands into deserts.

It is estimated that 200 million people in the region will be forced to leave their hearth and home to new places where the influx may create problems of its own. Either the lessening of rain or too much of it at certain places is a relatively recent phenomenon.

Uprooted

On top of it, trees are being cut indiscriminately in the region. As many as 30,000 trees are in the process of being uprooted in Lahore alone. I blame the developed world, particularly the West, which has progressed at the expense of poor nations like ours.

We are paying for their sins. Uganda President Museweni has aptly described the emission of gases by the developed countries as "an act of aggression" against the poor. "They have polluted for decades and we pay the price in lost landscapes and lost lives."

Developed countries are also responsible for the concentration of gases in the atmosphere which has been taking place cumulatively over the last 150 years, says Dr R.K. Pachuri, the IPCC chairman. "Even today if you look at the per capita emission, China and India are nowhere near the developed countries."

It is, therefore, not surprising that the Security Council's first meeting on global warming could take place only a few days ago. As expected, the US was opposed to the very idea of the meeting.

Russia's opposition is understandable but definitely not China's. Maybe, the latter is behaving like a passenger in a third class compartment shutting out others after he has got in.

Whatever the reservations of America, Russia and China the Security Council's meeting turned out to be a grand show. As many as 52 nations participated in it, apart from the Council members.

The West, like the haves, does not understand that the have-nots may become desperate if the distance between the two is not spanned. This applies as much to trade as it does to agricultural products and ecology.

Why does an individual from poor countries put his life to danger to travel to the West because the risk is worth reaching the destination, a prosperous world? America has already spent around $600 billion on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

If what President George W. Bush has asked the US Congress is approved, the total may be somewhere around $750 billion.

Were he to spend one-third, $250 billion, to help the developing and underdeveloped countries adopt a low carbon economy, he would change the fate of millions of people in poor countries.

It is time the Saarc summit or countries in the region unofficially consider the strategy against global warming.

An emergency meeting is called for and India should take the initiative. But New Delhi is hardly active. Its silence is like the moribund attitude towards the population explosion.

The excesses committed during the emergency stalled birth control programme. Policemen reached bedrooms. Since then political parties have been afraid to even mention "birth control" lest they should lose vote as the Congress did in 1977.

Global warming is worse than the population explosion waiting to hit the region. Strange, all this does not move the region.

Kuldip Nayar is a former Indian High Commissioner to the UK and a former Rajya Sabha MP.