India Worst hit by Climate Change, Reveals Lancet Report

Guwahati: It is just a week left for the 24th Conference of the Parties (COP) on climate change to begin in Katowice, Poland and amidst all the preparations for the conference, a Lancet report states that the impact of climate change on human health is destructive across the globe. Along with some other countries of the world, India too is one which is badly hit by heat stress.

As reported by the Lancet Countdown 2018 on Health and Climate Change, every human being living on this earth was exposed to an additional 1.4 days of heat wave between 2000 and 2017. The heat wave exposure in 2017 was even more with an additional 157 million heat wave exposure events taking place and unbelievably, this is 18 million more heat exposure events than that of 2016.

In India, there was an additional 40 million heat wave exposure cases in the year 2016 in comparison to 2012. The outcome is that India lost nearly 75,000 million labour hours in 2017. The nation lost about 43,000 million hours in 2000 and such a huge increase in the loss of labour hours in a time frame of less than two decades is disturbing and pretty grave.

If being seen sector wise, then in the agriculture sector alone, India lost about 60,000 million hours of labour hours in 2017 and this was 40,000 million hours in 2000.

The Lancet report was authored by 27 organisations’ people and these also include doctors, academics and policy professionals from various countries. Dr Poornima Prabhakaran, associate professor and deputy director of the Centre for Environmental Health at PHFI said, “What we saw in the data shared is that the number, duration and intensity of heat waves has been increasing in India, particularly in the last decade. There are spikes in heat wave related morbidity and mortality. Lancet had shared summary data sets with us.”

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