The Sikkim floods have yet again brought to the fore the increased risks of large scale floods, the subsequent downstream damage caused by cloudbursts at high altitudes, and the bursting of expanding glacial lakes in a warmer world. Rightly, those eager to understand how the changing climate is impacting the environment and increasing the risk of hazards to our people and infrastructures have expressed their concern. As always, it has also attracted near constant media coverage.

Frequent flood events as a result of heavy rains are often made worse by other factors such as faulty land use, landslide-blocked dams bursting and so on. The floods in Sankhuwasabha and Mustang, for example, were caused by torrential rains at high altitudes combined with a landslide-blocked dam bursting in the river valleys—a common phenomenon often triggering heavy floods in the Himalaya during the monsoon.

While discussing floods and assessing their damage, it's crucial to consider the differences in the unique impacts of floods of various origins. In the case of glacial floods, it's rather easy to pinpoint which areas will be affected and plan for risk management action in advance. However, it’s quite different regarding floods caused by cloudburst or intense rains. They can affect a wider area and cover multiple adjoining basins from ridges to valleys. Perhaps no other example illustrates this better than the well documented and much researched Kulekhani floods of 1993 in which a cloudburst in the Tistung area of Makwanpur not only caused tremendous damage to lives and property within the Kulekhani area, but also in Chitwan to the south and the north where several villages including major bridges along Pokhara Highway suffered damage.

Political economy of floods

The political economy of floods is such that the government is quick to act in restoring damaged structures after every flood event if urban masses and power centres are affected. Common examples are supply interruptions due to damaged highways or power outages due to fallen transmission lines. Funds are made available immediately to repair and rebuild the damaged structures as well as construct more complex structures using expensive methods. The unending maintenance of unstable slopes along the Muglin-Narayanghat road is an obvious example. However, not even a fraction of this attention goes to areas with similar problems in the hills when farms or infrastructure are damaged even though they are central to the community. News about floods and landslides from the hills only become relevant when lives are lost. The communities or owners are left to restore or rebuild the damaged structures themselves. And when the scale of damage is beyond their abilities, these dilapidated structures are abandoned. The affected families simply seek refuge elsewhere or look for alternate sources of income if their farms aren't salvageable. The harsh consequences associated with heavy rains in the hills have never been part of our disaster risk management discourse.

For argument's sake, let’s focus on a primary sector—agriculture—which is said to be the largest economic sector and engages nearly two-thirds of our population. Unfortunately, this sector suffers from multiple issues, but the most damaging and widespread are the impacts of global warming and climate change. Be it rising temperature, delayed monsoon, increscent rain, intermittent dry spells or flash droughts, the result is plummeting farm production.

In principle, the government’s commitment to protect agriculture from these impacts is unquestionable. Our government's roadmap for adaptation planning in the agriculture sector acknowledges that the direct economic cost of climate change to agriculture is high. Erratic monsoon rains have resulted in frequent droughts and floods affecting paddy production, which in a normal year contributes about 7 percent to the GDP. The plan also notes that the economic losses in paddy from 2001 to 2010 due to drought amounted to about Rs10 billion a year.

Just one crop highlights how vulnerable agriculture is to climate impacts—and by extension so many people in the country—yet we still don't have any safeguards in place. The paddy production in 2023 is also expected to suffer due to a below average monsoon, furthered by El Nino, but there is no plan to address this either because our commitment to tackling monsoon-related hazards, especially in the agriculture sector, leaves much to be desired. It’s often left to the mercy of nature. In such a scenario, other inputs such as improved seeds and fertiliser to grow more food don't help much.

Agriculture doesn’t survive in isolation unless done in a controlled environment which may be possible for small projects. However, when it comes to commercial or subsistence farming, agriculture is a meeting point of several disciplines: geology, hydrology, microbiology, plant science, and perhaps most importantly, hydrometeorology. The changing climate has impacted all of these disciplines to various degrees, and addressing them requires an understanding of what changes are taking place.

Who else would understand the changes better than the farmers who deal with them every day? They're well aware of how the unreliable monsoon has impaired their livelihoods, and how it has made their future bleak. But they may not know what to do about it. Unfortunately, the local agro-vet centres remain the most accessible source of information for most farmers in this country, and these centres aren’t well-versed with climate impacts. Farmers don't have access to the climate experts who can help them with remedies. For this very reason, other impacts of climate change such as depleting soil moisture, erosion, diseases or outbreak of pests affecting farm production continue to go unaddressed.

People's representatives

This is where the people's representatives come in. Ideally, the problems facing constituents should be a priority for elected representatives, but there seems to be a worrying gap between what the constituencies need and what their representatives think they need. These elected officials not only have access to national experts but also international experts for technical advice and guidance. But this isn't how things work.

Even after over half a century of organised efforts to develop agriculture in this country, and over a decade of the ongoing discourse on how climate change has impacted agriculture and the national economy, a delegation of parliamentary members visited Bangladesh, a country with a completely different geographical setting, to explore ways to transfer technology and learn best practices in agriculture. This only illustrates how we have yet to begin understanding the issues facing our agriculture which has its roots not only in our soil and but also our social fabric. The sooner our policymakers realise this, the quicker we will be to take appropriate actions for a resilient agriculture.