PLEA Network

11 July 2023,  DW Global Media Forum:  Climate change in India: A growing environmental crisis. Intense monsoon rains have lashed parts of northern India over the past few days, leaving a trail of death and destruction, as well as rendering many areas inaccessible.  The state of Himachal Pradesh has been the hardest hit. Television footage showed landslides and flash floods, washing away vehicles, destroying buildings and ripping down bridges. According to the India Meteorological Department, torrential rains across the country in the first week of July have already produced about 2% more rainfall than normal. The agency has forecast more rain across large parts of northern India in the coming days. “The region, which is usually one of the driest, has received disproportionately high rains,” an department official told DW… 2022 extreme weather events. In 2022, the Center for Science and Environment, a New Delhi-based public interest research and advocacy organization, tracked extreme weather events in India. It found out that India on the whole experienced extreme weather events on 314 out of the 365 days, meaning that at least one extreme weather event was reported in some part of India on each of these days.  The report concluded that these events caused more than 3,000 deaths in 2022, affected about 2 million hectares (4.8 million acres) of crop area, killed more than 69,000 animals used as livestock and destroyed roughly 420,000 houses. Read more here