Editorial: Talk More About the Weather

The nation requires 33 per cent of its land mass to be under forest cover. At present, vegetation cover in the country stands at 23.68%. If one keeps the Indian landmass in mind, the 10% shortfall that the country needs to cover becomes a monumental task, especially when not much is being done to meet this target. Given the national average and targets, some might say that Sikkim need not have undertaken the State Green Mission given the fact that nearly 46% of the State is already under forest cover. And yet it did. The Green Mission has runs its course, and within a year or thereabouts the level of its achievement will become clear for all to see. The earthquake disruption notwithstanding, should the Mission come out with good marks, the State will be all the richer from the initiative. If nothing else, with the concept of Green Mission and the 10 Minutes to Earth initiatives, the State has seeded the concept in young minds and the success of government schools from Sikkim in the national Green School effort is a direct result. National targets and averages are kept too optimistically low and are too metro-centric to be true to ground realities, seldom moving beyond the token plantation drives on earmarked Days. The metros already live in environmental devastation, but the utter unpredictability of our weather systems and the existing and potential havoc of climate change should make Sikkim stay the course and make Sikkim greener. Irrespective of data challenging climate change projections, ice caps everywhere are showing signs of stress, harking a possible collapse which could change the way life exists on the planet. Sikkim knows the phenomenon too well with too many natural springs having dried up and too many lakes reduced to puddles in recent times for the stress on natural resources not to be perceptible. One must bear in mind that Sikkim’s high mountains and glaciers, because they are closer to the Tropic of Cancer than any other segment of the Himalaya, is more susceptible to even the most minor fluctuations. The current spate of thunderstorms draws its strength directly from pressure fluctuations over the Bay of Bengal, for example. But even as Sikkim has undertaken massive state-sponsored plantation drives and has even added “climate change” to the nomenclature of the Department of Science & Technology, not enough is being done to study the impact of climate change on Sikkim. While an improved green cover is the safest option for Sikkim in the cushion it provides to the catchment areas, a long-term effort will require better understanding of climate change and its effect of Sikkim. What some experts should also start doing is collating and studying the metereological data in more detail to uncover whether there is a pattern in which the climate is changing in Sikkim. That will help guide future initiatives and its findings may also have the people ask after the weather more often. The seasons have changed noticeably even in recent years. The concern should now graduate from passing remarks to concerted studies, not just by the experts, but also by school students from whatever survives by way of traditional knowledge base.