Flash floods, the koha and climate change

What do flash floods and the reported delay in the Koha (Koel) birds in heralding the traditional Sinhala and Hindu New Year have in common: Global Warming.

Just a week after Prof Mohan Munasinghe, an expert on energy and global warming and Vice Chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sounded a warning about the lack of public apathy and state attention over climate change, Colombo suffered its worst ever floods.

Now what does climate change have to do with flash floods? “High intensity rains,” noted Kusum Athukorala, a water resources specialist who heads a women’s network of water professionals. “High intensity rain is when rainfall over many days happens in a much shorter time like what happened on Thursday (May 3rd).”

She said this is the impact of climate change, adding however that rains cannot be solely blamed for the chaos in Colombo. “Blame bad governance and politicians who have allowed unauthorized construction and encroachment on wetlands, swamps, banks of rivers,” Athukorala, who has been battling with local politicians for years over these issues, said adding that at the rate encroachment is taking place on the banks of the Kelani River “I won’t be surprised if the whole of Colombo gets flooded in a couple of years.”

She said intensive rainfall doesn’t also re-charge ground water resources and such events are often followed by a drought. The impact of global warming on biodiversity is increasingly evident. “There has been talk that crows built their nests late this year forcing the Koha (Koel), which encroaches on these nests, to delay its arrival during the Sinhala and Hindu New Year last month,” she said attributing this to changing weather patterns.

She said flowers are also said to be blooming at the wrong time while in extreme cold regions polar bear breeding has been known to be affected.

Thus while the chaos in Colombo continued, politicians blamed each other for the flooding but missed out on the bigger picture that climate change is in fact also responsible.

There was no discussion either by the government or any other group even in the non-governmental sector on the dangers of global warming after yet another report from the IPCC — released in Bangkok — warned of rising temperatures and danger to the human and animal life, and biodiversity.

The deluge on May 3 which quickly flooded most of the business areas in the capital causing unbelievable traffic snarls and some deaths including that of a working woman who fell into an unprotected storm-water drain and was swept by surging waters. Shanthi de Silva, Professor in Agriculture Engineering at the Open University of Sri Lanka, believes that given rising temperatures and sea levels Colombo won’t be able to take the strain of intensive rainfall in coming years.

“We just don’t have the infrastructure to cope with floods in the city,” she said, adding that her data is based on studies she conducted at a British university last year which has developed new models to ascertain the impact of climate change.

She said according to these studies rainfall in the months of April and May in wet areas (including Colombo) will double from previous years while it would get drier in the dry zone. ‘The impact on biodiversity would be enormous.”

The economic fallout from global warming for poor countries like Sri Lanka however is the most ignored factor in the debate over climate change.

Environmentalists in Colombo believe that the industrialized world will benefit from global warming at the expense of the poor. Piyal Parakrama, Executive Director of the Centre for Environmental & Nature Studies, says global warming will reduce food production in tropical countries like Sri Lanka while reducing winters in the US and Europe. “Reduced winters would allow more food production days in the west. We would face a food crisis and be forced to import from the west.”

Ardent supporters of the west however reject this argument saying in some parts of Europe, the winters were more severe this time than before. Environmentalists are also lamenting the absence of research or any attempt to do so to study the impact of climate change on plant and animal life.

Dr. Deepthi Wickremesinghe, a zoologist attached to the University of Colombo, says climate change will affect amphibians like toads and frogs. Fish would certainly get affected by a sea level rise and rising temperatures while the impact on Sri Lanka’s colourful corals is already evident with corals bleaching off the popular southern tourist coastal resort town of Hikkaduwa.

“Unfortunately we don’t have any research or evidence of the potential impact of climate change on the amphibian population and we can only go on assumptions,” she said adding that there is no attention being paid to this particular field of research.

Parakrama says Sri Lanka has been identified as one of 25 biodiversity hot spots in the world with a high proportion of endemic species among its flora and fauna. Established data shows that 23% of the flowering plants and 16% of the mammals in the island are endemic

“Rainforests need a stable climate and to maintain this biodiversity, if there are erratic weather patterns, that’s a problem,” Parakarama said.