Billions of rupees lost due to climate change impact in Sri Lanka

While climate change has disastrous effects on Sri Lanka and with the country unable to stop its impact, the public can prepare for these changes, safeguard themselves from them and mitigate the impact.  
The observations were made by Dr. Lalanath de Silva, Attorney-at-Law and Head, Independent Business Mechanism, Green Climate Fund while addressing the Annual CEO Forum of the Sri Lanka Business and Biodiversity platform held on Tuesday at Hotel Ramada, Colombo. He was making personal comments which doesn’t represent the views of the Green Climate Fund.
Sri Lanka has a record of droughts, floods, geographic changes to vector borne diseases (brought by insects, etc), coastal erosion, tropical storms, lightening, crop failures, landslides and siltation of reservoirs which are related to temperature and rainfall changes.
He indicated that the cost of climate change costs billions of dollars as in the case of coconut industry in Sri Lanka in the wet zone where major losses would occur. “Without extra adaptation measures this is predicted to result in a loss to the industry of Rs. 4,795 million annually by 2020, which is nearly 4.7 per cent of the total value of the industry at equilibrium,” he said. 
Coastal erosion is due to sea level rise, river-bed sand mining and unplanned coastal building activities resulting in adverse impacts on the environment, citizens, infrastructure, businesses, and the national budget.
Quoting a report from the Asian Development Bank and UK Aid, he said that tropical and subtropical regions of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, and Sri Lanka are projected to be vulnerable to increasing temperature and CO2 level, with a decline in rice yields as much as 23 per cent by 2080.
Citing a June 2017 World Bank report, he said that over the long term, annual losses for housing, infrastructure, agriculture, and relief from natural disasters are estimated at Rs. 50 billion with the highest annual expected losses from floods – Rs. 32 billion, cyclones or high winds Rs. 11 billion, droughts Rs. 5.2 billion and landslides Rs.1.8 billion. 
To overcome these challenges the report suggests that it is of utmost importance for Sri Lanka to reduce impact of disasters and to deal with the impact when the disaster happens. 
To improve physical resilience, the World Bank is supporting the Government’s Climate Resilience Improvement Project (CRIP) and recommends that the country should identify current climate risk, and implement immediate risk mitigation interventions; Identify future drivers of risk and  create basin-level long-term risk mitigation investment plans, followed by physical investments, he said. (QP)