The UN says the hardest hit by climate change need more money

Conservation efforts to conserve water in the India’s poorest neighbourhoods, with an example from a village of Bhubanese (Aharonov, India)

Last year, 95% of India’s extreme weather deaths resulted from thunderstorms, lightning and heavy rainfall, according to government data (see go.nature.com/3jmkrt3). The rains are no longer predictable. In the worst cases, clouds can grow rapidly and deposit more than 100 millimetres of rain in one hour over a single neighbourhood.

Too much water flowing into rivers and streams can mean that much of it is lost, meaning that you don’t have as much of it to use in the year. Much of my time in his village and others was spent seeing and talking about efforts to conserve water, undertaken with the help of a nonprofit group, the Watershed Organization Trust.

Those efforts include altering landscapes by digging trenches on slopes and planting more trees to slow runoff so that more water percolates into the ground. But they also include educational efforts like teaching villagers how to develop a water budget for the year, how to monitor groundwater and how to change crops and planting methods to use less water.

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To help developing nations prepare for more extreme storms, heat waves and floods, industrialized countries gave them around $29 billion in 2020. The report says that the developing world needs a lot more in order to reduce the damage from extreme weather events. By the end of the decade, developing countries will likely need up to about 10 times more money every year to adapt to a hotter planet. By midcentury, those annual costs could soar to more than $500 billion.

Almost two-thirds of Pakistan was flooded last year, causing more than 1,500 deaths and 33 million homeless. Almost 2,000 people died in flash floods across Africa, and parts of the United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Oman and Yemen were inundated with water.

“The message of this report is clear: strong political will is needed to increase adaptation investments and outcomes,” Inger Andersen, executive director of the UN Environment Programme, wrote in a foreword to the report.

She said that they needed to get ahead of the game if we want to not spend the years in emergency response mode.

The Environment and Climate Investment in the 21st Century: How Funds Should Go to COP27 to Protect the World from Climate Change Risks

The UN published the report days before its annual climate conference starts in Egypt. In a separate report published last week, the UN said the world isn’t cutting greenhouse gas emissions nearly enough to avoid potentially catastrophic sea level rise and other global dangers.

The UN climate negotiations scheduled to begin over the weekend in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh are the 27th Conference of the Parties, or COP27. Efforts will be made to increase the funds available to deal with climate change in developing countries.

Mafalda, the CEO of Climate Investment Funds says that the discourse needs to be raised a lot so that they can do even more to help the environment.

To prepare for more extreme weather, the world needs to invest more money in projects to reduce the hazards, vulnerability and exposure that people face, the UN says. It could also include making sure infrastructure is built well in areas at a high risk of flooding, as well as providing early warning systems that could help people evacuate in emergencies.

Duarte says that failing to spend the money that’s necessary to limit and prepare for climate change exposes the entire world to potential risks. Those risks could include armed conflicts, refugee crises and disruptions in financial markets, analysts say.

“We have to change our mindset and the way we think, because, actually, when it comes to climate, you know, an investment across borders in other places is a domestic investment,” Duarte says.

River-monitoring gauges in Kerala, the Pralayam, which ended the Universe in the Hindu religion triggered by rains on the Meenachil River

On a nice day after summer ended in Malayin chippara, the courtyard of St Joseph’s Upper Primary School was a hive of activity as a marching band played in the background. This is one of 220 outposts where Emmanuel has set up rain- and river-monitoring gauges. He says the visit is meant to motivate his volunteers, but the students already take this effort seriously. Job Jose says that a rockslide destroyed his neighbor’s house and also caused his family to lose their well. Meera Binoy’s house was damaged by flood waters. She says a cloud burst open while speaking in a foreign language.

The secretary of the River Protection Council in Kidangoor organized a group of people to get out of the way of the fire. T. Raju did not want to lose his belongings. He lay down on his stringed bed frame, figuring he had seen plenty of bad rains. His television floated as his bed moved. This wasn’t normal.

Raju jumped up, grabbed some clothes and 270 rupees (US$3.30) and fled to the evacuation site, he recalled in an interview with Nature last October. The water covered his home in the flood of 2018, and a stain came up on his wall, he said.

The state of Kerala, where the Meenachil River is located, received 164% more rainfall1 than normal that August, triggering what residents call the Pralayam — a flood to end the Universe in the Hindu religion. The biggest in the state since 1924 was it. More than 400 people died, more than one million were displaced and damages amounted to US$4.25 billion, according to an Indian government report2.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00341-5

Rains in India’s megacities: A problem of predictability in the Indian Ocean and the South Asian tropical region, triggered by the monsoon

Since 2018, “the sound of the rain beginning really disturbs my mood,” says Emmanuel. “It is not like before — we were sleeping peacefully even when it’s raining all season. But not any more.”

Acknowledging the inherent difficulties of the problem, the IMD has focused since 2017 on issuing short-range warnings called nowcasts ahead of thunderstorms in major cities. According to the IMD, 80% of the time, these use cloud and wind data from radar and model to issue forecasts that are accurate. But Hosalikar acknowledges that even this isn’t good enough. India’s megacities are complex environments containing highways, crooked lanes, skyscrapers, slums and quick changes of elevation. The urban structures channel winds and create pockets of instability, meaning it can rain hard in one neighbourhood while the next one over remains dry. “We should use a 600-metre model,” Hosalikar says. But that is impractical without more data and improved models.

The IMD’s head of climate research and services says that there is a problem of predictability in the tropical region. Climate change is adding fury to it.

Over the past year there has been a rise in bad news in the region. In March and April a heatwave killed at least 90 people in India and Pakistan and caused a worldwide shortage of grain because of the war in Ukraine. Heavy rain and floods occurred in northeast India in May. There was a great deal of flooding due to the monsoon in June. August spelled doom for Pakistan, when the nation was flooded after weeks of intense rainfall. There were more than 1,500 deaths and $30 billion in damages.

Every June, South Asia nervously awaits the summer monsoon, also called the southwest monsoon, which decides the fortunes of hundreds of millions of people. As the Northern Hemisphere tilts closer to the Sun during May, the land heats up and the warm air above it rises. The trade winds reverse course and flow in from the Arabian Sea, pushing moisture-laden rain clouds up the towering Western Ghats mountain range in Kerala and nearby parts of southwest India, triggering rain.

“The monsoons are one of the hardest natural processes to be understood,” says Arpita Mondal, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay. The unpredictability of convective storms, and long-range forecasting in this region becomes even more challenging as a result of that.

“We have a wide spectrum of users,” says Soma Sen Roy, an atmospheric scientist at the IMD in New Delhi. “We have people who are advanced at handling mobiles or computers. Some people have never seen a computer or mobile device in their life.

Monsoon forecasting in the Western Ghats: What data are available for the Indian Meteorological Observatory to study convective storms?

The monsoon first makes landfall in the Western Ghats when it first lands in a small area of the Arabian Sea. In August 2018, strong trade winds crashed against the Ghats and climbed over the mountains. The clouds were made by bands of water from the sea. Some grew as high as 15 kilometres. The weather system covered almost the entire state, but remained locked there due to distant events.

Indian meteorologists run the models twice a day at a 12-kilometre resolution to generate weekly forecasts. That’s too coarse to be able to forecast convective storms, which need a resolution finer than 4 kilometres, says Thara Prabhakaran, a cloud scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. She studies the formation of storms through the use of data obtained by aircraft and instruments in the rain clouds. The hope is that these data can improve forecasting models. “Nowadays, there are very heavy rains happening in a short period of time,” she says. How does it happen? The model we are missing has physics.

The IMD can forecast some of these rainfall events with about 70% accuracy two days before they happen. But the accuracy drops to 60% for forecasts 5 days ahead, and its 10-day forecasts are even less accurate, it says.

Forecasting storms before they develop requires a dense array of observation stations, which does not exist in the region. The IMD has the best set-up in South Asia, and it gets data from 33 doppler weather radars, 56 balloon-launching sites, 25 lightning-detection sensors and 725 automatic weather stations, as well as meteorological satellites, ships and other sources. The Indian government and agencies such as the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also operate observation buoys on the Indian Ocean.

But only some of these data are shared or used in monsoon forecasts, Koll says. The data should be open so that we can use it for cutting-edge research. He adds that the IMD sometimes releases data when requested, but the process is slow and it doesn’t provide all data. The IMD’s Hosalikar responds that data are freely available for researchers, except for commercial purposes.

Millions of small farmers on the Non- Gangetic Plain use pump sets each year to flood their fields during the dry season. The weather forecasting models predict that evaporation of this irrigation water should cool the land surface and ease heatwaves. Mondal and her colleagues found that the forecast models underestimated the cooling by five times. She says that the scale is hard to measure and predict. That is creating a gap between what is predicted and what happens on the ground.

The water flow downhill has changed because of people. Villas have been built in paddies that used to hold water, roads have been built on canals, and the riverbed has been mined for sand. Koshy had his home flooded for the first time.

Flooding and droughts happen when the local water cycle is overwhelmed because of changes in how people use the land, and sometimes because reservoir managers make the wrong decisions as a result of imprecise forecasts, says Mondal.

The school records daily precipitation and river-flow data in a rain book, and then they send it to a group that oversees the operation. In a nearby village, 70-year-old retired bank manager P. C. Jose collates the data. He is part of a team that analyses the readings from about 220 river gauges and 13 rain gauge spread throughout the 1,272-square-kilometre Watershed. When there is no rain, measurements are taken on a once a day basis. During the rains, the team increases the frequency to once an hour or more.

With the help of data and his team’s deep knowledge of the surrounding topographical terrain, Emmanuel and his team can predict when areas downhill will flood. It’s not yet entirely scientific, but it works, says Emmanuel. The group is teaming up with the family of Koll, who hails from this area, to make sure that scientifically rigorous data collection is done through an online portal.

This effort is “the best working example” of grassroots action, says Koll, which is something that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has called on local communities to do to adapt to climate change. The Early-warning system along the Meenachil River can be tailored forclimate action across South Asia that face similar climate challenges and land use changes.

After visiting his volunteers all day, Emmanuel took a break in an office he shares with another community group. He pointed at a traditional lunar calendar hanging on a wall. Farmers use it to plan their planting and harvesting schedule, but these days, nature’s rhythm is wonky: there is less constant rainfall, and more unpredictable fury. The early-warning system is needed. But keeping volunteers on track, recruiting new members, ensuring data collection, getting buy-in from local officials and securing funding for gauges all take up a lot of his time. Emmanuel is committed to the community because his ancestors were elected leaders and social workers here; it’s his family’s legacy.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00341-5

What will we learn from a flood if we don’t survive, or how climate change will affect infrastructure and livelihoods in the tropics?

But he knows it might not outlast him unless he is able to build a strong team. Something may stop when I stand still. But I hope that is not going to happen.”

People in the tropics are more adequately prepared for flash floods than people in the drylands. Settlements tend to be on floodplains and near rivers in dry areas. Dams and levees are low priorities.

Around half of the world’s population is already at risk of severe water scarcity for at least some of the year, according to the latest (sixth) assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published this week. Climate change, such as heavy precipitation, flooding, and the like is likely to increase this number. If global temperatures are 1.5C above pre-industrial temperatures, extreme agricultural drought is likely to be twice as likely in the world.

Flood risk can contribute to inequalities. There are low income and minority households that live in flood prone areas in the drylands. If maps show these areas to be high risk, they could be deprived of local infrastructure investment, increasing their vulnerability. Socio- economic data should be conveyed to decision makers alongside the maps.

Dams, barriers and dikes will need to be installed in drylands to protect settlements. China has built thousands of kilometres of levees along the Yellow River. This is a big deal with hundreds of projects with many millions of dollars in costs.

Climate change is making the frequency, scale and impacts of floods and droughts more uncertain. The rate of floods in the tropics and at northern mid-latitudes doubled between 1985 and 2015. Global warming is increasing the amount of moisture held in the atmosphere (by 2–3% per 1 °C rise in temperature) and is causing drier summers in regions such as the Mediterranean, southwestern Australia, southwestern South America, South Africa and western North America1. Yet, water managers almost everywhere continue to devise policies and design infrastructure (such as drainage canals, storm sewers, dams and levees) on the basis of historical records, such as the time elapsed between floods of a certain magnitude. In a changing climate, the past is no longer a reliable predictor of the future.

Nature-based solutions are more economical. For example, in Pakistan, the government of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province has restored almost 350,000 hectares of forests in its ‘Billion Tree Tsunami’ planting drive. Levee replacements will allow flood waters to be diverted away from homes and onto natural floodplains. The large residential areas should adopt a number of techniques to reduce the amount of run-off. These are being installed in cities throughout China, including Xining in Qinghai province, the largest city on the Tibetan Plateau.

Natural features are good at storing and conveying water, but they can be poor in extreme floods. Local differences in vegetation and soil must be considered. How the systems degrade and how to maintain them must be known. Promising projects include the World Bank’s Global Program on Nature-Based Solutions for Climate Resilience and the Sindh Resilience Project in Pakistan, as well as government-led water and soil conservation initiatives in the Loess Plateau in north-central China.

Water should be a priority of the 2021 UN climate conference in South Africa, or what is needed of dryland management in future development policies?

Managed resettlement is more equitable and efficient than leaving people to fend for themselves. In order to investigate the best way to manage retreat, a cross-discipline research must be conducted that involves social science, geography, engineering and psychology.

Risk-transfer schemes — such as flood insurance, catastrophe bonds and solidarity funds — should be developed for drylands. A national system of flood insurance products is being developed in China. The national emergency-management system includes these in dozens of pilot cities, including Zhengzhou, in the central province of Henan. Weather index insurance is a product that provides compensation for the loss of crops and livestock in the event of a certain amount of rain. Catastrophe insurance protects businesses and residences against extreme events that are too expensive for insurers to cover, such as super typhoons or floods that occur only once in 1,000 years.

Algeria has made catastrophe insurance mandatory. Every insurance company has to join the Catastrophe Risk Insurance Pool to help cover their disaster losses. All properties must be insured with the government.

Collective behaviours also need to be understood11. Social-media messages can provide rapid information about locations, impacts and responses to dryland floods, as revealed through data mining and artificial intelligence. Models can be used to improve management strategies. It is important for policies to be changed as information becomes available. Assessing the robustness of flood resilience is one of the things that will be done with interdisciplinary analysis.

Water was not a priority for the September 2021 UN conference on food security, nor last year’s climate COP27 in Egypt, says Henk Ovink, the Netherlands’ special envoy for international water affairs. Water must have a firm place in any follow-up UN process, he stresses. The UN Food Systems Stocktaking Moment in Rome will take place in July, theSDG Summit in New York will be in September, and theCOP28 in November in Israel. “We can’t wait another 46 years because what is happening is just too awful at the moment, and it’s going to get worse,” says McDonnell.

The answer is simple: water has not been a focal point of the international sustainable-development policy agenda.

Several low-income countries asked for financial support, but were rebuffed, and instead a study was proposed on how to finance water projects, as Nature reported at the time.

It will take a long time to establish a new treaty or institutional UN body. In the UN system, delegates will call for water to be prioritized in existing treaties.

Some countries will ask for more funds in the form of grants, especially for desalination and wastewater treatment projects. A spokesman for the Jordan’s water and irrigation ministry says that there is a lot of international support. He says loans put financial pressures on already struggling economies.

UN secretary-general António Guterres is also expected to ramp up fundraising for his plan, announced at COP27, to create climate early-warning systems in all UN member states, so that countries are better prepared for extreme events. “Only half of our 193 members have proper early-warning services in place,” says Petteri Taalas, secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, based in Geneva, Switzerland, which is working with Guterres to implement the plan. According to Taalas, we need US$3 billion over the next five years. So far, around 10% of this has been raised, through different sources.

Some preliminary work to reshape the economics of water has begun: two of us (M.M. and J.R.) are leaders on the independent Global Commission on the Economics of Water (watercommission.org), which was launched in May 2022 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The group is assessing impacts on the global hydrological cycle from climate and environmental change, as well as country interdependencies and the international cooperation needed to treat water as a global common good. A call to action (see go.nature.com/3zxnw54) and a first review report (see go.nature.com/3twxsok) were released the week before the UN 2023 Water Conference.

The UN World Water Development Report states that water use has increased by 1% a year for the last forty years, due to population growth and changing consumption patterns.

The authors of the report said that the climate crisis and the stress it is putting on the ecosystems may have consequences for plant and animal species.

Flood and pollution control, data sharing and efforts to reduce levels of planet-heating pollution should “open the door to further collaboration and increase access to water funds,” he said.

Water is the lifeblood of our planet — essential for keeping humans and every plant and animal alive. It helps to circulate carbon and nutrients in the air and in soils, and regulates climate. For millennia, Earth’s water cycle has provided reliable supplies and sustained conditions conducive to human development. Yet anthropogenic pressures are now pushing the cycle out of balance, threatening to undermine the reliability of rainfall itself.

Effective management of water is a global common good. The goal-driven missions that add up around the world need to be defined. For example, nations might pledge to ensure that the supply of green and blue water in the hydrological cycle inside their borders remains within a manageable range, as defined by safe planetary limits or boundaries9. There must be strategies and targets designed to begin coordination, finance and innovations.

The researchers refer toprecipitationsheds andevaporationsheds in the atmosphere by analogy with Watersheds on land. The precipitationshed is where the rain comes from and the edificationshed is where it goes. Green water flows from land, including from soil and water bodies, as well as transpiration from vegetation, are also referred to as evapotranspiration.

Researchers need to understand better how these processes interact and how atmospheric flows of water vapour connect different regions. A new view of interconnectivity is emerging, through combining meteorological databases (including on water vapour, humidity, wind speed and direction) and computer models that connect likely sources and sinks.

Rainfall patterns in sub-Saharan Africa, meanwhile, are tightly interwoven. Nigeria derives 64% of the moisture that precipitates its rainfall from within the continent; of this, 22% comes from within and 42% from outside its borders, predominantly from the Congo Basin. In turn, Nigerian land contributes 43% of the evaporated water driving rainfall in neighbouring countries such as Cameroon, Guinea and Ghana. All these countries’ water supplies are thus at risk from deforestation in central Africa.

China, too, is heavily reliant (74%) on water evaporated from land for its precipitation. Out of it, 34% comes from within and the rest comes from neighbours such as India and Russia. Moisture from Chinese land also has a large role in rainfall across Central Asia and the Tibetan Plateau.

This striking view of interdependence surpasses existing transboundary issues around rivers, lakes and groundwater, which are the usual focus of water governance and disputes. There is an impact on supplies to Sudan and Egypt from the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam. Researchers need to study how rifts between countries might grow once inter-reliance is better understood.

By contrast, green water is given no economic value, despite the fact that it drives economic development, stabilizes climate change and secures precipitation. It can be public, private or common.

The government could attach conditions to contracts to maximize the public benefits whenever private companies benefit from public subsidies. The amendments to the safe drinking water act in 1996 promoted equitable access to water by creating the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund to subsidize companies that provide water for disadvantaged communities. The US CHIPS and Science Act requires recipients of funding to maximize efficiency in water, waste, and electricity.

The rental-seeking and value-enhancement of some national water sectors should be counteracted by new forms of public–private arrangements. In England, for example, since the privatization of the water industry in 1989, £72 billion (US$88 billion) has been paid out to shareholders as dividends, while outdated infrastructure has left the water system riddled with leaks and sewage discharges.

For example, the European Union’s Water Framework Directive has, since 2000, required the EU member states to develop river-basin management plans jointly with the public. Obligations are reviewed every six years, and non-compliance brings legal sanctions. Although progress has been made, more-coordinated efforts and monitoring would help to realize the directive’s full potential11.

The sectors must be involved. Around 75% of freshwater consumption is attributed to food production with India the largest consumer. India might focus on ensuring continuity of food supply without imposing pressure on national use of green and blue water. Production and consumption processes can be updated to maximize water sharing and minimize water waste.

Reducing emissions of greenhouse gases is the focus of most climate action. Water management can help to reduce emissions, but it is not well known. In Asia and Africa, less water-hungry techniques for irrigation are being used to boost rice production. Such methods include ‘alternate wetting and drying’, in which rice fields are flooded, then allowed to partly dry out, then reflooded. The system uses 30% less water than floods, it cuts methane emissions without reducing yield, and it increases farmers profits by cutting water-pumping costs. Solar-powered irrigation is also beneficial. In Ethiopia it could be used to increase crop production and farmers’ incomes in 18% of the agricultural land that is now rainfed.

Improving the treatment of water and wastewater saves water and cuts emissions, too. More than 80% of waste water globally is released into the environment, and fossil-fuel based energy accounts for 3% of emissions. Treatment before disposal, or processing waste to produce fertilizers and biogas, would not only cut emissions but also lower pollution risks3.

Finance for adaptation is not at the scale needed. In 2018, more than 90% of global climate funding (of $746 billion) went to mitigation, leaving just $34 billion for adaptation. The water sector received just 3% of the climate funds. It is estimated that adaptation will cost between $150 billion and $300 billion per year by the end of the century. Achieving the UN Sustainable Development Goal of ‘universal and equitable access to safe and affordable drinking water for all’ by 2030 would cost about $1.7 trillion16, or triple the current level of investment. And much more is needed: projected costs for water infrastructure range from $6.7 trillion by 2030 to $22.6 trillion by 2050 (see go.nature.com/3t9bi59).

Water-based adaptation must fit local contexts or it will make the risks worse. For example, in coastal areas of Bangladesh in the 1960s, international experts put in embankments and sluice gates to provide flood protection and boost agriculture in the Ganges Delta. They did it without looking at the traditional water systems, the inability of local communities to maintain engineered flood-control structures, and the tremendous amount of sediment flows that meandering rivers bring. The consequences have been dire — worse floods and waterlogging, sinking of land and filling up of riverbeds, increased soil and water salinity, and degraded food and livelihood security19. Many men from the region have migrated to search for jobs, causing household burdens and increases in insecurity.

Such problems stem from either failing to understand or ignoring the root causes of vulnerability, which are often historical. In Cape Town, South Africa, there was a requirement to cut water demand in order to cope with a long dry spell. As a result, poor and working class households were facing severe shortages, while affluent households were able to store bottled water.

Going forward, local communities need to have a say in shaping and determining their futures, as well as lead the decision-making process. In Bangladesh, in the year of 2021, the district council worked closely with local women to combat water shortages in the hilly region. The women chose to install a solar-powered well and tank to pump, store and supply water, and took the lead in project design, implementation and follow-up, to ensure success. The projects should become the norm.