Tell-Tale Signs

Ever more erratic global weather patterns – caused by climate change - have added 170 million people to those already experiencing water shortages. The UN's Panel on Climate Change - comprising over 1000 of the world's leading scientists - warns that those numbers will rise. Earth Report goes to China, Mozambique, South Africa and Orissa in India to catalogue the impact of climate change and find out about new strategies for coping with it.

There is now little doubt that the earth's climate is changing. But what will be the impact on the world's fresh water? Devastating droughts are ravaging huge areas of Asia and Africa, and scenes of some of the worst flooding in human memory have been hitting the headlines with alarming regularity. The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that around the world, 170 million more people will face extreme water shortages as a result of global warming.

This week, Earth Report visits two climate change hotspots in India and Southern Africa, where the tell-tale signs of a changing hydrological system are beginning to show. Will current methods of managing water be able to cope under ever more extreme weather patterns?

Mozambique
Currently experiencing a devastating drought, Mozambique has suffered the last two years from deadly floods. The scale of the swing from drought disaster to flood disaster is raising the volume of voices such as those of Professor Bryan Davies who argue that dams such as Cahora Bassa, managed purely for electricity production, are timebombs.

With increasing climate variability thousands more people are going to die. Poverty stricken Mozambicans on the Zambezi floodplains are sitting ducks.

Dubbed "the disaster capital of India", Orissa has been reeling under contrasting extreme weather conditions for the last decade. The state has been buffeted between cyclones, heat waves, floods and droughts. According to the Centre for Science and the Environment, out of the last one hundred years, Orissa has been disaster-affected for ninety of them. There have been floods in forty-nine of those years, droughts in thirty and cyclones in eleven. These extremes of weather have led many to describe the situation here as a "dress rehearsal for the mayhem of climate change".

Despite average rainfall Bolangir District, Orissa still suffers drought.

How much these extremes are down to climate change, environmental degradation, or geographical location, or a combination of all three, is unknown, but now for the first time, officials at the Indian Meteorological Department have acknowledged there must be something seriously wrong with Orissa's climate. There is however cause for hope, in the form of political will. CSE reports that "the Orissa Government finally appears to be serious about drought-proofing the state". Finally the government has got serious about drought proofing the state - focussing on recharging groundwater reserves. And it appears to be working. Thousands of wells are being recharged and intensive awareness campaigns have helped to involve poor communities in the process.

Earth Report takes a walk into the countryside with celebrated local nature poet Haldhar Nag. He used to write about the six seasons of Orissa, but now they've been reduced to three.

"The seasons have changed their nature" nature poet Haldar Nag reflects. He takes us to visit an eighty-year old farmer Jadumani Pradhan who laments the changes, and describes how the animals and birds are behaving unnaturally.

Orissa has a strong tradition of consulting nature and ancient wisdom to predict the weather. Many people have always relied on the 'Panjika', an ancient book that contains age-old methods for predicting future conditions. Now says Mr Pradhan, the Black-Headed Oriole no longer trumpets the advent of spring. If a small Indian Skylark lays its eggs on a field, it used to signify the onset of a drought year, but now it is hot and humid all year round, the birds' hatching habits have changed.

These ancient systems of prediction, though not scientific, are not uncommon. The issue of food security has affected man since the beginning of time: Pharaonic officials measured the Nile's annual floods, knowing that feast or famine depended on them. Today's scientists are playing the same game, but with new tricks.