Editorial 1 : What is the value of attributing extreme events to climate change?
Context
Climate models are bad at capturing normal rainfall and worse at extreme ones. They are better at capturing temperatures, but only at regional scales, not at very local scales.
Value of extreme-event attribution
- While no formal cost-benefit analysis of an attribution exercise has been reported, many experts have argued that attributions are critical for the ‘loss and damage’ (L&D) process.
- L&D doesn’t have a unique definition but its place in climate talks under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change has come a long way in the last decade.
- Economically developing countries, in particular those that are ‘particularly vulnerable’, have demanded the L&D fund to pay for the havoc climate change wreaks within their borders.
- Obviously, the criteria by which ‘particularly vulnerable’ countries are to be identified are crucial.
- For example, India is a developing country in the tropics and is highly vulnerable to climate change’s impacts.
- But it is unlikely that India will qualify for L&D funding.
- The developed world is opposed to the idea of being held legally accountable in court for any extreme events since that could open a floodgate of lawsuits.
- Against this background, our understanding of whether attribution reports can actually hold up in court as evidence of culpability is very important. A good case in point is a recently published report on heatwaves in Asia.
Attribution of Asian heatwaves
- Last week, a team of climate scientists called World Weather Attribution (WWA) reported that heatwaves across Asia, from the west to the southeast, had been rendered nearly 45-times more likely by climate change.
- It is worth understanding how these ‘rapid extreme event attributions’ are performed.
- They found that the data are hardly ever sufficient, especially for rainfall, and almost never for extreme rainfall events.
- Climate models are also notoriously bad at properly capturing normal rainfall and worse at extreme ones.
- Thus, climate scientists need to address these challenges in the process of assigning probability changes to events in the past.
- Because right now, even though the L&D fund and climate jurisprudence are becoming more visible, attribution exercises are happening as if disconnected from governments’ adaptation and mitigation strategies.
Picking extreme events to attribute
- Another significant challenge in attribution exercises, is how scientists choose the extreme events for which they will perform attribution exercises.
- When evaluating the Asian heatwaves, the WWA scientists used regional scales and different definitions for different regions. They also arbitrarily considered daily, three-day, or monthly average temperatures for attributing likelihoods.
- Heatwaves can be exacerbated by natural factors such as an El Niño event or human factors like urbanisation and deforestation. There is also a debate as to whether irrigation affects heatwaves as well.
- Further, no weather event will occur in exactly the same form twice in a place, which means an extreme event occurring in that place will likely have no precedent. This is why it is easier to reliably attribute heatwaves at the subcontinent scale but not those at the level of particular areas.
Extreme events and human action
- The actual impacts of extreme events depend not only on the hazard or the extreme event but also on the vulnerability and the exposure of the population affected.
- Similarly, the financial consequences are also affected by multiple factors
- Considering all these challenges, we must take stock of the international financial aspects of adaptation, mitigation, and L&D.
- In particular, governments should consider an agreement on historical responsibilities to fund developing countries, close adaptation gaps, build adaptation capacity, and finance mitigation for the global good.
Way forward
The real world is severely resource-constrained. In a counterfactual world where human, financial, and computational resources are infinite, attribution exercises are a beautiful scientific challenge and could serve as a productive intellectual exercise. But in the real world, we need a cost-benefit analysis based on a clear role for attribution in the overall climate action landscape.
Editorial 2 : A vegetable triumvirate, inflation and the takeaway
Context
Inflation is a critical indicator of an economy’s health, reflecting the changes in the general price level and the cost of living.
Measuring inflation
- In India, the Consumer Price Index (CPI) is used to measure price inflation which is largely based on the Laspeyre’s price index and measures the economy’s cost of living.
- The CPI basket comprises 299 items of which vegetables account for a weight of 6.04% in the total basket.
- Within vegetables, the three vegetables — tomato, onion, and potato (TOP) — hold a weightage of 2.2% in the overall CPI basket for an average Indian household.
- The significance of TOP goes beyond its numerical representation. These three commodities have historically played a pivotal role in influencing both food and beverages inflation as well as headline CPI figures.
- One notable fact is that the TOP group constitutes 3.6% of the total consumption basket in urban areas while it constitutes 5% of the total consumption basket in rural India for the bottom 5% of the consumption classes, respectively, as per the CPI basket classification.
- In FY2023-24, vegetable prices in India soared by about 15% (year-on-year). Vegetable prices have exhibited significant volatility, shifting dramatically from a fall of 0.7% in June to a substantial rise of 37.4% in July.
- During the same month, the contribution of vegetables to headline inflation was a high 31.9%, and of TOP was 17.2%.
Price volatility
- One of the striking features of TOP is its price volatility.
- The coefficient of variation (CoV) of inflation is a key measure of volatility.
- The inflation volatility of TOP has been measured using the coefficient of variation (CoV) for the period January 2015 to March 2024, yielding a value of 5.2.
- It is significantly higher than the volatility of the vegetables sub-group the food group as well as the volatility of headline inflation.
- This exercise reveals that TOP’s CoV surpasses not only the food and headline group but also the vegetables sub-group.
- This heightened volatility underscores the sensitivity of these commodities to market forces, weather fluctuations, and supply chain dynamics.
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Aiding the farmer
- The volatility and importance of TOP in shaping inflation trends highlight the need for effective policy interventions and a nuanced understanding of agricultural supply chains.
- These are perishable crops and are subject to a number of biotic and abiotic stresses.
- As these crops do not have Minimum Support Price and are mostly sold to private traders by farmers, this volatility in prices also hurts farmers, the majority of whom are net buyers of these crops.
- The possible solutions to reduce the volatility of inflation for these crops include an overhauling of agricultural value chains and improvement in the cold storage facilities, better prices for farmers to incentivise the production of the crops, and increased profitability in the cultivation that can be achieved by reducing the exorbitantly high input prices of fertilizers and pesticides used in the production of these crops.
Conclusion
The abrupt changes in lifting the export bans on onion ahead of the Maharashtra elections also show that we are still using short-term measures to deal with the price volatility in these crops as against measures that are demanded by the farmers.