Hyderabad: With 241 incidents of extreme weather events in the first 273 days of 2022 – nearly 88 per cent of the time- the Centre for Science and Environment has described the year as “the watermark of climate change”.
The climate that wreaked havoc in the country has not only claimed “2,755 lives but affected 1.8 million hectares (ha) of crop area, destroyed over 416,667 houses and killed close to 70,000 livestock.” This is for the first time the Air Quality Index (AQI) in Delhi has reached an all-time low and the Supreme Court had to intervene to improve the air quality of the national capital.
The number of deaths due to these events was the highest in Himachal Pradesh (359), while Madhya Pradesh and Assam witnessed 301 human deaths each, India 2022: An Assessment of Extreme Weather Events launched November 1, 2022, showed. In terms of human lives lost, central India topped the list with 887 deaths, followed by East and North East India (783 deaths).
Assam reported the highest number of damaged houses and animal deaths, according to the analysis. Karnataka, which experienced an extreme weather event in 82 days, accounted for more than 50 per cent of the crop area affected in the country. Lightning and storms were spread over 30 states and claimed 773 lives. Heat waves claimed 45 lives.
With thunderstorms, torrential rains, landslides, floods, cold waves, heat waves, cyclones, droughts, dust storms, hail or snowstorms: in the first nine months of 2022. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines this extreme weather as a phenomenon and a "rare at a particular place and time of the year." Interestingly enough according to the CSE report – "Under the effect of climate change, extreme events that used to occur once every 100 years have begun to occur every five years".
Flash floods struck camps of pilgrims heading for the Amarnath Cave Temple on July 8, 2022, following a brief but intense spell of torrential rain, also known as a cloudburst, killing 16 while 14 went missing as it swept away a camp of 25 tents and 3 community kitchens for pilgrims to the Amarnath Cave Temple near Pahalgam in Jammu and Kashmir, and about 141 km from Srinagar.
In May 2022 one of the worst floods in recent history took struck India and neighboring Bangladesh killing at least 110 people and leaving millions scrambling for food and medicines. The floods left over 9.5 million people stranded.
As many as 27 mountaineers lost their lives when an avalanche struck the Draupadi ka Danda peak in Uttarakhand on October 4, 2022. This was one of the worst mountaineering disasters in the country. A massive landslide took place near the railway construction camp at Marangching part 5 area in Manipur, about 75km west of the state capital, in the intervening night of June 29 and 30.20 army men among 27 dead and 35 went missing.
Gujarat witnessed one of the worst civic disasters in recent history on October 30 when 135 people including over 50 children died after an old suspension bridge over the Machchhu River in Morbi town collapsed on October 30 at around 6:30 p.m.
Twenty-six people died on October 2 when a tractor trolley carrying pilgrims overturned at Kanpur in Uttar Pradesh. As many as 33 members of a wedding party were killed and 19 injured when a bus carrying them fell into a gorge in Uttarakhand's Pauri Garhwal district on June 6 at around 7 pm.
At least 27 people died and 12 were injured in a fire that broke out in a three-story commercial building near the Mundka Metro station in west Delhi on May 13. It was not just accidents and natural calamities that resulted in the loss of lives in 2022, but the outbreak of contagious viral diseases in the country affected humans and wreaked havoc on cattle.
The possibility of a Monkeypox outbreak sent jitters across the country when India recorded its first case of the viral disease on July 14, 2022 in Kerala’s Kollam on 14th July. The 35-year-old patient reached Trivandrum from the UAE on July 12. The number of cases of monkeypox in India has now reached nine.
The outbreak of Lumpy skin disease, a viral disease that affects cattle started in India with the first case being recorded in April in Gujarat's Kutch region. The Cumulative number of cattle deaths caused by lumpy skin disease has gone up to 97,435 as on September 23, 2022– almost double from the 49,682 deaths recorded about three weeks ago, according to official data. Rajasthan has been worst hit by the outbreak of lumpy skin disease with 11 districts reporting a surge in cases, Union Animal Husbandry Minister Purushottam Rupala said.
Air pollution also left its mark once again on the lives of people in the Delhi-NCR region in November as air quality severely deteriorated in November. Stubble burning was the key reason behind the perilous air quality.
