Mukti Rijal

At a time when COVID-19 has taken a heavy toll of lives surpassing all contemporary records, another tragedy has befallen the country caused due to the early onset of torrential monsoon rains last week. The rains brought the tragic disasters that deflected the attention of the authorities from COVID-19 to calamity. However, the pattern of monsoon rainfall during the previous year was different from what seems to be this year. Last year weather fluctuation was very much uncertain and unpredictable which the case is this year, too. But the monsoon rains started very late and precipitation pattern was erratic and irregular. The occurrences of floods and landslides had not been heard till mid-July. However, the destruction wrought upon by the delayed monsoon was also very heavy.

Rain havoc
This year the massive floods and landslides have caused havoc even during the pre-monsoon days. Heavy rains have caused flooding and landslides in many parts of the country. In Helambu and Melamchi of Sindhupalchowk district, almost a dozen people have died and more than 60 others are reported to be missing, 260 houses have been damaged and thousands of people are reportedly displaced. Similarly, infrastructures like roads, highways, bridges and causeways have been destroyed in different parts of Lumbini Province and Karnali Province.
According to the reports, floods have displaced dozens of families from Tal village in Nasho Rural Municipality in the Manang district. A heavy rainfall in Mustang has caused landslides and damaged roads. It is reported that the people stranded in Jomsom of Mustang have to be airlifted due to damaged roads and active mudflows. Needless to say, Manang and Mustang districts used to have low precipitation during the rainy season in the past due to the rain shadow phenomenon.
They were known as arid terrain but for some years now, these districts are receiving heavy precipitation which is very unusual and unpredictable. Why this happening breaking is the regular and established weather practices and patterns has been an issue that needs to be discussed. This is not only the case of Nepal but across the earth.
Several studies and scientific reports point out the fact that the climate changes induced by anthropogenic activities are behind the cataclysmic changes and erratic weather patterns across the globe. More recently, some scientists have called this new epoch as the anthropogenic arguing that the human-induced activities have been at the centre to damage and alter the entire planetary ecosystem. This has given rise to several natural disasters, including the pandemic like COVID-19 and natural disasters.
The term ‘anthropogenic’ was coined by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen in the early 2000s and it is derived from the Greek word ‘anthropo’ for human, and ‘cene’ for new which can be said as the new age in which human activities are responsible to dominate, destroy and damage the planetary ecosystem. In fact, human induced activities have caused undeniable impacts on the environment at the scale of the planet as a whole. Humans are thus altering the planet earth.
The World Development Report 2020 published by the World Bank has focused on this catastrophic alteration and ecological imbalance engendered in the global environment because of the human actions. The report highlights and brings forth several destructive impacts of climate change on the planetary ecosystem. According to the report, the current COVID-19 pandemic is a cautionary tale for humans. For decades, scientists have been predicting about the possibility of such a pandemic pointing to the rise of new diseases jumping from animals to humans. And COVID-19 is perhaps the one that was predicted by them.
Indeed, the increasing transmission of disease from wildlife to humans reflects the pressures the activities of mankind are putting on the planet. It is a tale of the risks we confront as we go deeper into a new reality with the unprecedented planetary change in scope, scale and speed. It is driven by reckless human actions posing risks to people and all forms of life.
As per the report, COVID-19 was indeed superimposed on a world with wide and growing inequalities in human development. And it is driving deeper divide between those who are more able and those who are less able to cope. In fact, this is reflected, for example, in the inequitable distribution of COVID-19 vaccines around the globe.

Imbalanced relations
It is learnt that rich and capable countries like the US, China and many other developed nations have made the vaccines available to almost all citizens whereas a larger percentage of citizens in the less able counties like Nepal have been denied access to vaccines. This shows that the underlying drivers of shocks such as COVID-19 are rooted ultimately not only in imbalanced relations between people and planet but also in inequity and imbalance in the distribution of resources. And these drivers feed off the imbalances in opportunities, wealth and power across people and countries. Confronting this reality of a self-reinforcing cycle of social imbalances and of planetary imbalances, according to the World Development Report, calls for applying the human development approach to growth and sustainability.
The human development approach in enlarging people’s abilities and opportunities must be considered in the context of an unprecedented moment in human and planet’s history. It calls for a full understanding of the pressures we are putting on the planet and our interdependence with nature. As long as planetary imbalances persist, they engender risks that can manifest in shocks to human development just as the COVID-19 pandemic has done. Existing asymmetries of power and opportunity in the society can perpetuate and increase inequalities in different aspects of life. There is a need in finding the ways and means as to how to mitigate the climate change impacts while improving human capabilities to cope with its shocks, pressures and impacts.

(The author is presently associated with Policy Research Institute (PRI) as a senior research fellow.  rijalmukti@gmail.com)