How heatwaves are affecting livelihoods and food security

Tens of thousands of people in Europe are now battling one of the worst heatwaves in history.  Countries like Italy, Spain, Poland, Germany, Greece, France etc are sizzling in record-breaking temperatures that European Space Agency said won't end soon because 'it has only just begun.' 

Among the countries suffering the 'hottest temperature ever recorded in Europe,' Greece's temperature on Thursday exceeded 40 degrees Celsius resulting in wildfires. As a result, thousands had to be evacuated. 

And the coming days are expected to see as high as 45 degree Celsius. 

Italy also recorded its highest-ever temperature on Wednesday at 41.8C. They had to place red alerts in 23 cities. 

The latest heatwave in Europe is said to have been prompted by an anticyclone 'Charon' (a high-pressure zone where winds move slower and result in heat traps despite clear or warmer weather), which brewed in the Mediterranean from North Africa. 

What Europe is suffering today is what Bangladesh, India and the greater region have been enduring suffering for a longer time. Last June this year, for example, the temperature reached as high as 41C in Bangladesh when tens of thousands of primary and secondary schools had to be closed by the government. 

Suffocating to more than 40C temperature, Dhaka residents, in its narrowly built alleys crowded with 18 times more residents than its capacity, witnessed the terrible heat of their lifetime. The livelihood of the people whose jobs require roaming in the open became challenging. 

Additionally, farmers working on agricultural fields in between heated weather and intermittent thunderstorms struggle to survive. 

Now both India and Pakistan are facing one of the worst flash floods of their histories. Pakistan also braced for the most vicious flood losing billions worth of resources and countless lives last year. 

An expert, for example, Dr John Nairn, a Senior Extreme Heath Advisor at the World Heat Organisation and at the forefront of the Bureau of Meteorology's Heatwave Assessment operations has long asserted that this heatwave in Europe and elsewhere around the world is actually connected to climate change. 

ABC News recently quoted Nairn who is currently doing his PhD in heat waves at the University of Adelaide: "Climate change is causing the loss of polar ice, which leads to the weather pattern staying in one place." 

Attributing the heat to human activities, another expert Dr Kai Kornhuber said, "The emission of greenhouse gases directly translates into a higher likelihood of such extreme heat weather events." 

And all these catastrophes are directly connected to climate change, and its newer victims in the developed world have started to suffer it at an unprecedented intensity. 

To reiterate, meanwhile, the lesser developed countries have been living through climate change-induced extreme weather events for a longer period of time, a fatal phenomenon which they barely have had any participation in causing. 

Heat waves' impact on food 

Just like the heat waves make life difficult, especially in cities, the farmlands suffer heavily as a result of rising temperatures. One after another series of heatwaves endangers nature's ability to produce food, according to the researchers. 

For example, the mangos in Bangladesh this year were harvested earlier than usual because of the massive heat. This happened with the Indian mangoes last year as well. Due to climate change-induced change in harvest cycles, excessive mangoes ripened over a short period of time. So much so that many mangoes had to be pickled.

Not only this, the burning temperature was reported to be causing even flowers to dry out and wilt, according to a Bloomberg-powered BQ Prime report. 

In Bangladesh, around 21,000 hectares of rice crop was ruined due to heat in 2021.

A Department of Agricultural Extension official said in May that the heatwave had already ruined 141 hectares of rice crops. The official was quoted saying that his agency was trying to develop heat-tolerant rice varieties to save the harvest from heat shocks. 

This loss of crops as a result of a heat wave is true for the entire world. 

"There are growing risks of simultaneous major crop losses in different regions in the world, which will really affect food availability and prices," said John Marsham, Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Leeds, to The Guardian. 

"This is not what we're seeing right now, but in the coming decades that's one of the things I'm really scared of. As a human being, if you're wealthy enough, you can get inside and put the air conditioning on. But natural ecosystems and farmed ecosystems can't do that," he said. 

"What we do know is that heat waves will become more frequent. Earlier, if a heat wave occurred once a year, it did not happen again. Now we are seeing that after one heat wave sweeps through the country, another takes place. 

And it is becoming more intense," Md Shamsuddoha, chief executive at the Center for Participatory Research and Development (CPRD) told The Business Standard earlier. 

Just like the losses in agriculture took a heavy toll on South Asian agriculture, the heat wave in Europe in 2018 led to around 50% of crop failures. In fact, this is a repetitive (and developing) story which keeps occurring more and more each year, in myriads of parts across the world. 

Damages are also done to the ecosystems in the tropical oceans. In 2021, for example, one billion marine animals were killed by a heat dome (which occurs when a ridge of high pressure builds over an area and doesn't move for up to a week or more) along the Canadian Pacific coast. 

And it is important to remember that the ocean, with its highest biodiversity, supports more than 500 million people across the world. 

Liveability in difficulty while livelihoods endangered

If you have lived in Dhaka in April during the second half of Ramadan and then in late May to June, you must have witnessed rickshaw pullers of the city bathing in sweat, huffing and puffing in extreme weather conditions. 

The residents, due to its extremely crowded population and abundant concrete jungle in the absence of adequate greenery, suffered heavily in the unprecedented heat. 

Just like the heat impact on agriculture and the ocean-atmosphere, resulting in wildfires in Europe and the Americas, prolonged exposure to extreme temperatures can severely risk human health with dehydration, heat exhaustion, and heatstroke among other detrimental effects on the human body. 

Both elderly populations and children can face heightened risks during the heat wave. And city life especially becomes unbearable with extremely reduced productivity. 

"This will, I think, become a permanent part of summers in Bangladesh, it will become normalised. Summers will come with some heat waves," added Md Shamsuddoha. 

Last summer, the heat wave killed 61,000 people in Europe. Bangladesh recorded 70 deaths in July 2022 heatwave only in three days.

According to the latest study Building Urban Heat Resilience: An International Collaboration between DNCC and the Adrienne Arsht Rockefeller Foundation Resilience Center (ARSHT- ROCK), heat waves will have an impact on the lives and livelihoods of more than 3.5 billion people worldwide.

And according to the report, extreme heat events are causing productivity losses greater than 8% of Dhaka North City's annual output. 

Since the climate change-induced apocalypse will eventually be unavoidable for all – irrespective of the socio-economic class one belongs to – immediate actions from all, particularly the advanced and developed world, are imperative. 

In December 2019, speaking ahead of the UN's Climate Change Conference COP25 in Madrid, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said efforts to reach global targets have been "utterly inadequate" and climate change could pass the point of no return.

This begs the question: Are we too late? 

Most analyses (including IPCC scenarios) indicate that limiting warming to 1.5°C requires global greenhouse gas emissions to peak before 2025 and be halved by 2030. We are now in the middle of 2023, providing us less than eight years at the current pace of emissions.

"In the absence of accelerated and effective emission reductions, including carbon removal technologies, we have limited time before we reach the point of no return," wrote Pedro Gomez Head of Shaping the Future of Mobility, Member of the Executive Committee, World Economic Forum.