From: 04/29/2022 17:01
Northern India and Pakistan groan in temperatures of over 45 degrees. In some cities there are first blackouts – New Delhi’s power plants may have to close. The wheat crop is also at risk.
The extreme heat wave in India and Pakistan is increasingly compromising energy supplies in both countries. While power outages of up to eight hours have been reported in some Pakistani cities, New Delhi officials warned that they could only keep many plants running “less than a day”.
Temperatures in the Indian capital rose to over 43 degrees Celsius. “The situation in India is devastating,” said Arvind Kejriwal of the regional government for the capital region. He warned of the potentially dramatic effects of power outages in New Delhi’s hospitals and subways.
Heat wave in India, Bangladesh and Pakistan
Sibylle Licht, ARD New Delhi, Daily News at 5pm, April 29, 2022
Improvement probably not until early next week
Since March, hundreds of millions of people in northern India and Pakistan have been suffering from a series of unusual heat waves. In April, temperatures were already above 45 degrees in many places and could exceed 50 degrees over the weekend, a spokeswoman for the World Climate Organization (WMO) in Geneva said. A slowdown is not in sight until early next week.
It is still difficult to say whether this heat wave is directly attributable to climate change, the WMO spokeswoman said. However, these events were consistent with climate researchers’ predictions that climate change in South Asia would favor more frequent and more intense extreme weather events.
Researchers fear record heat
“The world climate report published last year shows that events we only expected every 50 years are now occurring five times more frequently,” climate researcher Erich Fischer, from Zurich, told Swiss broadcaster SRF. Such temperatures have never been seen in parts of the affected region at this time of year. The climate researcher fears the heat wave is likely to break records.
Along with the high humidity, there were sometimes conditions where people reached their limits of adaptation. Northern India and Pakistan are one of the most densely populated regions in the world, home to around ten percent of the world’s population. People live together, air pollution is high, nights are hot. Many people have no way to keep cool, says Fischer. If these heat waves last longer, people without shelter in air-conditioned rooms will soon not be able to live there.
India expects crop failure
Record temperatures are also hurting India’s wheat crop. Since March, crops have been stunted by the heat in the fields. The northern state of Punjab is particularly affected. The region is considered the breadbasket of India and supplies the largest amount of the Indian food reserve. The central government had hoped to buy a third of this year’s supply for the Punjab reserve. But now 25% less is expected, agricultural experts said.
In fact, the New Delhi government had planned to compensate for Ukraine’s supply shortfalls due to the Russian war of aggression there with its own production and also export wheat. This is now uncertain because the government alone needs 25 million tons of wheat for its welfare program, which feeds more than 80 million people.
Extreme heat wave in northern India
Peter Hornung, ARD New Delhi, 29 April 2022 17:59