Will India be uninhabitable by 2035?

Rising temperatures will breach the human tolerable limit, mostly in India and central Africa. Nearly 3 billion people will be living in climate similar to the Sahara, the least populated geography due to uninhabitable climate conditions.

Soothsayers are no more needed to forecast the future suitability of the Earth for living. Climate scientists regularly issue warnings on the climate emergency caused by unprecedented global warming, probably experienced some 100,000 years ago in a different climatic era. 

At least for 6,000 years, the humans (mid-Holocene, the current geological epoch beginning some 11,700 years ago) — and the associated environment of the planet — have settled and prospered in a suitable temperature regime. Distribution of humans across geographies in the same temperature conditions more or less remains the same during this period. 

One way, we never had experience of survival in another temperature band. This is going to change, rather faster than expected. And the question rages: will the planet be suitable for living, say, if the temperature rise breaches the current band?

A recent assessment — one of its kind — tries to visualise the near future. The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) released Navigating New Horizons, a rigorous exploration into the near future of planetary health and human wellbeing based on current scientific studies that also involved a survey to rank various threats. 

The report insists that its intent is not to forecast but to “foresee” the future. The report foresees potential environmental, economic, social and geopolitical disruptions; makes an assessment of when they will hit us; and what is the perception of the respondents in the survey to each of these. 

“The disruptions presented in this report are not guaranteed to happen. But they could happen,” says Inger Andersen, Executive Director of UNEP.

One of the disruptions that the assessment has dealt with is: whether vast land areas in the planet would become unfit for human habitation due to climate emergency impacts like wildfires, flooding, and intolerable heat besides other few. An associated disruption to this one is the mass migration to be triggered by the unsuitability of climate.  

The UNEP assessment says that this disruption can be felt in the next seven years, that is by 2035. Nearly 90 per cent of the respondents in the survey that fed into the assessment feel that this disruption is “likely, very likely and virtually certain” to hit us. 

The areas that will be severely crippled by this unbearable temperature include India. The temperature rise will breach what is known as the “human climate niche”, a temperature band between 52- and 59-degree Fahrenheit.

The assessment analysed many scientific studies to reach this conclusion, which earlier said that the situation would be felt half-a-century later. 

It quotes one such study: “Scientists projected that over the coming 50 years, up to three billion people could be living well outside climate conditions (and particularly temperature) that have served humanity over the past 6,000 years, and worse, that by 2070, absent climate mitigation or migration, certain regions—Northern South America, central Africa, India and northern Australia—could simply become too hot to allow human life.” 

This study, released in 2020, was spearheaded by ecologists, climatologists and anthropologists of Washington State University, Pullman, Global Systems Institute, University of Exeter, and Center for Biodiversity Dynamics in a Changing World, Department of Bioscience, and Aarhus University. This study qualified their findings saying nearly one-third of the global population will be exposed to a temperature regime similar to the Sahara after half-a-century.

Right temperature has been a key climatic condition for human migration and choosing the right place of settlement since the “out of Africa” exodus. 

Humans face a similar situation now. Will there be massive waves of migrations seeking suitable climate zones? “Populations will not simply track the shifting climate, as adaptation in situ may address some of the challenges, and many other factors affect decisions to migrate. Nevertheless, in the absence of migration, one third of the global population is projected to experience a mean annual temperature >29 °C currently found in only 0.8% of the Earth’s land surface, mostly concentrated in the Sahara,” concluded the researchers in the 2020 study. 

But many studies attribute migration waves to changes in temperatures that impact human existence. For instance, the Little Ice Age that mostly impacted Europe and the North Atlantic from 1560 to 1660. The expansion of mountain glaciers and dip in temperature triggered huge migration, leading to a population collapse in Europe.   

In the current climate emergency, reports are already showing evidence of internal migration caused by extreme climatic events. Whether these are precursors to a planetary movement of humans will only be established much later.