THE occurrence of two cyclones in consecutive seasons—Cyclone Nisarga in 2020 and cyclone Tauktae in 2021—is highly unusual for the west coast of India but fits in with the warnings of experts.
The India Meteorology Department has indicated that rising sea temperatures could mean that the west coast will see annual cyclones. The Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology has said that the surface temperature of the Arabian Sea has risen by 1.2 to 1.4 °C over the past 40 years. This, it says, can increase wind speeds by 5 per cent and result in cyclones and storm surges.
For reasons not yet fully known, the Indian Ocean is warming faster than other seas. The Arabian Sea, where the average temperature so far has been 24 to 25 °C, saw a dramatic rise during Tauktae’s passing. When the cyclone passed Goa the sea temperature was measured at 30 to 31 °C, which increased the wind speed from 80 to 100 kilometres/hour and it further picked up speed to 175 kmph as it rammed past Mumbai. Classified as “extremely severe”, Tauktae at its peak had a one-minute sustained speed of 220 kmph.
Waves as tall as four metres were generated as it swept past Ratnagiri even though it was some 100 km out at sea. The damage from both cyclones has been well documented, but what has been glossed over is the protective role of mangroves during extreme maritime weather.
How does a mangrove forest protect the coast from a cyclonic onslaught?
Mangrove trees live on the boundary between land and sea. They have laterally spreading roots with attached vertical roots that anchor them. The whole plant from the roots to the branches and the canopy absorbs the shock of storm surges.
They act as barriers to flood waves through factors such as bottom friction, tree density and the overall width of the mangrove forest. The roots of mangrove trees retain sediments and stabilise the soil of the intertidal region. Many studies have shown that up to 60 per cent of the wave force is dissipated by the first 100 m of mangroves along a coast.
A 2020 study published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America entitled “Mangroves shelter coastal economic activity from cyclones” by Jacob P. Hochard, Stuart Hamilton and Edward B. Barbier had significant findings.
Using spatially referenced data and statistical methods from 2000 to 2012, the authors tracked “the impact of cyclones on economic activity in coastal regions inhabited by nearly 2,000 tropical and subtropical communities across 23 major mangrove-holding countries [including India]”.
Their findings show that “direct cyclone exposure—i.e., within 100 km of the cyclone’s ‘eye’—has a permanent impact on long-run economic outcomes… in the absence of natural protections that buffer winds or reduce stormwater inundation.
Results suggest that cyclone exposure disrupts economic activity in coastal communities in the year of impact and in subsequent years following exposure. Higher elevation and wide mangroves, together, buffer this initial impact of storm exposure and enable communities to return to pre-exposure growth rates quickly thus avoiding long-term impacts on economic activity.
Despite their proven benefits, mangroves continue to be wilfully destroyed by official sanction for so-called development. The Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services in Hyderabad found that the sea levels around India are rising at around 1.6 to 1.7 mm every year.
Mumbai, with a population of about 20 million people, lies at less than 15 m above sea level. Parts of the city are below or at mean sea level, making the city’s population vulnerable to climate change–related dangers.
One way to mitigate the risks is to nurture mangroves, natural wetlands and other coastal vegetation and natural rocky shores and sandy beaches. These are all armour for the coast.
A paper titled “The Global Flood Protection Benefits of Mangroves” by Pelayo Menéndez, Iñigo J. Losada, Saul Torres-Ortega, Siddharth Narayan and Michael W. Beck says that mangroves provide significant protection “from cyclones and the more regular (non-cyclonic) high wave and swell events.
However, cyclonic events are when damages are the greatest and mangroves offer the greatest benefit. With climate change the intensity and frequency of the largest events are likely to increase and thus the role of mangroves will therefore be even more relevant in future scenarios.” The paper says “countries such as Mexico, India and Vietnam” draw cyclone-protection benefits from mangroves.
Abundance of evidence
This is just one paper that has researched mangroves. There is an abundance of such hard evidence, but Mumbai’s treatment of its mangroves goes against all the scientific proof of their benefits. The island city had enormous mangrove forests until three decades ago.
In Mumbai, development has always been linked to reclamation, and this automatically spelt doom for mangroves. Towards the southern tip of the city, what used to be a huge mangrove forest is now a bus depot and a sprawling illegal slum.
The forest was destroyed before the Coastal Regulation Zone (CRZ) laws came into existence in 1991 and at a time when trucks full of construction rubble would line up at night and brazenly dump their loads into the waters of the intertidal region. In this way Mumbai’s topography expanded into the sea.
After the CRZ laws were passed, mangroves continued to be killed but in a more insidious fashion. The inlets that bring in seawater, which is essential for the survival of mangroves, are blocked so that the plants wither and die. Then the dead mangroves are sold as firewood and the rubble dumping begins. In this way the city lost about 9,000 acres (one acre is 0.4 hectare) of mangrove between 1991 and 2001.
Infrastructure projects are a big threat to mangroves. To construct an overpass along a long stretch of Mumbai’s eastern seaboard in 2019, about 8,000 mangrove trees were killed by depriving them of seawater. When the work for Mumbai’s new international airport started in Navi Mumbai, satellite images showed that hundreds of acres of mangroves were destroyed.
The bullet train project, which will run between Mumbai and Ahmedabad, will claim at least 35,000 mangrove trees. More recently, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA) is all set to clear-cut a one-hectare plot of mangroves to build an elevated station for the metro rail service.
In 2015, the Bombay High Court declared mangroves as protected forests, and soon after that the State government implemented a mangrove conservation plan to be carried out on government land. One happy outcome of this has been the notification of 1,036 ha of mangroves on government land as reserved forest and the handing of the same to the Forest Department.
This way mangrove land held by authorities such as the Jawaharlal Nehru Port Trust and the MMRDA will finally get transferred to the Forest Department. The non-governmental organisation Vanashakti is fighting for this.
More than 3,000 ha of mangrove forest is supposed to have already been transferred to the Forest Department under orders from the Chief Conservator of Forests but this has not been done. Vanashakti has filed a public interest litigation petition seeking orders for the restoration of all mangrove forests destroyed illegally since 2005. Satellite imagery will be used to establish the before-after scenario.
In June, the Mangrove Cell of the Forest Department released a glossy publication on mangrove conservation called “Bio-Sentinels of Maharashtra”. The Mangrove Cell was established in 2012, and a year later a special unit called the Mumbai Mangrove Conservation Unit was created and headed by a Divisional Forest Officer.
Ecotourism involving local people and creating sustainable livelihoods are some of the conservation efforts of the cell, but the point is that the nemesis of the mangrove forest is politician-supported development and on this the cell is quiet.
There was a well-meaning plan to replant mangrove trees, but there is a strong reason why this will not work: developers and mangroves both vie for the coast, and it is well established that developers will win the game. All the above-mentioned infrastructure projects are ones that have been officially sanctioned but without a thought being given to the fact that Mumbai is on the red list of climate change–affected cities.
A 2019 report entitled “Flooded Future: Global vulnerability to sea level worse than previously understood” brought out by the American research institute Climate Central predicts that “many of the world’s coastlines are far lower than has been generally known and that sea level rise could affect hundreds of millions of more people in the coming decades than previously understood”.
The report says that Asia is particularly vulnerable because of the vast numbers of people who live along the coast. It goes on to say: “Based on sea level projections for 2050, land currently home to 300 million people will fall below the elevation of an average annual coastal flood. By 2100, land now home to 200 million people could sit permanently below the high tide line.” The report specifically mentions Kolkata as vulnerable in the Indian context, but environmentalists say that all coastal cities, including Mumbai, are at risk.
A working paper of the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) written by Angela Picciariello, Sarah Colenbrander, Amir Bazaz and Rathin Roy entitled “The costs of climate change in India: a review of the climate-related risks facing India, and their economic and social costs” further corroborates this: “Looking towards the end of the century, global sea levels are projected to rise by at least 44-74 cm relative to the mid-1990s, excluding the risk of ice-sheet collapse.
Sea levels along the Indian coast are not forecast to rise quite as much as the average, increasing by 20–30 cm compared with current levels. Even so, this will have a severe impact on infrastructure and property, particularly in low-lying and densely settled cities such as Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata.
It will also affect low-income rural communities that depend on coastal ecosystems for food and livelihoods, as the disappearance of coral reefs, degradation of mangroves and saline intrusion into the water table affect the productivity of agricultural land and natural ecosystems.”
Flooding is endemic to the low-lying areas in Mumbai and now with storm surges and cyclones the whole city is vulnerable. Mangroves are proven buffers against storm surge flooding. The ODI paper quoted a 2013 study in which Mumbai was ranked fifth in the world for flood-related losses. It quoted the catastrophic floods of 2005 in the city that killed 5,000 people and caused economic losses of $690 million. It says: “Floods will only get worse when combined with the heavier rains, higher sea levels and more severe storms associated with climate change.” With the risks of climate change increasing, saving Mumbai’s mangroves becomes more important than ever.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.