ISLAMABAD: World Bank South Asia Region Lead Economist Muthukumara Mani Thursday in his research based on climate scenarios and projected changes in temperature and precipitation in South Asia said women-headed households are more resilient in aggressive climate change impacts.
He expressed these views at an interactive session organized by Leadership for Environment and Development (LEAD) Pakistan on the study by Muthukumara Mani on South Asia’s Hotspots: The Impacts of Temperature and Precipitation Changes on Living Standards.
He said it was observed in the research that women leading the household in the absence of men working somewhere in the far would develop enough potential to resist to serious repercussions of climate change.
Mani said the research had revealed that adverse climate change impacts were going to have explicit effects over living standards of the vulnerable communities living in the hotspots.
“The hotspots are areas where living standards will be most impacted by average changes in temperature and precipitation. The hotspots having less than four percent living standards losses have been rated as mild, from four to eight percent moderate and above eight percent as severe hotspots,” he explained.
Almost 800 million people in the South Asian region were living in the areas to become climate change hotspots in the near future, he said.
“At least 10 districts of Pakistan mostly six from Punjab and rest four Sindh are found to become climate change hotspots. Sindh will be most impacted followed by Punjab. The top seven districts in India to become hotspots are from Mahrashtra whereas severe hotspots have been supposed to occur in areas where farmers’ suicide ratio has been high,” the World Bank, Lead Economist said.
The report, he said, had found some similarities in vulnerable areas and households in six South Asian countries. “These hotspot districts have less road density, poor access to market and water starved population,” he added.
He said every country in the region was taking policy steps to mitigate climate change risks and avoid serious impacts on their regions. The governments could perform well in development, awareness, educating the communities, establishing and enhancing the existing early warning systems to become climate resilient, he added.
He noted that his study focused on hotspots to appear in the future facing direct impacts of climate change other than reports explaining extreme disaster and climate change events occurrence in the future.