From Singapore to India, Nepal and Myanmar, Asia must 'adapt' to heatwaves
Each time Singapore residents wake up in the coming weeks and months, they are likely to check for heat alerts as part of their morning routine before heading off to work or school.
Such a scenario may have been unthinkable less than a decade ago, but it's something that people in the Asian financial hub will have to get used to, with the city state planning to issue regular warnings about extreme temperatures.
The authorities in Singapore are not being overly cautious, either, as climate scientists confirmed this week that July will be the hottest-ever month on record.
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UN and EU monitors said the recent heat was likely unprecedented for thousands of years, and warned it was just a taste of the climate future to come.
Similarly warm conditions prevailed only 120,000 years ago, according to an analysis by Leipzig University climate scientist Dr Karsten Haustein.
"With climate change, many countries in the world, including Singapore, are seeing rising temperatures. It is therefore important for members of the public to adapt," the city state's Sustainability Ministry and National Environment Agency said in a recent joint statement.
It's increasingly likely that Singapore's efforts will soon be replicated in different forms across Asia, as the region is highly vulnerable to climate change.
Deadly floods swept through northern India recently, while an area of China's Xinjiang province sweltered under 52.2-degree Celsius temperatures, breaking the previous record of 50.6 set in 2017.
The extreme weather woes are partly down to El Nino, a weather phenomenon that typically disrupts rainfall patterns every few years.
Temperatures in Asia tend to increase during El Nino years, often leading to wetter and warmer air.
But such weather will now become commonplace, thanks to our relentless burning of fossil fuels, scientists say.
"As long as we keep burning fossil fuels, we will see more and more of these extremes," said Friederike Otto, a senior lecturer in climate science at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
"[But] even if we stop burning fossil fuels now, temperatures will not go down," she said. "So the heatwaves we are seeing now, we definitely have to live with that."
The heat is already taking a heavy toll on the health of those living in marginalised communities with poor access to public health services, common to tens of millions of people across Asia.
Heat-related mortality has increased by about 70 per cent globally since the early 2000s, said Marina Romanello, executive director at the Lancet Countdown on climate change and health, which tracks connections between the two.
The impacts have been immense, with scorching weather badly degrading the abilities of those like farmers to work for up to 12 hours a day in their fields, as they have done for generations.
In 2021 alone, soaring temperatures caused about 470 billion work hours to be lost globally, for a financial loss of around US$700 billion, Romanello said.
There are around 450 million small farmers in the Asia-Pacific region. And scientists says it is often the poorest countries - like Bangladesh, Nepal, Pakistan and Myanmar - who bear the brunt of climate change.
Reasons include the time it takes to rebuild low-income communities affected by natural disasters, a lack of social welfare safety nets, and geographical considerations like being in vulnerable coastal areas.
High temperatures also pose other hazards, including devastating forest fires.
This week, the Indonesian authorities said the number of areas susceptible to wildfires had doubled between July 17 and July 23 because of the dry weather, serving as a grim reminder of a devastating 2015 blaze that blanketed Southeast Asia in haze for five months.
A US study later linked that year's haze to more than 100,000 premature deaths in Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore.
"Although not all hotspots will turn into fire spots, we still have to be vigilant because of the significant increase that we are seeing," said a spokesman from Indonesia's BNPB disaster mitigation agency.
Indonesia's weather agency this month said the country is expected to see its most severe dry season since 2019 in the second half of the year, partially due to El Nino.
Hot and humid conditions have also brought worries of more mosquito-borne diseases like dengue and malaria, said Aravindan Srinivasan, director of thematic collaborations at the non-profit Asian Venture Philanthropy Network, which works to mitigate climate stress.
Such diseases were already endemic to Southeast Asia, South America and sub-Saharan Africa, but have now started breaking out in uncharted territory like Europe.
However, densely-populated Asia remains the most at risk. Five of the world's most vulnerable countries to climate change - India, China, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Indonesia - are located in the region, Srinivasan pointed out.
Srinivasan's Singapore-headquartered network, which counts philanthropists and large companies among its 600 members, is keen to fund mitigation and renewable generation programmes in Asia. It has been working in India for the past six months and plans to soon launch operations in China, as well in Southeast Asia.
His non-profit network cooperates with grass-roots enterprises and works with different organisations who collaborate with governments to identify problem-solving programmes for local communities, such as painting rooftops to lessen heat, but these initiatives are often strapped for cash, Srinivasan said.
"We have to look at both sides of the coin - mitigation and adaptation," he added.
Mitigation and adaptation are becoming evermore important as extreme weather prompts a surge in electricity demand to power air conditioning and fans, threatening yet more emissions.
Power consumption records in several Chinese cities have been broken recently, with Shanghai reportedly burning hundreds of tons of coal per hour to keep the city cool, while people in other nations, like Vietnam, have had to cope with rolling blackouts.
Climate activists are now eyeing a year-end UN climate meeting in Dubai, hoping there will be agreements to phase out fossil fuels and ramp up renewable energy. But they say nations need to prioritise the environment.
Striking a balance between energy needs and reducing emissions is key to preventing more frequent and intense heatwaves, said Julie Arrighi, director from the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre at The Hague in the Netherlands.
Asian countries are often tempted to turn to coal-based power as the fuel is readily available in the region, but this strategy is fraught with risks amid a changing climate, experts say.
Thermal power facilities - those which operate using energy produced by a steam boiler, often fuelled by coal or gas - do not operate as efficiently in very hot weather, said Grant Hauber, strategic energy finance adviser at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.
He noted that such facilities often suffer capacity reductions when it is very hot. According to energy think tank Ember, around 62 per cent of the world's electricity came from fossil fuels in 2021.
The International Energy Agency said on Thursday that global coal consumption rose to a new all-time high in 2022 and will stay near that record level this year, as strong growth for power generation and industrial applications in Asia outpaces declines in the United States and Europe.
Coal usage last year rose by 3.3 per cent to 8.3 billion tonnes, it added.
Asian demand has remained strong over the last couple of weeks as China has been ramping up coal fired-power generation, ANZ bank said recently.
But renewable energy's declining prices mean that over the longer term, demand in Asia is likely to shift more towards green sources, experts say.
"Increasingly, it may actually be renewables that step in to fill the gap," said Hauber, noting that solar power saved the day during heat-related outages at gas-fired plants in the US state of Texas last month.
Additional reporting by Agence France-Presse
This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (SCMP).
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