By Nikunja Bihari Sahu
The hot summer days are back with vengeance! With daytime temperatures soaring over 400 °C in many parts of Odisha, the current season promises to be painfully hot.
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Interior districts are boiling with sweltering heat driven by hot and dry westerly winds and towns like Jharsuguda, Titlagarh, and Sambalpur are recording temperatures close to 450 °C. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), our planet has warmed by 0.6 degree C over the last century and it is projected that Earth’s mean temperature is likely to rise 2.4 to 4.8 degree C by the year 2100.
Smashing all temperature records, 11 of the warmest years of the past 125 years occurred only after 1990, with 2005 being the warmest year on record. The year 2005 was characterised by exceptionally high temperatures in the northern hemisphere and a significant surge in sea-surface temperatures.
Intense heatwaves in 2003 took a toll of around 35,000 people in the whole of Europe, including 15,000 lives in France alone. About 700 million people in India depending directly on climate-sensitive sectors such as agriculture, forests and fisheries for their livelihood will directly face the brunt of climate change induced by global warming. Even animals are not spared from the wrath of nature.
The polar bear in the melting ice sheets of the Arctic, the Royal Bengal tigers in India’s fragile mangrove forests of the Sundarbans, the right whale in the plankton-poor waters of the warming North Atlantic, and the orangutan in Indonesian forests segmented by frequent bushfires and droughts are some of the survivors of this ecological crisis.
Global warming has proved to be very harsh to Odisha also. Atmospheric temperature is consistently surging in coastal and interior cities including Bhubaneswar with summer turning out to be painfully unbearable.
Gone are the days in the capital city when the cool southerly breeze used to lash the summer evenings, much to the delight of the residents. Low-pressure weather conditions and depressions are becoming regular events, causing unpredictable rainfall patterns across the state much to the woes of farmers. Who can forget the scorching hot summer days of 1998 when hundreds of people died of heatwave-related incidents and the devastating Super Cyclone of 1999 that claimed thousands of lives in coastal Odisha.
Frequent floods and droughts in the following years battered the lives of the people. The sea has also posed a serious threat to the state. The Bay of Bengal is expanding towards the coastal landscape at an alarming rate, taking many villages and fertile farmlands into its grip.
Keeping such grave consequences in mind, world leaders have met at several climate summits in the past to find a solution with the Rio Summit in 1992 serving as the launching pad. The following Kyoto Protocol (1995), Copenhagen Accord (2009), Paris Agreement (2015), Glasgow Climate Pact (2021), the UAE Consensus (2023) and the Brazil summit (2025) have yielded little tangible progress.
Given the turmoil and turbulence in the global political scenario, as mentioned above our mantra should be to ‘Think globally and act locally’.
We can directly reduce our carbon footprint by curbing personal energy consumption, utilising the public transit system and adopting energy-efficient appliances.
The writer is Education Officer, Regional Science Centre, Bhubaneswar.
