Scientists Find Proof of Climate Change Impact On Wayanad Landslides

Wayanad: An international team of scientists have inferred that the deadly landslides in Kerala’s Wayanad district were caused by a heavy burst of rainfall, made 10 per cent heavier by climate change.

The team international team included 24 researchers from India, Sweden, the US and the UK. According to them,  said that more than 140 mm of rainfall in a single day on soils highly saturated by two months of monsoon rains caused the landslides and floods in Wayanad.

The rainfall occurred in a region of Wayanad that has the highest landslide risk in Kerala. To measure the impact of human-caused climate change, the scientists from the World Weather Attribution (WWA) group analysed climate models with high enough resolution to accurately reflect rainfall in the relatively small study area.

The models indicated that the intensity of rainfall has increased by 10 per cent due to climate change, they added.

According to scientists, the atmosphere’s capacity to hold moisture increases by about 7 per cent for every one-degree Celsius rise in global temperature.

The earth’s global surface temperature has already increased by around 1.3 degrees Celsius due to the increased concentration of greenhouse gases. It is causing extreme weather events, such as droughts, heatwaves and floods worldwide.

Wayanad landslides are also linked to forest cover loss, mining in fragile terrain and prolonged rain followed by heavy precipitation.

The southeast Arabian Sea is becoming warmer, causing the atmosphere above Kerala to become thermodynamically unstable. This instability is allowing the formation of deep clouds.

A 2022 study on depleting forest cover in Wayanad showed that 62 per cent of forests in the district disappeared between 1950 and 2018, while plantation cover rose by around 1,800 per cent.