El Niño calls for wider monitoring of ecological stress

In recent years, India has become reasonably proficient in forecasting atmospheric disturbances that cause cyclones. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) issues alerts for extreme weather events such as intense rainfall and heat waves. In the coming months, the country’s scientific community will face a different climate-related challenge. India has entered a potentially difficult post-monsoon period. After a 12.6 per cent rainfall deficit during the southwest monsoon, the IMD expects extremely dry conditions over most of the country for the rest of the year. A strengthening El Niño can reduce water availability in rivers and wetlands and increase stress on farms, forests and oceans. These could have cascading effects on people’s lives and livelihoods. However, two forests with similar rainfall deficits may respond differently because of differences in soil moisture, vegetation, groundwater or human pressure. Two wetlands may have different capacities to withstand a prolonged dry spell. Such differences cannot be explained by the intensity of warming and point to the importance of local ecological conditions. A Super El Niño may not cause an ecological shock by itself, but it can push an already stressed system past a threshold. Micro-monitoring can help discern ecological nuances and help direct scarce resources to imperilled ecosystems. It can also identify resilience.

Continuous and high-level satellite data of the Earth’s atmosphere and surface has fundamentally transformed weather forecasting and disaster response. Such observations today need to be complemented with field-level observations. Uttarakhand’s recent move towards real-time monitoring of glacial lakes is an important initiative in this respect. At the especially vulnerable Vasundhara Tal, sensors will link changes in water levels, snow depth and other features of the glacial lake with early-warning mechanisms. Similarly, tracking soil moisture, vegetation stress and animal movement is necessary to identify unusually dry patches in forests early. This is particularly imperative because warmer winters, erratic western disturbances, and declining snow cover are already altering the moisture cycle in the Himalaya, leaving forests vulnerable to fires before spring. Identifying thermal distress in coral reefs can, likewise, provide valuable insights into the health of marine ecosystems and help protect shorelines from waves and erosion.

Last month,  nearly 200 ecologists in the country issued an appeal for an emergency ecosystem-wide monitoring network. The appeal is salient because the current El Niño is likely to be too large for any one institution to track. The country has proven scientific capacity to understand weather, but ecological monitoring remains divided among research institutions, government departments, universities, and citizen groups. A coordination framework among them can enable a robust response not just to the immediate challenge, but to broader climate vagaries.