Fighting what climate change is doing to animals merits a change of India’s own

Life came close to being completely annihilated 251 million years ago during a period in the earth’s history called the Great Dying. The more formal label applied to this time is the end-Permian mass extinction, when 95% of all species on the planet were wiped out.

The cause: volcanic eruptions in Siberia had spewed about 2 quintillion litres of basalt lava over an area the size of Libya in eastern Russia, releasing humongous amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The subsequent global warming melted frozen gas hydrate reservoirs in the ocean, releasing vast quantities of methane — a more potent greenhouse gas — into the atmosphere, causing further warming and creating an ever-worsening positive feedback loop called a runaway greenhouse effect.

Ultimately, a global temperature rise of 6º C led to the biggest crash in the history of life — more significant than the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

In a 2003 paper, palaeontologists Michael Benton and Richard Twitchett wrote, “Some scientists and politicians look to the sky for approaching asteroids that will wipe out humanity. Perhaps we should also consider how much global warming could be sustained and at what level the runaway greenhouse comes into play.”

A little over two decades later, climate change is the defining crisis of our time. As the mercury creeps up faster than feared, climate scientists believe the pace of global heating has been significantly underestimated and will reach 2º C by 2045 itself.

Humans are today the dominant force on the planet, and the sheer scale of anthropogenic impact on biodiversity makes it difficult to differentiate the role of climate change. A question arises: do we know how our fauna are responding to climate change?

The canary in the coal mine

“The bulk of species today are facing multiple global changes, be it climate change, deforestation, hunting or the spread of invasive species,” Umesh Srinivasan, an assistant professor at the Centre for Ecological Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, said.

Srinivasan and his team have been monitoring montane (of mountainous regions) bird populations in primary forests and selectively logged forests in the Himalayas in Arunachal Pradesh for eight years now. So far, “researchers have tried to understand the impact of climate change on a species or the impact of habitat loss on a species,” he said. “We are trying to understand the joint impacts of climate change and habitat degradation on species.”

As lower elevations become warmer, his team has observed birds shifting their range higher in search of cooler temperatures, and subsequently explored whether bird populations can remain viable depending on where they have moved: into primary forests, i.e. intact forests of native species, or into logged forests.

On average, the team found, logged forests were 2º C warmer than primary forests. The peak difference was as much as 6º C — reminiscent of the temperature during the Great Dying. “Hotter and drier conditions in logged forests resulted in shifts in the community composition of what these birds were eating. Birds lost body conditioning and survival rates of birds declined,” Srinivasan said.

A shifting range also meant changes in the composition of the avian community, resulting in dire consequences for the population. “Say a bird or insect or any species is in a symbiotic relationship with another species. If one of them moves up and the other can’t move up as fast, it will lead to a loss of interaction, which can cause the extinction of both species,” Srinivasan said.

Phenological shifts — whereby species change the timing of biological events such as breeding — is another way they respond to climate change. While such responses to the environment may seem adaptive in one sense, they can be forced to happen in suboptimal conditions, leading to mismatches between species involved in crucial species interactions.

“Birds that have synced their breeding times over evolutionary time to when the caterpillar biomass is the highest are now rearing chicks earlier or the caterpillar biomass is peaking earlier,” Srinivasan said.

Some bird species in the Himalayas have also responded to climate change by changing their forms, per Srinivasan. “We’re finding a lot of birds in logged forests are becoming smaller and have proportionately longer wings. We think one of the reasons why that is happening is that smaller individuals with larger appendages can lose heat better.”

“There is this evident intensification of the impacts of habitat loss and degradation due to climate change.”

Corals and dolphins sound the alarm

The marine and riverine realms are “probably worse hit” by climate change, according to Nachiket Kelkar, head of the Riverine Ecosystems and Livelihoods programme at the Wildlife Conservation Trust in Mumbai.

“From my experience in the Lakshadweep Islands, the reefs here were far better in diversity and resilience because there was very little fishing on the islands for a long time. [But they] have been badly hit in terms of mass mortality of corals due to bleaching,” Kelkar said.

Nearly 50% of live corals in the Lakshadweep Islands have been lost to bleaching — a process in which corals turn white due to the loss of zooxanthellae, a photosynthetic algae that lives inside their tissues — as a result of global warming. At the same time, species like the green turtle (Chelonia mydas) have benefited from the effects of climate change. The abundant growth of algae and seagrass during hot years has resulted in a population explosion of turtles around the world.

Kelkar and his team have been collecting data on dolphins in India’s rivers for 25 years. The data allows them to infer population trends as they correlate to the El Niño-Southern Oscillation — a climate pattern characterised by fluctuating ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific that influences weather patterns worldwide.

“We have seen that during El Nino droughts, there’s a lot more dolphin calf mortality. The reason could be the heat or lack of oxygen or depletion in fish stocks,” Kelkar said. “Whatever the case, we see a qualitatively agreeable correspondence between severe droughts and dolphin calf mortality.”

Connectivity, weather, disease

As the earth’s surface warms, range shifts among species are expected to become more common. However, they can happen only if species are able to move between areas with suitable habitats, rendering climate connectivity one of the more immediate conservation challenges for India, according to Srinivasan. Climate connectivity refers to connections between areas with suitable climates that a species can move and adapt to.

“Our protected areas are all fragments of varying sizes, separated by what conservation biologists call a hostile matrix — not suitable for biodiversity,” he said. “In the mountains, species need primary forests in higher elevations to move up. In the plains, we can predict species will move north as it gets warmer closer to the equator, for which again they will need corridors.”

Extreme weather poses another unique conservation challenge. For species with small populations and a limited geographical range, one extreme weather event could spell doom.

Girish Punjabi, a conservation biologist at the Wildlife Conservation Trust, cited the example of the greater one-horned rhinoceros (Rhinoceros unicornis), which has a limited geographical range, with Kaziranga National Park accounting for about 60% of its population. “It floods every year in Kaziranga during the monsoon. Imagine there is a megaflood and most of the park is underwater, including the Karbi Anglong Hills, where the animals move during every flooding season. What will happen then?” Punjabi asked.

“Many species can probably adapt to these gradual changes in temperature but they certainly can’t adapt to a severe weather event,” Srinivasan said.

A warming world also means parasite and disease proliferation. “We are 2,000 metres above sea level here in Arunachal Pradesh. Until three years back, there were no mosquitoes and we never saw [cases of] avian pox. But now we are seeing birds with avian pox lesions,” he added.

Likewise, frogs in India are currently suffering breakouts of fungal diseases similar to those linked to mass die-offs in South America, according to Kelkar. “There have been several reports of fungi on Indian frogs, similar to chytridiomycosis, a disease caused by the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis.”

Conserving a warmer world

“First and foremost, conservationists should document the impacts of climate vis-à-vis other impacts on the ecosystem,” Kelkar said. “I am involved in one such effort where we are pooling our long-term data sets to see whether the same signals can be seen in multiple species. Such efforts are the first step to understanding what exactly climate change is adding to the already large problems of ecosystem loss and species extinction.”

“Second, we need to build more social capital and generate awareness among the local community to protect ecosystems as they are. The third is to channel restoration funds and efforts in the right direction,” Kelkar added.

Punjabi concurred: there are fewer studies of climate change plus their effects on specific faunal species in India than in the West and in Africa and that we need to do more to understand how climate change affects animals. “We should at least look at future scenarios and understand how animal ranges might shift,” he said.

For Srinivasan, the only thing left to do is to build local resilience. “It’s difficult to envisage any conservation action that will be meaningful at the planetary scale. Where I do see hope is in places where things are decentralised and are not yet under the control of governments.”

“Increasingly, if you look at places that still have natural habitats left, those are places stewarded by Indigenous communities,” he said. “Indigenous stewardship is the only way for sustained local scale conservation action.”

Punjabi, however, expressed belief that change has to happen at multiple levels: “Climate change is a global phenomenon, not a local one. We need to phase out fossil fuels, and countries have to meet their targets under the Paris Agreement.”

While the kind of political beliefs and positions currently taking over climate action negotiations may fail to inspire confidence, Punjabi said there is also a growing realisation that the world needs a stable living environment if humans are to survive. “It is in our selfish interest to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. There are no easy or perfect solutions, but a whole bunch of imperfect attempts at solving this crisis may get us somewhere,” he said.

Kingdom animalia

A tipping point refers to a critical threshold in a climate system that — if and when it is exceeded — the system suffers irreversible consequences. The United National Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has identified several tipping points that many scientists believe are already underway or could be reached soon.

Srinivasan referred to the melting of the Antarctic ice sheets and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest as crucial natural thresholds that already risk being crossed.

If we do cross one of these climate tipping points, what will it mean for the world of animals? Will our wildlife protection laws hold up in that scenario?

India’s wild animals and habitats are accorded “comprehensive” protection under the Wildlife (Protection) Act 1972, according to Praveen Bhargav, a trustee at an advocacy organisation called Wildlife First and a former National Board for Wildlife member.

“Being a prohibitive law, no wild animal can be trapped, captured, poisoned or killed by any means. The Act also contains provisions to protect the habitat of wild animals by notifying them as Protected Areas where no destruction of habitat is permissible,” Bhargav said.

Following the 2023 amendments to the Act, “all wild animals are now specified in Schedules I and II, depending on their conservation status.” The punishment for offences against Schedule I species is higher than Schedule II species, with “3-7 years imprisonment” and a “fine”. Bhargav also noted that ‘upgrading’ a species from Schedule II to Schedule I is possible without amending the law itself.

At the same time, Bhargav also said that the growing scientific consensus on shifts in various species’ populations and life cycles driven by climate change underscores the need for stronger laws to protect contiguous habitats.

“Forest laws currently do not address the threat of fragmentation while diverting forests for development,” he said. “Instead, an unscientific approach of planting trees elsewhere forms the main mitigation approach. It is a major lacuna that needs addressing with appropriate amendments.”

Nikhil Sreekandan is an independent journalist.