On climate change’s front lines, hard lives grow even harder

WORLD

On climate change’s front lines, hard lives grow even harder

Hifjur Rehman, a third-generation farmer, collapses in a paddy field destroyed by floods in Dima Hasao, India, on June 2. Hundreds of millions of humanity's most vulnerable live in South Asia, where rising temperatures make it more difficult to address poverty, food security and health challenges. | ATUL LOKE / THE NEW YORK TIMES

By Hari Kumar and Mujib Mashal
The New York Times

Jun 15, 2022

FATEHGARH-SAHIB, India – When the unseasonably heavy rains flooded the fields, and then the equally unseasonable heat shriveled the seeds, it did not just slash Ranjit Singh’s wheat harvest by nearly half.

It put him, and nearly all the other households in his village in northern India, that much further from financial stability in a country where a majority of people scratch out a living on farms. Like many Indian farmers, Singh is saddled with enormous debt and wondering how he will repay it, as a warming world makes farming ever more precarious.

For India and other South Asian nations, home to hundreds of millions of humanity’s most vulnerable, a seemingly bottomless well of challenges — poverty, food security, health, governance — has only deepened as the region bakes on the front lines of climate change.