If climate were to be a line, weather would be a dot in it. To most of us, climate change is all about global warming and its impact. The understanding is not wrong but is not comprehensive. Because, in real terms, when we refer to climate we refer to the long-term trend of weather. And weather is not about just cutting down of tree and carbon emission. It is all about temperature, rains, draught, sunshine or the lack of it, cloud cover and all that. Carbon emission is just part of the havoc being wrought on our own habitat, that is Earth.

When we refer to disaster in the context of climate change we, therefore, need to refer to a very wide gamut of risks like thoughtless creation of dams or ground water lifting for agriculture along with the one resulting from carbon emission.

The dams were thought of as a way of protecting agriculture from the vagaries of rains and ensuring an increased productivity of land. Add to that pesticides and chemical fertilisers and you have today’s one cause of breaching bio-diversity and increased salinity downstream of dams. Not only that, it has had its impact on the ground water recharge as well.

Chemical fertilisers and pesticides created havoc with every living organism. It killed beneficial insects, birds and impacted gene structure of living organisms in the ecological chain. Dams took away the strength of current in the river water leading to choking of streams through siltation. When the water surged, river beds couldn’t accommodate the increased volume of water, leading to floods that were not ordained by Nature.

We lifted water from the underground that are all connected through layers of porous earth. They couldn’t find their natural replenishment from water reservoirs on the surface at the same rate we were lifting water for agriculture. It affected the forest. In addition to our hunger for trees to create new habitats or furniture, we also contributed to depletion of natural resources that directly or indirectly are the conditions of our life.

This is the way we raised water salinity threatening our life support reservoir of sweet water. We contributed to raising the carbon footprint by increased use of everything that is a carbon contributor creating risks of disaster like global warming, rising of sea level, unpredictable rain cycles, tsunamis at a regular frequency wiping off habitations, earthquakes and of course polar melting. All of these are wrecking havocs and raising the risks of greater disaster. That’s why when we talk about climate risk, we are also talking about disaster risk. We are doing so because the Earth can live without us, but we cannot live without the Nature that gave us our birth. And that is the risk we are talking about when we are talking about climate.