South Asia may be too hot to live in by 2100 due to climate change: scientists

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Indian vendors who sell sunshades for car windows rest by a roadside on a hot summer afternoon in Jammu, India. A new study suggests wide swaths of northern India, southern Pakistan and parts of Bangladesh may become so hot and humid by the end of the century it will be deadly just being outdoors. Photo: AP

Published: 2:45am, 3 Aug 2017Updated: 2:45am, 3 Aug 2017

Climate change could make much of South Asia, home to a fifth of the world’s population, too hot for human survival by the end of this century, scientists warned on Wednesday.

If climate change continues at its current pace, deadly heatwaves beginning in the next few decades will strike parts of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, according to a study based on computer simulations by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Key agricultural areas in the Indus and Ganges river basins will be particularly hard-hit, reducing crop yields and increasing hunger in some of the world’s most densely populated regions, researchers said.

An Indian man cools himself under a public fountain on a hot afternoon in New Delhi, India. A new study suggests wide swaths of northern India, southern Pakistan and parts of Bangladesh may become too hot to live in by the end of 2100 due to climate change. Photo: AP

“Climate change is not an abstract concept, it is impacting huge numbers of vulnerable people,” MIT professor Elfatih Eltahir told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“Business as usual runs the risk of having extremely lethal heat waves.”

The areas likely to be worst affected in northern India, southern Pakistan and Bangladesh are home to 1.5 billion people, said Eltahir, the study’s co-author.