Climate and our lives

Our lives depend on the climate. You can see it in our festivals, many linked to seasons and farming: Bihu, Makar Sankranti, Pongal, Onam, Baisakhi, Lohri, Gudi Padwa, Chhath Puja, Hemis, Losoong, the Awe winter festival. Harvests, new years, rivers: each marks a turn of the farming year.

Climate also drives the economy. A monsoon failure means poor rain in the monsoon. Follow what it sets off:

• farming suffers
• people, usually women, walk long distances to find water
• farm workers move to cities looking for work
• food (grain, vegetables, fruit) gets costlier, fuelling inflation (prices rising in general)

So a failed rain in one village is felt even by city people who never saw the field.

Factories depend on the weather too: they need water, and they need to know when they can move goods.

All over the world, climate and people's living conditions are closely linked, and things get much harder when a climate disaster strikes. That's next.