Socio Economic Impact Of Climate Change

3. Socio- economic Impacts of Environmental Change

3.1. Introduction

Soviet Central Asia remained one of the poorest regions of the USSR until the break- up of the union. These republics lagged behind the others in all social and economic indicators. The shortcomings of the Soviet policy of rapid economic integration were visible by the 1970s and a number of problems including environmental problems were assuming critical proportions (Patnaik, 1995). The situations became worst after the disintegration of Soviet Union in 1991 due to the lack of managements and resources. Central Asia is faced with a range of serious environmental challenges, where climate change and climate variability will add to the current problem complex. Climate variability is not a new phenomenon in Central Asia but climate change will add to existing and recurrent economic, social and ecological stresses, risks and uncertainties. With climate change follows environmental change which is manifested in changing resource abundance or scarcities of natural resources and ecosystem services (Nilsson and Ingevall, May 2009). Key environmental challenges include climate change and climate variability, radioactive emissions, widespread pollution, desertification, loss or degradation of ecosystem, salinization, floods, droughts and large-scale natural resource depletion of land, water, forests, minerals and energy resources. Climate change adds to existing economic, social and environmental challenges. Central Asia’s environmental problems are not isolated phenomena but are linked in multiple ways with other development themes across the region. Attaining development objectives such as sustained and pro-poor growth, public health, broad-based employment, devolution a...

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...creased rainfall and increased temperature in the western part of Central Asia such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan leading to the scarcity of water which directly heats the agriculture and livestock production. The estimating consequences from the precipitation and temperature change on the production of food are the potential changes in variability and extreme events like droughts, heat waves, sand storms and heavy rainfall. Increased surface runoff in the mountainous regions accelerates the land slides, soil erosion and floods which have huge capability to destroy the crops.

The rise in Central Asia’s food insecurity is an indirect result of a poor macroeconomic environment (Rhoe et al., 2008). All the five countries of Central Asia are still in the process of transforming agriculture into the past soviet context of market oriented production.