For several years, one was always under the impression that climate change was a thing of the future, something that the next generations would face, perhaps in the next century, by which time we would all be safely dead! The monsoons always hit with regularity around June 5, give or take a day or two. The monsoon followed a dairy animal’s lactation curve. It began slowly, then maximized during July, then began tapering in August before it concluded in September. April always had showers. Little did any of us realize – though people, especially scientists, in the last decade kept telling us so – that climate change would begin now and that the present generation – mainly responsible for this spectacular crisis – would itself have to suffer climate change repercussions. In our Indian idiom, karma is to be suffered in future lives. But in climate change karma, we discover we have to suffer consequences originating in our ill deeds now.

Rising sea levels, erratic weather patterns, and increased temperatures are no longer impending threats – they’re present-day challenges that cast a worrying shadow across Goa’s environmental health, and over those who live within the state’s boundaries, underscoring the global nature of the crisis. In 2022, we had showers almost every month. This year (2023), temperatures exceeded those of previous years, and there were no April showers. The melting of the polar caps was ensuring that within a period of two decades, 20% of Tiswadi taluka, for example, would be subject to invasion by the sea. We have already commenced suffering extreme heat and erratic rain, both playing havoc with our power delivery system which in turn not only leads to oppressive conditions, but hits the economy has well. The coming generation is going to face drowning of significant parts of the landmass. Till now, not a single political leader of the state has adverted to the climate change crisis unceremoniously dumped on our heads.

A significant contributor to the crisis is an archaic mindset, embedded in an outdated education system that prioritizes and celebrates efforts to accumulate personal and individual economic gains over environmental well-being as “success in life”. This perspective, prevalent worldwide, encourages the exploitation, rape and processing of natural resources without considering long-term ecological consequences. Such a mentality, even if it has affected most educated brains, has no serious possibility of long term survival. We must concede that it is, in fact, an obstacle to survival. The problem is how do we get rid of it?

We may be able to do some things to mitigate climate change suffering because we are responsible for the functioning of micro-climates, and if these are not damaged beyond a point, harsher effects could be mitigated. But there are other things we cannot do anything about simply because Goa is too small, being part of a huge global system over which it has simply no control. For example, if Karnataka diverts the waters of the Madei, we are helpless. If India wants to continue with its policy of basing the expansion of its industrial output on the burning of fossil fuels, especially coal, we are helpless. We are a small dot in the land mass of the sub-continent, less than 1%.

For years, for decades, Goa was never in such a difficult and despairing condition. In the beautiful tapestry of the world’s ecosystems, Goa formed a captivating panel which has brought millions to visit. But now we must acknowledge that this vibrant tableau is under serious threat, mirroring the global crisis. The scale at which climate change is happening is difficult to grapple with. What makes things worse is that politicians are refusing to listen to science, to the large number of reports from bodies set up by the United Nations community which indicate that most ecosystems at the global level are moving to the stage of irreversible degradation. Goa’s ecosystems cannot be an exception, when the development model is still the same as elsewhere. The point of having a history and reading it (I am referring to Goa’s history) is to give oneself the opportunity to discover that things could be done differently. Goa thrived because it did things differently. Now no longer.

Understanding Goa’s Unique Environment Model

Goa is not just a postcard destination; it’s a repository of rich biodiversity, resplendent landscapes, and diverse ecosystems. Centuries of careful stewardship by our Goan ancestors have preserved these natural treasures of hills, plateaus (sadas), fields, lowlands (khazans), beaches with their sand dunes and mangroves. Without a Town and Country Planning Department for over 500 years, villagers supposedly uneducated and without university degrees, assembled a sophisticated way of life that could be sustained in perpetuity. Its comunidade system was a complex mechanism of productively managing common village resources, with an admirable sharing of dividends to all. No one constructed a house or building on the sand dunes, or in the fields or khazans or on the sides of hill slopes.

It is this awesome exercise in green building and green infrastructure that gave Goa its priceless brand image discovered in the mid-eighties by mass tourism. The Goans saw Goa as home. Those who came to visit saw it as cash. People who had done nothing to create the idea and the place called Goa and its maddening biodiversity and intelligently planned village environments, became the first to seize the opportunities to convert this brand image into money. The Ministries of Environment collected money to sanction “environment clearances” for activities that only damaged the environment. So from industrialists to real estate carpetbaggers, even while unsuspecting Goans looked on, the siege was only about getting a piece of the pie. Rich folk entering a cake shop and throwing their notes to acquire slices of the most attractive looking cakes. The businessmen, assisted by the Goa Investment Promotion Board, took the plateaus and village commons. The rest estate lobby took the rest, or what the mining sector had not already butchered. The elaborate architecture of living created slowly and patiently over centuries was sought to be dismantled, without a thought, though many complained, some vociferously.

It is only after the Town and Country Planning Department was created in the early seventies, that we found houses approved for construction in fields, within 500 metres of the high tide line on the coast, on hill slopes, in khazans, on khazan embankments. We thought we were now dealing with educated folk. But these were educated and degreed folk without any cultural roots, insensitive to local topographies, earlier histories and building wisdom, and, we found to our utmost horror, mostly corrupt. The damages done by mining were mostly restricted to the interior areas. The destruction caused by the so-called planners of the TCP Department touched every nook and corner of the state.

Thus, the past decades of development have done little but disrupt the careful equilibrium, this balance, the environmental stability of generations installed over 500 years. Now we pay the price. Panjim city in 2023 is a classic instance of the stupidity of those in charge. A massive duplication of the infrastructure is carried out without knowing about or doing a survey of the existing functional systems in place. Graveyards look more ordered, so the only comparison to Panjim today is with a war zone. No person or authority is able to provide even a justification or plans or design for the massive excavation and uprooting of the city. All this is done under the aegis of “smart cities”. Nowadays, after beholding the rubbishing of what Swami Vivekanand called “a cute city”, we can recognize that in the modern world, “smart” often must mean “dumb.” But the suffering by the community is no less intense.

But what happened to Panjim in 2022-23 is a microcosm of the havoc caused by the development model to the rest of the state from the 1960s. The state of Goa, its planners, its “authorities” operated confidently under the fatal assumption that the old must be replaced, nature was too slow, and that small was not necessary any longer required since big was better. In the midst of villages, they promoted and sanctioned huge projects that simply disregarded the village environments, and the natural endowments on which the villages had created their lifestyles. They sought to impose a land revenue code when there was already existing a code of comunidades. Every project they sanctioned was ultimately predatory and unsustainable. Increasing parts of villages and their commons were simply taken away and given to others. Worse, the developments created severe imbalances in population, migrants and settled folk, from which we are yet to recover.

In the Arab world, we have the state of Palestine under siege from the militarized government of the state of Israel. If we look at that conflict carefully, we may be able to see the present takeover of Goa’s natural assets by persons influential beyond limits from Delhi and Mumbai and other finance centres in terms of a similar state of siege. Goa is actually today getting to be almost daily an illustration of a place under occupation. The original inhabitants, those who created the majesty of Goa, are not similar to the Palestinians. Every new development effort is an effort to corner their resources, from IITs to airports, to golf courses and gated communities. All the plateaus have already been invaded and sequestered.

It is this “development” which everywhere first dismantles the elaborate green infrastructure and topographies erected over centuries that also exposes the largely innocent people of the state to the suffering associated with climate change. That is also the reason for the large-scale resistance from the ground to most of these projects brought into the state by its politicians. The resistance has never been to a single illegal building or a small factory located in one village. People have resisted and fought poorly devised coastal zone management plans, bad Outline Development Plans, insensitive large projects, destruction of hills and land filling. Their focus has always been the absolute protection required for Goa’s ecological assets. Everyone can reel off the list: khazans, fields, sacred groves, sand dunes, rivers, creeks, embankments, mangroves, plateaus, forests and wildlife sanctuaries, and finally the western ghats. It is these assets that were treated as “no-go” areas by people with better sense than us and for a period exceeding 5 centuries. We have found no reason to squander these riches simply to enable a factory to be set up, or a gated community with its high secured walls, with its sewage let outside. Every one of these assets is an important component of the bulwark or armoury that is needed to meet the challenges arising out of climate change. No discussion of the impact of climate change in Goa can take place in the absence of a complete record of the health of these assets. Any threat to their continued existence has to be repelled. Of that there is little doubt.

The majority of Goans have therefore arrived at a cross-roads, where they must make a conscious choice, as individuals, as village communities, as a state as a whole. Do we lend our support to the continuing degeneration of the state under the promise of a development which we have seen unfolding across it in the form of millions of tonnes of concrete dumped over the past two decades, or do we thunderously say, No! It is easy to go along with the things as they are. It is even more difficult to call a halt and say, “Let’s reconsider what we are doing.” Climate change is unforgiving. But so will our children and future generations be, when they discover how we sacrificed the riches of Goa to the cancer of real estate, mining and development.

Ends