Advances in Agriculture and Environmental Science: Open Access Submit your Article | www.ologypress.com/submit-article Ology Press Citation: Bhandari MP.The climate change induced problems in South Asia, a case study of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan. Adv Agr Environ Sci. (2018);1(1): 52-54. DOI: 10.30881/aaeoa.00009 Introduction Recognizing the severity of the impact of global climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1 drew attention to the issue of vulnerability, which it defned as “the degree to which a system is susceptible to, and unable to cope with, adverse effects of climate change, including the variability and extremes…[it] is a function of the character, magnitude and rate of climate change variation to which a system is exposed, its sensitivity and its adaptive capacity”. 2 I argue, however, that this defnition needs to be expanded if we truly are to grasp what it means to be vulnerable to climate change induced effects. The defnition must account not only for physical risks and resiliency, but for the capacity of societies to mitigate those risks and respond to climate change induced crises. The need for such an expansive understanding of vulnerability is clear when we consider that discussion of climate change issues in the media and policy forums of developed nations—especially the United States and European Union—tends to focus on the potential impacts on the economies of these nations in the future. Climate change, however, already is having devastating effects on developing nations—effects that, despite being quantifed; receive virtually no attention in the Western world. The impact of climate change and physical vulnerability to its effects has been well documented globally; in particular it is intense in the lower Himalayan developing world such as Nepal and Northern India, the effects of which translate directly to the ecosystems of the lowland and coastal islands, as in Bangladesh. 1,3 Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan already face severe problems due to rapid climate change, but these problems are utterly exacerbated by the fact that these nations are unprepared to mitigate them because of societal factors such as population growth and poverty. Keywords climate change, vulnerability, human development, developing nations, poverty Background CIA 4 estimates show that population growth in all four of these countries signifcantly exceeds the global average. For example, Nepal’s population is growing at the rate of 1.596 percent, followed by Pakistan 1.573; Bangladesh 1.566 and India 1.344 percent, while the global growth rate is 1.1% and the rate in much of the developed world is either stable or negative. 5 Further, we fnd that poverty in these four countries, as measured by the Human Development Index (HDI) and Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) is extensive (as shown in the table 1 below). Review The climate change induced problems in South Asia, a case study of Bangladesh, India, Nepal, and Pakistan Medani P Bhandari Department of Natural Resource & Environment / Sustainability Studies, Akamai University, USA Correspondence: Medani P Bhandari, PhD is Professor at the Department of Natural Resource & Environment/Sustainability Studies, Akamai University, Hawaii, USA, Tel 240-505-1469, Email medani.bhandari@gmail.com, mbhandar@syr.edu Received: February 04, 2018 | Published: April 09, 2018 Copyright© 2018 Bhandari. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Table 1A brief comparative account of four countries (including HDI and MPI Rand and Index) Country Land surface in 000 Sq. Km) Population in million Population Density (per Sq.km.) 2010 HDI Rank HDI Index MPI Rank MPI Index PPP GNI/ capita (US$) 2010 GNI/capita (US$) 2010 Annual growth GDP (%) 2010 Bangladesh 144 160 1157.83 129 0.469 72 0.29 1550 580 6.2 India 3287 1181.4 350.61 119 0.519 73 0.3 3280 1,220 7.3 Nepal 147 28.9 202.06 138 0.428 81 0.35 1180 440 5.3 Pakistan 796 184 206.9 125 0.49 69 0.28 2680 1,000 2 Data Source: Environmental Performance Index (EPI) 2010; World Bank 2011; UNDP 2010: 223-224; Alkire and Santos (2010) (from Multidimensional Poverty Index: 2010 Data) and OPHI 2010; CIA 2010 (Note: Human Development Index (HDI) in 0-1 scale; Multidimensional Poverty Index (MPI) in 0-1 scale).