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FATEHGARH-SAHIB, India — When unseasonably heavy rains flooded fields and then equally unseasonal heat crumpled the seeds, it not only nearly halved Ranjit Singh’s wheat harvest.

This has placed him and nearly all the other households in his village in northern India much more unstable in a country where the majority of people earn their living from farms. Like many Indians, Mr. Singh is a saddle. with big debt and he wonders how he’s going to pay for it as a warming world makes farming even more unstable.

For India and other South Asian countries, home to hundreds of millions of humanity’s most vulnerable people, a seemingly bottomless pit of poverty, food security, healthcare, governance has only deepened as the region cooks at the forefront of climate change.

Global warming is no longer such a remote possibility that officials with short electoral powers can choose to stay away. Increased volatility in weather patterns means a greater risk of catastrophe and serious economic damage for countries already struggling to boost growth and development and outpace the pandemic’s destruction of lives and livelihoods.

in Pakistan, grappling with an economic crisis and a political collapseA cholera epidemic in the southwest has confused local government as it tries to put out massive wildfires.

in Bangladesh, flood before monsoons It has left millions stranded, complicating long-standing efforts to improve the country’s response to chronic flooding. In Nepal, authorities are trying to dry up glacial lakes that are about to explode before washing out Himalayan villages facing a new phenomenon: too much rain, too little drinking water.

And in India, the region’s largest grain supplier, which supplies hundreds of millions of its own citizens, the declining wheat harvest has resurfaced long-standing concerns about food security and the government’s ambitions to feed the world.

South Asia was always hot, monsoons always soaking wet. And it’s not alone in tackling new weather patterns. But this region, which has nearly a quarter of the world’s population, is experiencing so much climate change, from untimely heavy rains and floods to scorching temperatures and prolonged heat waves, that they are increasingly becoming the norm, not the exception.

“We used to wear jackets in March,” said Mr. Singh, a farmer in Punjab in northern India. “This year, we’ve been using the fans since the first day of March.”

That March was the hottest month on record in India and Pakistan in 122 years, with precipitation 60 to 70 percent below normal. scientists say. The temperature came earlier than usual this year and temperatures remained high – 49 degrees Celsius, roughly 120 degrees Fahrenheit, in New Delhi in May.

Krishna AchutaRao, a climate researcher at the Indian Institute of Technology, estimates that such a heatwave is 30 times more likely than before the industrial age. If the globe were to rise 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures from the current 1.2 degrees, such extreme patterns would become much more frequent, he said – perhaps every 50 years or even every fifth.

According to preliminary information, the yield of India’s national wheat harvest has dropped by at least 3.5 percent this year due to extreme weather conditions. In Punjab, traditionally India’s wheat basket, the decline was around 15 percent, with some districts seeing a drop of up to 30 percent.

In the Fatehgarh-Sahib district of Punjab, farmers like Mr. Singh faced a double calamity, among those worst affected. Heavy rains came earlier and lasted longer than usual, flooding the fields. Those who managed to drain the water hoped that the worst was over. But in March, a heat wave came.

As its intensity became clear, the Indian government abruptly reversed its decision to expand its wheat exports as global supply had already shrunk due to the war in Ukraine. Officials addressed rising international prices and the challenges of food security within the country.

Malancha Chakrabarty, a researcher on climate change and development at the Observer Research Foundation in New Delhi, said India is “extremely vulnerable” to food security threats, not only because of reductions in production but also because a large part of the population cannot afford it. food as prices rise.

Dr. “We’re looking at a huge population that is on the verge of being extremely poor,” Chakrabarty said. He said that despite significant progress in reducing extreme poverty, many people simply survive and “cannot get shocked”.

Damage to the wheat crop has caused yet another jolt to India’s underperforming agricultural sector. In many places, traditional crops are particularly vulnerable to groundwater depletion and irregular monsoons. Farmers and government disagree How far can one go in opening agricultural markets?. In debt, farmers are committing suicide in increasing numbers.

The agricultural crisis has pushed many into the cities to seek other jobs. But India’s largely top-focused economic growth, not expanding employment opportunities. And much of the urban work is outdoor work, which this year’s extreme heat has made dangerous.

For those still on farms, global warming is changing the nature of what they put into the land.

Agronomists once focused on developing high-yielding varieties to meet India’s food needs in the wake of devastating famines. The priority for the last few decades has been to improve the heat resistance of crops. In laboratories, seeds are tested at temperatures five degrees Celsius above those outside.

“It’s a dilemma,” said Ratan Tiwari, who heads the biotechnology program at the Indian Wheat and Barley Research Institute in Karnal. “Unless we’re very sure the temperature will be there, and we certainly won’t give a heat tolerant variety, but that’s not the highest yield.”

The institute’s scientists have helped develop nearly 500 varieties of wheat germ over the past few decades. What gives hope to Mr. Tiwari and other scientists is the increased tolerance of heat to the cultivars in general.

“Gradually, genes are accumulating in the appropriate directions,” he said.

While the decline in wheat harvest affects India most directly, the shocks from climate change do not stop at international borders.

Bangladesh and Nepal are dependent on India for wheat imports. Rising tides are wreaking havoc in Bangladesh, as well as in neighboring Indian regions of Assam and West Bengal. Nepalese authorities are forced to try to do so when water from heavy rains strikes lightning from the Himalayas. bring back endangered rhinos These were swept into India.

The flooding problem in Bangladesh is not new. Hundreds of rivers cut through the country of 170 million people, while rising waters displace hundreds of thousands of people each year.

Authorities have gotten better at saving lives with quick evacuations. But they have trouble predicting the timing of the flood due to the irregular monsoon patterns.

Rayhan Uddin, 35, from the Zakiganj district of Sylhet, Bangladesh, owns a tree nursery, farms and about 6.5 acres of paddy. His home, paddy fields and ten-year nursery business have been destroyed twice since 2017.

“I’ll have to start over in the nursery,” she said. “The same thing happened five years ago.”

Nepal, where a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line, is perhaps the clearest example of how extreme weather conditions, such as floods and water shortages on the one hand, and escalating forest fires on the other, turn life upside down.

Villagers in the Himalayas, accustomed to snowfall, are now receiving more heavy rainfall, a phenomenon that has forced many to migrate. Drinking water is also a major problem, as springs dry up with less snowmelt.

Nepal’s ministry of agriculture estimates that around 30 percent of arable land is no longer used, mostly in hilly areas. Across the country, wildfires have increased almost tenfold over the past two decades.

Downstream, agriculture is becoming increasingly uncertain and risky: Rice production has dropped nearly 10 percent last year, with tens of thousands of acres damaged by floods that killed large numbers of people.

The continued melting of snow due to rising temperatures has increased the number of glacial lakes by hundreds, and about 20 of them were determined to be prone to eruption.

In 2016, the Nepal Army drained Lake Imja near Mount Everest to reduce the risk to downstream populations. Authorities are trying to raise money for the immediate evacuation of four more lakes.

In Pakistan’s bustling Balochistan region, evidence of an unusual spring has been clear for weeks: In several counties the skies have turned bright orange as a fierce sandstorm swept the area. Forest fires at the state line burned for weeks, destroying an estimated two million pine and olive trees.

On top of the fires came the plague. Panic gripped the mountain town of Pir Koh after large numbers of people, most of them children, experienced diarrhea, vomiting and leg cramps. At the end of April, authorities declared a cholera epidemic, which health officials said could be linked to rising temperatures. More than two dozen people died.

Disease outbreaks, floods and harvest disasters make headlines, while activists and experts warn of the cost of more persistent, routine threats.

“This is daily climate change at work: a slow-onset change in environmental conditions that is destroying lives and livelihoods before our eyes,” he said. a report summarizing how tens of thousands of Bangladeshis lose their homes and crops to river erosion each year.

Bhadra Sharma contributed reporting from Kathmandu, Nepal, Seyf Hasnat from Dhaka, Bangladesh Zia ur Rahman Suhasini Raj from Karachi, Pakistan and New Delhi.