Climate change: Cost and effect

India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development

Author: Navroz K Dubash (ed)

Publisher:Oxford University Press

Price: Rs 1,846

Pages: 576

Spread over 25 chapters and 576 pages, including detailed references and a nicely done index, this is clearly a unique volume on India’s flirtations with climate change and among the most important on environment policy in India.  

For this reviewer climate change and global warming are evident realities that are quickly gathering momentum, and it is also apparent that India is not ready to address the issue either as an active participant in global fora or in domestic policy.  Why that is the case, the scale of the problem, the institutional logjams, the lack of ideas or resources, and the possibilities ahead, are all addressed in varying degrees of depth by the authors.  

The authors’ list reads like a Who’s Who of those involved in this domain.  They have either been in the thick of things as negotiators (Shyam Saran), as evangelists working with the government in international arena (Sunita Narain) as investors (Mukund Rajan) as labour union leaders (Ashim Roy), as advocates in the Supreme Court (Shibani Ghosh), sociologists, international consultants, and academics hailing from technology, science, economics, sociology. All told, there are 36 authors and co-authors each bringing a different perspective.

Why this volume works very well is not only the multi-disciplinary take on the issue of climate change, but also the focus on getting to the details.  Thankfully, the authors stay away from simply identifying the problem and go further into identifying the solutions or at the very least the various strands that make up the problem.  Mr Saran’s essay, for instance, on the events that led to the Copenhagen agreement reveals more about the inherent flaw of global negotiations and international agreements than most detailed analyses of such agreements.  Navroze Dubash’s introductory chapter clinically describes the various issues, not taking either a pessimistic or an optimistic stand, but simply describing where the national debate stands, its strengths and its flaws. 

But Mr Dubash’s focus on institutions comes through strongly, and each essay while outlining the issue it seeks to address looks at the underlying institutional issue as well. His co-authored essay with Ms Ghosh, for instance, focuses only on policy and institutions and gets into the details including a count of the number of senior- and middle-level officers and consultants working on climate change (numbering barely 80-odd across nine central ministries).  But that is not all — his larger message is fairly unambiguous as well, the following quote being from his introductory note.  “As climate actions are not always costly to development actions but sometimes complementary, a possible path forward exists for India to engage with both climate and development productively.”

Of course, there is much in the specific chapters that left me dissatisfied but that is not important; what is more important is that the authors do attempt to go into the details that are available but don’t shy away from mentioning those where more is not known. Consider, for instance, the second essay penned by J Srinivasan describes the “Impact of Climate Change on India”.  The author painstakingly sifts through available literature and describes the received wisdom on air-quality, glaciers, sea-level, aggregate temperatures, rainfall and how they are changing.  The sparseness of credible studies on regional impacts within India did, however, act as a dampener for this reviewer.  As did a mere mention that particulate matter has a direct bearing on cloud cover, without going further into how north India’s endemic winter haze might be affecting weather patterns.

This reviewer was surprised at the large number of essays oriented at international agreements (10 in all).  While fewer review-type essays could have been better, the essays both individually and as a group reveal the larger problem with which policymakers globally are perpetually grappling.  As soon as humanity creates a common target (warming limited to 2-degree Celsius, for instance), every participant in the global arena will seek to achieve this by minimising their costs.  While the ostensible group objective is the specific target, the effective objective of each individual country is minimising cost.  As long as we attempt a common target each member of the community would only work on minimising costs rather than maximising effect, and the group objective can rather perversely never be met.  The solution for the next global order (current one having failed) therefore is not having a common target at all, but rather rewards based on changes achieved.

To sum up, this is an important volume and needs to be read widely.  Not only should it be a compulsory reading for all who work on the environment, but also students and laypersons who are interested in understanding the inner mechanics of India’s environment challenge.