Seize the initiative on climate change, Mr Modi

'This is the Indian government's duty not just to its own people but to its own notion of developing-world leadership', says the author

The sixth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is substantively darker than its fifth report, which was produced in 2014. The 2014 report led to the Paris accords on climate change, which were the first such actual agreement for decades — but were known even then to be fundamentally weak as compared to what was needed. The sixth report makes it clear that the consensus that climate change is caused by human activity is universal among climate scientists; that some irreversible and exponentially accumulative processes associated with climate change have already begun; and that action must be immediate if the world is not to warm more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.

This is unquestionably one of the most important pieces of news for every Indian over the past year. Ours is the country most at risk from global warming and associated weird weather patterns and events. Our lives, livelihoods and macro-economy are dependent upon a fragile weather 

system — the monsoon — that the IPCC reports is likely to be severely altered by global warming. A more intense, but patchy monsoon, with a later onset — such as we have seen sev­eral times over the past years — will ch­a­nge how farmers must operate. It will render current cropping timetables and crop choices irrelevant. It will make hilly areas prone to far more landslides, and will increase catastrophic flooding in the lower reaches of the Gangetic and Brahmaputra basins.

The report says that the Indian Ocean might warm more than other bodies of water, rendering life on the coasts far less comfortable. Further, a rising sea level will mean coastal erosion, threats to densely populated coastal regions, and increasing salinity that will reduce the availability of fresh water for settlements and render ever more fertile land uncultivable. India’s politics will also be increasingly disrupted by climate refugees of one kind or another. Many will be internal refugees, leading to regional tensions. Others will be from outside. Disputes between Indian states and with our neighbours over water will take on a fresh edge.

And then there is heat. Most of India, particularly the northern plains, is already a difficult place to live and work because of a long hot summer. This summer is due to get longer and hotter. The number of days with temperatures over 40 degrees Celsius will increase dramatically. A large number of people will still work outside, doing manual labour, under the scorching sun. An increase in the number of heat stress days will lead to public health crises.
 

Given the stakes for India, it is frankly disheartening to consider that our overall stance on climate change has not changed for a decade or more. It remains something between disgruntlement and indifference. Indifference because we still believe that we have bigger problems, and disgruntlement because we also believe — in this case correctly — that this is a problem that we did not cause ourselves. This combination has led us in the past to shoot ourselves in our own faces quite dramatically, especially at the Copenhagen conference in 2009 where we held up a global deal on climate largely to ensure that we were not seen as preferring the United States to the People’s Republic of China. (That turned out well for us, didn’t it?)

The Narendra Modi-led government is far more cooperative at the global level with urgent issues than those that preceded it, but its imagination seems to have run out in the recent past. It has returned to indifference — military and geo-strategic issues are more important — and to disgruntlement. Where is the $100 billion emerging economies were promised at Paris in 2015? Lost in this attitude is the fact that a $100 billion divided across emerging economies doesn’t really help us all that much, given that what we will need to build climate-proof infrastructure and climate-resilient communities can be measured in the trillions of dollars, not billions. Few have accused Mr Modi or his government of a lack of ambition, but that is precisely what is on display here. Bureaucratic wrangling over $100 billion in the run-up to a summit — COP26 at Glasgow later this year — which has the potential to shift trillions of dollars in investment betrays precisely the sort of pettiness that this government claims it has eschewed in international affairs.

The fact is that others have created this problem, but others will not solve it for us. That is unfair, but international relations notoriously give short shrift to fairness. India needs to move forward on climate change to secure Indians’ futures; that means putting aside talking points that have outlived their usefulness, and thinking at the scale that can actually make a difference. India needs to emerge from COP26 with a deal that the prime minister can credibly claim will, over the next decade, mobilise trillions of dollars in climate-oriented private finance towards the emerging world, including India. This is the Indian government’s duty not just to its own people but to its own notion of developing-world leadership.