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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

Warming signals -Navroz K Dubash
-The Indian Express

Attitudes toward climate change in India can appear paradoxical. Although India is one of the countries most deeply vulnerable to climate impacts, climate change does not rank high on policymakers' list of concerns. Two factors explain this inattention. First, India has pressing and immediate development concerns, such as providing sanitation, improved healthcare and access to affordable energy to its population, while the effects of climate change appear abstract and distant. Second, there is a fear that India will be pressured to undertake costly actions to limit greenhouse gas emissions, which would stifle growth and efforts at poverty eradication. For these reasons, the predominant attitudes towards climate change range from polite disengagement to wariness. A new synthesis report from the UN-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides messages that challenge these perceptions and the basis for a more productive politics of climate change in India.

In discharging its core function of updating scientific understanding, the report states more forcefully than ever before that the problem simply cannot be ignored. Warming of the climate system, it says, is "unequivocal". The last 30 years were likely the warmest 30-year period in 1,400 years, and this warming is probably largely due to higher greenhouse gas emissions. The Earth's physical system is already registering impacts such as a 26 per cent increase in ocean acidity and a shrinking of the arctic ice sheet at the rate of over 3.5 per cent a decade. Future impacts include likely increases in water stress, reduced crop yields, species extinctions and damage to coastal areas from sea-level rise.

These are the sharpest and starkest warnings the IPCC has yet provided, although they are consistent with past reports. The real novelty of this report and its potential for a new politics lies in its discussion of what can be done about climate change

First, the report lays out a two-way relationship between sustainable development and climate change. Sustainable development provides "a basis for assessing" climate policies, which, therefore, cannot undermine sustainable development itself. At the same time, "limiting the effects of climate change is necessary to achieve sustainable development". For developing countries, the message is particularly dire: "climate change impacts are projected to slow down economic growth, make poverty reduction more difficult, further erode food security, and prolong existing and create new poverty traps." In other words, if sustainable development is the overriding national objective, as it is in India, climate change cannot be ignored.

Second, adaptation to the effects of climate change (as opposed to mitigation or trying to reduce emissions and therefore future impacts) is necessary and can reduce climate risks. This is consistent with the recent Indian government policy of emphasising adaptation at both domestic and global levels. But there are two important caveats. Restricting adaptation to "incremental change to systems, without considering transformational change, may increase costs and losses, and miss opportunities". So far, state action plans on climate change are squarely incremental. In addition, there are limits to adaptation. Global mitigation is also needed to reduce the severity of climate impacts. In other words, we may be able to manage the effects of a two-degrees-warmer world, but we are unlikely to manage a four-degrees-warmer world. India needs more creative and transformational adaptation approaches at home and a modified global stance that throws its weight behind enhanced global mitigation action, in addition to support for adaptation

Third, though time is running out to deliver on adequate mitigation, the report provides important ways for India to productively engage with this problem. The report highlights policies that attempt to integrate multiple objectives, such as energy security, air pollution reduction and improved energy access as well as local environmental quality, with reduction of greenhouse gases. In many cases, there are strong complementarities, or "co-benefits" across objectives, although they are hard to design and quantify. Mitigation approaches need not undercut development. They can accelerate sustainable development efforts. India should build on this approach when it designs its national pledge to the international community in mid-2015, spelling out how it will operationalise the co-benefits approach in the existing National Action Plan.

The IPCC also provides India with an argument against unreasonable expectations from the global community. It includes a section on ethics for the first time, in which it emphasises the importance of "equity, justice and fairness". Based on this, India could argue for strong mitigation action from developed countries and for equity considerations, along with environmental effectiveness, to be part of the benchmarks against which national pledges of action should be judged during international negotiations.

The IPCC suggests both that climate change is a real, and not abstract, threat to India's development, and that there are significant energy options that would allow India to develop and yet contribute significantly to global mitigation. These insights pave the way for India to enhance efforts at climate-resilient development at home. We could leverage them to become a global champion of effective climate action

The writer is senior fellow at the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi, and a member of the core writing team for the ‘IPCC Fifth Assessment Synthesis Report'