OPINION: India is on the front lines of the climate crisis. So why isn’t it an election issue?

Editor’s note: Aditya Valyasan Pillai Fellow and Adaptation and Resilience Coordinator. Collaboration for a sustainable future, an independent climate change research institute based in New Delhi. The views expressed in this commentary are his own.read more CNN Opinion.

New Delhi
CNN
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It is difficult for a country as large as India to truly understand how difficult and unforgiving a challenge climate change is. One way is to use a drone. very Equipped with a large battery pack, it flies from end to end.

We will depart from the southern part of Bangalore, India’s Silicon Valley, in the fall of 2022. It will fly very slowly north, reaching the Himalayas just before the national elections that begin this week.

You will witness constant turmoil in the country.

As soon as you take off, you’ll see the swanky homes and glittering towers of Bangalore’s new tech and elite companies submerged in the September 2022 monsoon rains. A few months further north, he arrived in March 2023, when record fires ravaged Karnataka’s forests and smoke obscured visibility for several days.

Then, in the early summer of April 2023, they headed to the sweltering, humid metropolis of Mumbai, where more than a dozen people, mostly women, were found dead from heat exposure at a large gathering. Then, in July, the entire area of ​​Delhi was submerged in floods.

That same summer, hospitals in the sun-baked state of Uttar Pradesh, home to more than 240 million people, were filled with lethargic workers suffering from heatstroke. Finally, the expected Himalayan snow cap is visibly gone, instead a near-snowless winter will continue into his 2024.

The effects of extreme weather in India are not neatly contained within its borders. This is a worldwide concern. When India imposes a ban on wheat exports because of a heat wave, or slows down its much-vaunted IT exports because Bangalore is submerged, the lives of millions of seemingly disconnected people around the world are disrupted. to be influenced.

India is the world’s third largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China and the United States. It is also the world’s fastest growing major economy.

How India deals with climate change is a matter of concern to everyone. But while climate has been mentioned in the election manifestos of the two major political parties, the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Congress, perhaps surprisingly it has not featured as a key issue in India’s six-week national election. right. this week. This differs from countries such as Australia, the UK and the US, where elections can be heavily influenced by climate change policy positions.

This is because climate politics looks different in developing countries. It will shape India’s elections in decisive but subtle ways. Climate impacts are shaping voters’ demands, but they tend to be filtered through concerns about livelihoods and continued welfare support rather than a clearly defined area of ​​politics labeled as ‘climate’ .

We see it in farmers seeking loan forgiveness and irrigation facilities after years of drought, in urban families seeking lower electricity bills to offset cooling costs, and in calls for more pervasive social welfare.

Here in the world’s most populous country, the average Indian currently doesn’t emit that much. India’s per capita carbon dioxide emissions are relatively low at 1.9 tonnes per person, less than half the world average of 4.7 tonnes per person and a fraction of developed countries.

This duality – low per capita emissions and rapid economic growth – is also shaping India’s climate policy. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s current government is pushing for rapid deployment of renewable energy and domestic green manufacturing to create jobs, while continuing to rely on fossil fuels to power the economy. This is almost the same as the previous government.

Flipping through the election manifestos of the BJP and Congress, we find dozens of pledges across areas that could be tabled on climate change policy, with the two parties fairly evenly matched (although their emphasis predictably differs). Masu).

However, these are listed across multiple chapters, and the word “climate” is barely mentioned (although each has a separate chapter on sustainable development). Similarly, climate change has not been featured as a central issue in stump speeches during this campaign.

However, parties are focused on development issues associated with climate change, including enfranchising the poorest (which could also help with climate shocks), creating jobs through green manufacturing, and revitalizing Indian agriculture. This includes construction, etc.

But the politics here seem to reflect the relative unimportance of climate change as a conceptual category in the minds of Indian voters. When tens of thousands of farmers marched through Maharashtra in 2018 after years of drought across the state, they protested rising agricultural debt, declining productivity, pests and inadequate irrigation. . This was a climate change protest, except for the slogans.

Consider the example of a conversation I had a few years ago with a Muslim woman living in a poor part of north Bengal. Her small house in an informal settlement in Delhi was engulfed by a summer fire, and a few years later her family home in Bengal was damaged by monsoon floods.

She supports her large family of children and grandchildren as a house cleaner in an affluent area of ​​Delhi. Despite her past impact on climate change, her main demands in the last election were for regular water (which she receives from water trucks once every two weeks) and cheaper electricity. (She said she was paying about three times more than her wealthy employer). payments through illegal connections), and cheaper healthcare costs.

Therefore, it is important that elections respond to development imperatives. Climate change headwinds are absorbed by electoral institutions and emerge as fringe policies rather than grand climate strategies.

This pattern of climate politics is reinforced by the seemingly low awareness of the issue of climate change in India. In a 2022 survey of more than 4,500 people nationwide, more than 50% of respondents said they knew little or nothing about climate change. Interestingly, in this study, when respondents were provided with a simple explanation of the phenomenon, their awareness of climate change increased by more than 80%.

a collection of For this Even if new climate-focused policies are introduced, they will not be able to move this country forward. If you do a long-term test, it will fail. For example, mobilizing significant finances to redesign cities to reduce heat trapping and reduce flooding will require a genuine national debate about our climate-ravaged future. Urgent investment is needed to soften tomorrow’s blow.

The climate crisis also deepens the need for global cooperation. India’s climate-induced power outages will become harder for trading partners and global markets to ignore as the economy grows. Domestic politics focused on immediate development goals rather than long-term climate action is creating a gaping hole that global adaptation finance must fill.

There is also a moral dimension to this. The climate impacts hitting India today are largely due to the past emissions of developed countries.

In an interconnected world, global resilience must be a priority. The impact of climate on the most populous country on earth is not just a national issue, it is an international issue.

Tamanna Dalal of the Sustainable Futures Collaborative assisted the authors with their research.