[This article first appeared in the Caravan magazine, June 1, 2023.]
India’s approach to global warming cannot mirror the West
THE GODAVARI RIVER wends its lazy way between the Papikondalu Hills of the Eastern Ghats in Andhra Pradesh. Bright jungle spills down the steep hillsides, reflected in the broad, slow bends of the magnificent river. On the December day I visited, a pall of pollution damped the view. The flanks of the hills were dotted with small villages, but nearly all of them were ghost towns—empty, voided spaces where not a child played, not a dog snoozed, not a cow grazed. These were the remains of a few of the over two hundred and fifty villages that will be flooded1 when the Polavaram dam is finished, not far downriver, creating a vast reservoir that will drown this spectacular landscape.
At the site of the Polavaram project, where the dam is currently under construction, dozens of gargantuan steel cylinders towered above the dusty road, awaiting their placement in what will become one of Asia’s largest hydroelectric dams. Dams are not only disastrous for the people who must leave their villages but are environmentally calamitous as well, destroying wetlands, inundating ecosystems, disrupting the natural flows of silt and nutrients and the migrations of riverine creatures. They affect the livelihoods of people living downriver, too, as conditions for fishing and farming change around them. For towns and farms above the dam, the reservoir may provide a source of water more reliable than the changing monsoons. Yet, having directly displaced around a hundred thousand families2 from relatively poor and marginalised rural communities, the power generated by the dam will primarily serve a different set of people: those who can most afford to pay for it. Much of what we call “development” across the globe has followed this modus operandi for centuries, dismantling the systems of the non-human world in service to “economic growth,” while doling out the costs and benefits unevenly among people.
This hints at the shape of things to come.
Closer to the coast, the Godavari fans out into India’s third-largest river delta before emptying into the Bay of Bengal. Its network of distributary rivers delineates verdant islets edged by mangrove swamps or soft, wide beaches. Much of the land is occupied by shady coconut groves surrounding low-density villages, whose inhabitants are regularly seen standing along the roads to fish the rivers or taking small boats out to fish the sea. One resident of the Konaseema islets told me that the sea level has been rising in recent decades, causing saltwater intrusion into their fields. As a result, some years ago, they were forced to adjust their livelihoods by abandoning paddy to cultivate coconuts and prawns instead.
The sea level has been rising because the ocean is heating up, causing its volume to expand. Ancient mountain glaciers and the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica are also melting away, slowly adding their volumes of water to the sea. When we burn fossil fuels and destroy forests, carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses accumulate in the atmosphere, forming a layer of insulation around our planet that traps the sun’s heat. As the globe warms, familiar patterns of heat, drought, wind and precipitation are changing.
A recent paper based on new methodology finds that the global sea level is expected to rise by at least twenty-seven centimetres3, even if we somehow arrest global warming at our present 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial temperatures4. That rise could happen more steadily—maybe at the current rate of about three-and-a-half millimetres per year5—or in bursts, if larger chunks of ice begin to slough off of Antarctica, suddenly sloshing the level by several centimetres in a single year.
Climate scientists expect this year and the next to be hotter than 2022, with a fifty-percent likelihood that the global average temperature will breach the “safe” 1.5-degree threshold within the next five years6. A new, AI-modelled study finds the world’s present course of heating suggests “a nearly 70% chance that the two-degree threshold would be crossed between 2044 and 2065, even if emissions rapidly decline,”7 thus surpassing the catastrophic threshold set by the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change half a century before 2100—the expected timeline upon which the IPCC bases its carefully calculated scenarios for reducing emissions globally.
Exactly how this will play out remains uncertain. The only real certainties are that, as we continue to burn fossil fuels, the planet will continue to warm, and each fraction of a degree of warming intensifies climate consequences by more than the previous fraction. The climate will become more unstable and the sea will rise even higher and faster, with devastating effects.
Given India’s long coastline and its total reliance on predictable patterns of rainfall and steady rates of snow-replenished, glacial meltwater to feed its people, the mounting threats of climate change are real and urgent. It behoves us, as a nation, to take aggressive action to mitigate these threats by reducing our use of coal, oil and gas, by preserving and expanding mature forests. But, given that we demand more electricity and gasoline to power our increasingly urban, consumerist lives while pursuing a model of development based on pulling more people into energy-intensive lifestyles, the central government has declared its intention to more than double energy generation capacity by 2030, mostly by rapidly expanding low-carbon energy sources. As a low-emissions, renewable resource, the Polavaram dam might be regarded as an example of “green” energy, never mind its immense ecological and human costs.
But, to get a real handle on our predicament, we cannot ignore these costs. We must reckon with the underlying reality that our mounting harms to natural systems have thrust us into a condition of ecological overshoot. This means we are depleting essential resources—perhaps most alarmingly, healthy soils—by annihilating living systems, extracting resources and producing pollution at a rate faster than planetary systems can replenish themselves, faster than natural geochemical cycles can restabilise themselves or the beleaguered biosphere can regain its integrity. Humanity’s rate of environmental despoliation has already exceeded at least six of nine known biophysical limits to our planet’s stabilising systems8. Only one of these systems is the climate.
Carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases that drive global warming, and the associated particulate matter that clogs and destroys our lungs—as well as, no doubt, the lungs of other animals—are only two types of pollution that industrial consumerist lifestyles generate. There is also the massive chemical runoff from intensive farming, including artificial fertilisers and pesticides, which cause disastrous harm to soil, insects and water bodies. Pollution, acidification and overfishing of the oceans damage marine life. Industrial effluents poison lands and waterways. Meanwhile, per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances—also called “forever chemicals”—and microplastics have become so pervasive in the environment that every person and other living being is constantly eating, drinking and breathing them in, likely contributing to the present epidemic of infertility, among other health concerns. Light pollution disrupts the nocturnal cycles of plants and animals.
Likewise, ongoing habitat destruction—including the cutting of forests; the damming, diversion and draining of rivers, swamps and marshlands; the dredging of mountains, riverbanks and seabeds; the planting of vast acreages of monocultures—is rapidly depleting the planet of animal and plant populations, reducing the diversity of life both within and across species. With these actions, we are fundamentally destroying the complex, inter-networked system of living beings that top predator species such as humans require for basic survival. These living systems literally produce the air, clean the water, and comprise the soil upon which our lives depend. By threatening the stability of this environmental substrate, ecological overshoot represents an existential crisis for humanity as a species—and, certainly, for industrial civilisation.
All attempts to mitigate climate change must take heed of overshoot. Elevating solutions that narrowly target only the single symptom of climate change will certainly prove ineffective at safeguarding living systems. Pursuing technological fixes that are designed to maintain the geopolitical and socioeconomic structures of industrial capitalism, and its mythology of eternally rising gross domestic product, is likely even to exacerbate ecological overshoot. Even renewable energies—whether solar, wind or hydropower—are harvested only by building non-renewable infrastructures that will massively accelerate mining and industrial-waste production, further annihilation of habitats and loss of biodiversity.
AS PART OF INDIA’S internationally declared commitment to help mitigate climate change, the central government intends to install five hundred gigawatts of renewable energy capacity during this decade. With this, it aims to reduce the nation’s emissions intensity—the amount of greenhouse gas emissions per unit of GDP—by forty-five percent, relative to what it had been in 20059. Plans to decarbonise the energy sector include building solar and wind farms, hydroelectric dams and nuclear plants10; retrofitting coal thermal plants to burn crop stubble11; exploring the production of “green” hydrogen12; and encouraging the public to adopt electric vehicles13.
Solar is slated to comprise the bulk of energy generation capacity—although, significantly, its problem of requiring companion capacity for power storage has not yet been worked out. Wind will account for the second largest slice. Meanwhile, coal energy capacity is also being expanded. Coal use is expected to peak between 202714 and 2032, at a rate forty percent higher than today15. Presumably, only after that would it be slowly phased out over four decades, in order to achieve India’s declared target of “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions by 2070, perhaps as low-carbon energy sources and battery capacities are further developed, although no explicit roadmap for the ultimate phaseout of coal use has yet been made clear.
Some international experts have welcomed India’s expanded ambitions, even while critics point out that these efforts remain insufficient to help the world meet its target of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius16. Yet, a different angle of criticism notes that this litany of megaprojects, including dams and solar farms, ultimately constitute a kind of internal colonialism, wherein the needs and desires of the upper classes are prioritised over those of people living closer to the land. These include oppressed castes and Adivasis, whose traditional lands, resources and livelihoods are stripped away in order to provide materials, from water to timber to fuel, and space for dams, power plants and other projects, that serve primarily the wealthier, urban-dwelling people of disproportionately upper-caste backgrounds, who consume the most. In fact, India’s climate mitigation scheme is chiefly about producing more power, even if that comes from burning coal, in the interest of economic growth and industrial development, while allowing the resultant burdens—of displacement, lost livelihoods, compounding economic insecurity, degraded ecosystems and depleted landscapes—to accrue mostly to the rural poor, the marginalised, as well as the land and all its creatures. I mention the land and its creatures here not as a romantic, rhetorical flourish but because they must not be left out of consideration, as essential as people.
It is worth noting that none of the ambitious-sounding facts and figures included in India’s updated climate change mitigation declaration account for justice or equitability in supporting and protecting its most vulnerable citizens, as though these matters are a separate concern. Nor does it enumerate intentions to extend mature forests and wetlands, regenerate soils, preserve biodiversity, nor any other broad environmental concern. Government authorities may speak of “sustainable development,” but sustainable, socially equitable programmes that finally ameliorate livelihood insecurity and childhood undernourishment, through environmental renewal, remain as elusive as ever.
But India can meet its narrowly focused climate-mitigation targets without addressing the larger problem of ecological overshoot. In fact, this approach tends to be preferred at various international summits, all of which are committed first to upholding the economics of capitalist growth above everything else. Indian elites across party lines remain committed to the dominant model of progress and development based on the unsustainable, consumption-led playbook of the West, the same approach that reproduces the dynamics of colonialism.
Can we imagine no other way forward? What might a just transition to a sustainable mode of life even look like?
Four recent books provide an array of insights and ideas from scientists, policy wonks, government spokespersons, environmentalists, activists, educators and others. The essays and reports that make up these volumes are all concerned with implementing sound responses to climate change that are inclusive and equitable. Three of them deal primarily with the challenges and inadequacies of present policymaking. Climate Justice in India, edited by Prakash Kashwan and published in 2022, demonstrates how historical disenfranchisement leaves some groups not only more vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis but, potentially, also to the technological, market-minded solutions that constitute India’s primary response.
Published in the same year, The Politics of Climate Change and Uncertainty in India, edited by Lyla Mehta, Hans Nicolai Adam and Shilpi Srivastava, takes a more anthropological approach, focussing on how marginal communities perceive environmental uncertainty differently than civic authorities tend to do. It considers how a lack of direct engagement with the perspectives of marginalised groups in formulating climate action plans adversely affects the outcomes. The 2019 book India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development, edited by Navroz K Dubash, presents some of the intricacies involved in turning abstract goals, such as emissions reduction targets, into policy agendas. And then there is Alternative Futures: India Unshackled, edited by Ashish Kothari and KJ Joy and published in 2017, which refreshingly attempts to imagine what truly sustainable and just futures might actually look like.
IN 2008, the central government created the National Action Plan on Climate Change, focussed around emissions mitigation and climate adaptation. As part of this, it directed states to create their own State Actions Plans on Climate Change, to be aligned with the missions of the NAPCC, guided by an overarching principle of “co-benefits”—that is, states were to find opportunities where development objectives could be met with climate mitigation or adaptation efforts. As India in a Warming World describes, while this co-benefits approach sounds promising in principle, it has not spurred novel thinking or new approaches to development. Neither has it provided clear guidance around which to build well-developed SAPCCs or a broadly shared vision and unified effort between the centre and the states, which are primarily concerned with issues that impact their local political contests. States and cities then back-fit their pet programmes into the logic of climate co-benefits. As Elizabeth Gogoi, who is involved with the process, explains, “State governments drafted their SAPCC with the understanding (or assumption) that they would receive central government funding to implement it and, as such, the plans were conceived as a set of fundable projects—often reading more like a ‘wish list.’”17 Another participant admitted bluntly, “The alignment is happening only for budgetary reasons.”18 This disconnection is further exacerbated by the lack of expertise and capacity among state governments to adequately study and forecast the effects of climate change in order to properly respond in their development plans.
It cannot help that central-government policies on climate change are not formulated first around what is feasible to meet people’s needs at home but rather the need to meet emissions targets declared in response to global climate accords. Indeed, reading about the formal intrigues of international climate negotiations, covered in some detail by contributors to Warming World, it is striking how much the thinking and strategising around the table devolves to political, non-environmental considerations—potential contributions to global warming become negotiating chips in unrelated geopolitical games or business concerns. One contributor, Sandeep Sengupta, tells us that “the enhanced importance that it attached to building a closer bilateral relationship with the US and the material and security benefits that it secured in return,” such as the bilateral nuclear deal in 2005, is what ultimately made India more receptive to the climate accord terms preferred by the West.19 Another contributor, D Raghunandan, argues that India has been late to appreciate the seriousness of climate change impacts within its own borders and, in fact, “approached the climate negotiations as primarily a problem of foreign relations, rather than as a forum to deal with and help tackle its serious vulnerabilities to climate impacts.”20
At times, the apparent lack of fear or urgency about the actual changing climate and what it means for ordinary people is exasperating. From the longstanding recalcitrance of many nations against accepting responsibility for their share of emissions, including India’s own resistance to commit to emissions reductions, to the “artful ambiguity”21 of the texts under debate and the incessant posturing and bullying, the accounts of climate gamesmanship included in this volume strongly edify the sense that what goes on in the name of climate talks is, to borrow the apt phrasing of the activist Greta Thunberg, just more “blah, blah, blah.” Of course, Indian officialdom is not at all unique in their apparent lack of urgency or efficacy. We know from Warming World and other coverage that most participants at the annual climate summits— except perhaps those from the Small Island Developing States, the impassioned youth groups and the UN secretary general—routinely come off as more concerned about projecting their power, preserving their own piece of the pie and shielding their own modes of denialism.
What results from this prevailing international approach is a load of technocracy—layers of generalised, technical details about climate change and mitigation intended to direct government policymaking—that finds no graspable touch points with lives on the ground. To take but one sample of the difficulties involved in managing the implementation of abstract technological solutionism, consider the depth and scale of social upheaval required in the transition to a renewable-energy economy, as outlined in Warming World by Ashim Roy, Benny Kuruvilla and Ankit Bhardwaj. To begin with, the project requires a rethink of who should even own the energy infrastructure, from generation to distribution. It means reskilling the labour force for jobs supporting wind, solar, nuclear and other growing energy sector technologies. This includes rebuilding local economies that are presently dependent upon coal-mining, in part by revitalising labour unions to transition coal workers into the renewable sector and provide protections. And then there is the matter of justly addressing resistance movements against forced population removals to accommodate the megaprojects, as well as creating social safety nets against the impacts of climate change and the disruptions of these new infrastructures themselves. “A ‘just transition’ approach,” the authors observe, “requires a wider framing than public ownership and orientation of energy infrastructure, to one that encompasses most social infrastructure.”22
Elaborating on how deliberations in the global halls of power trickle down with little effective translation for meaningful action in towns and villages, Kashwan states in the preface to Climate Justice,
The journey that market-based solutions would have to take, from Bali [which hosted the global climate summit in 2007] to places like Bastar in Chhattisgarh, where they would be eventually implemented, is not paved with the freedom of choice that pro-market advocates like to celebrate. Markets are designed to facilitate the accumulation of surplus in the hands of those who can channel it higher up in the ‘food chain’. In most cases, the market ecosystem is essentially a centralizing force and does not work for the poor and marginalized.23
Consider, for example, the coalminers of Jharia, Jharkhand, where coalfield fires have been burning for over a century, subjecting workers and nearby communities to toxic levels of pollution—even as they remain among the most underserved by the electrification they bring to the rest of the country. Since the mass burning of coal first took root, the landscapes surrounding mining sites have been so environmentally devastated that Adivasis and other oppressed communities living nearby have been unable to pursue their traditional livelihoods of subsistence horticulture and collecting forest produce, pursuits that require a healthy local ecology. In response, many of those affected were forced to take up labour as miners, an occupation injurious to their own health, the health of their communities and the health of those who live near the coal-fired power plants.
Miners constitute an easily exploited underclass of labourers, who not only disproportionately suffer the ravages of coal-mining but also stand to lose their livelihoods without recompense when India transitions away from coal toward “greener” energy systems. While policymakers might readily point out these problems, precious little seems to be in the works to address these inequities. Indeed, other vulnerable communities continue to be similarly disrupted and displaced, losing their livelihoods to make way for new energy projects, such as Polavaram and the Charanka Solar Park in Gujarat.
Or consider that, as glaciers recede and groundwater levels drop, oppressed communities across India face greater threats of water scarcity. In a country where the upper classes routinely waste water—not least in ubiquitous RO purification systems, which are known to discard up to eighty percent of the water they filter—fewer than half of Indian households even have access to piped water. In cities, families of oppressed castes, who are often forced to live in “slums” due to hereditary poverty and social stigma, are denied water connections because their settlements are not sanctioned, even though upper-class housing colonies that also violate construction regulations are not similarly penalised.
In nearly half of India’s villages, Dalit families face obstacles in accessing water24. Even attempts to make potable water more available often get corrupted by elite capture, in which the privileged castes are able to control the new resources. For example, when the Gujarat government’s Water and Sanitation Management Organisation worked with villagers to install a new drinking well, upper-caste representatives were able to influence the site selection to their own advantage. Similarly, when local authorities build new stand pumps meant for all villagers to access water, upper-caste members have been known in some cases to violently attack Dalits who attempt to use the pumps. As Arpitha Kodiveri and Rishiraj Sen point out in Climate Justice, even when Dalit workers were tasked to clean up Chennai and clear the dead bodies after flooding in 2018, they were not provided adequate drinking water. Working in the heat, especially without access to adequate drinking water, is already causing rising rates of kidney disease in India25, placing an increasing disease burden upon labourers who, again, disproportionately belong to oppressed castes. These are but a few ways inequality is enmeshed with climate concerns.
Yet, while several of the city and state action plans do acknowledge that women and the poor are especially vulnerable to the harms of climate change, none of the several reviewed in Climate Justice provide any specifics on how to address these vulnerabilities—and none of the plans acknowledge the particular vulnerabilities of oppressed castes at all. In failing to do so, they fail to safeguard against the many ways by which the burdens of climate change and of its mitigation are shifted onto these already vulnerable groups. Poverty, gender, caste and other systemic inequalities are the very conduits through which the depredations and challenges of climate change reach into individual lives, and must be understood as central to the issues that the SAPCCs attempt to address. Any programme that seeks to protect people from the risks of climate change or promote real development must, then, address the inequality itself.
As a mode of redressal, Kashwan suggests,
In the context of the climate crisis, philosophers argue that some actors, for example, fossil fuel corporations and the countries of the Global North, which are responsible for the climate crisis, owe restitution to those most affected by it. This principle informs the demands of countries in the Global South, that industrially advanced countries pay for the loss and damages linked to the climate crisis. Indeed, such demands could also be applied within national borders. In India, this relates most directly to the restitution of land, forest, and other resource rights to Dalits and Adivasis, who suffer high rates of landlessness and criminalization of resource use because of state control of resources.26
What then emerges most powerfully in Climate Justice is a discussion of environmental attitudes and practices within India that encourage ongoing forms of internal colonialism—though the authors never use this term—which, today, is also an arm of global neocolonialism. The construction of solar farms drives but the latest land grab in a historical trend of co-opting the resources and labour of the less powerful, beginning, arguably, with the entrenchment of the caste system itself, some two thousand years ago. By the Mughal period, forest dwellers were increasingly displaced from their ancestral lands, as the commons were slowly enclosed for the benefit of royal trophy-hunting and animal-collecting. This trend gained speed when the British not only enclosed forest commons but also forcibly settled pastoralists and other nomadic communities, branding some as “criminal tribes.”27 Such policies resulted from the worldview of British commercialism, in which only profit-generating lands and labour were regarded as desirable and developed. The British began industrial-scale logging programmes, sometimes planting non-native trees as cash crops in place of native trees, which degraded the forests upon which Adivasis had long been dependent for their subsistence. However, the enclosure of the commons and destruction of the forests, displacing Dalits, Adivasis and other marginalised communities, gained its greatest force in independent India, which accelerated the process even further after liberalisation in the 1990s.
This history has come to define the priorities and beneficiaries of modern environmental interventions. In this way, mainstream environmental ideals lead us to seek solutions that disregard the lives that fall beyond the state’s project of industrial capitalism, such as those displaced by solar farms and dams, even though their ways of life might have been genuinely less damaging to the environment. They lead us to imagine that poverty degrades the environment when, in fact, wealthier people produce far vaster quantities of pollution and environmental damage through a greater consumption of energy and materials, while they live at a distance from the resultant harms produced, including trash, sewage, coal-burning particulates, plastic waste and toxic effluents from mining and the manufacture of goods.
Mainstream notions of environmentalism also simplistically lead us to presume that merely planting trees—any tree, anywhere—is an unalloyed environmental good. In fact, planting trees is not at all similar to preserving mature forest and, if the wrong trees are planted in the wrong locations, it can be deleterious to local environments. We end up pursuing “conservation” on the Western model, which entails the enclosure of erstwhile commons into protected parks and preserves, as if to recreate some imagined state of “pristine nature.” No such condition has ever existed, not since the first people arrived in the subcontinent, some seventy thousand years ago.
Today, Adivasis are not allowed to hunt wild game in their ancestral forests because we imagine them responsible for the endangerment of forest animals. But it was not their hunting that decimated Indian forest life. That distinction goes to the members of the Mughal and, especially, the colonial elite, Indian and British, whose modes of sport and status-seeking extirpated whole populations of lions, tigers, elephants and other prized animals28, destabilising entire ecosystems that have never recovered. Adivasis, by contrast, had been thriving far more sustainably within the limits of their forest ecosystems, until the past several centuries, during which their social and subsistence systems were officiously dismantled, by degrees, and refashioned to make them more similar to townsfolk, whose subsistence options are tied to markets. This impoverished them in the name of “development” while giving control of their lands and resources to sport-hunters, loggers, miners and property developers. In seeking climate mitigation and adaption strategies, it is, therefore, essential to address not only existing social inequities but also mainstream attitudes that prevent us from framing the problems and their redressals in a manner that is compatible with social and environmental justice and ecological sustainability. In order to do so, authorities must engage directly with the most vulnerable groups, allowing them to define the problems they face and help formulate appropriate answers nearer to their own needs and lived realities.
AS THE CONTRIBUTORS to Politics of Climate Change and Uncertaintypoint out, communities living in marginal environments—areas that states have historically found difficult to develop for large-scale agriculture or regularised urban development, including Kutch, the Sundarbans and parts of Mumbai—have always lived with uncertainty. Their own knowledge systems often provide guidance for dealing with fluctuating conditions, based on past experience. Their modes of resilience did not require them to be able to quantify or predict difficult conditions or opportunities, only that they had the freedom to choose the best response at the moment when conditions arose.
Government authorities and their spokespersons, by contrast, typically attempt to address uncertainty in probabilistic terms, looking for narrow causal agents that can be statistically accounted for in scientific models. But trying to master, rather than learning to accommodate, the unpredictability of the environment can shut down viable pathways of resilience for those in marginal environments and thereby end up worsening their situation. For instance, attempting to build concrete embankments against the encroaching sea, as has been tried in irregular colonies in Mumbai and the Sundarbans, is both costly and ineffective, ultimately compounding the risks for those who undertake it.
The most tried-and-true strategy to mitigate livelihood uncertainty had always been migration. But, in today’s world of settled lives and bureaucratised social infrastructures, national borders, capitalist property and labour regimes, this poses problems. As the commons disappear, nomadic groups find it difficult to move freely to gather resources as needed or, in some cases, even to graze their animals. And, when land is lost to erosion or salination—an increasingly common disaster in coastal areas, due to rising seas and strengthening cyclones—families cannot simply take up a fresh patch of land somewhere nearby, as earlier generations had done. Owing to the twists and turns of land ownership or tenureship, through centuries of migrations and various forms of conquest—including land grabs, population relocations and displacements—families who lose their land to the seas often hold no deeds and are left without recompense or recourse through official systems.
People on the margins also recognise that their scope of uncertainty reaches beyond climate change to include the full spectrum of environmental changes in their region: encroaching urban developments, annihilation of mangroves and wetlands, incursions from industrial modes of extraction—such as fishing trawlers—and the construction of factories, roads, piers or other obstacles that restrict their movement and degrade the lands and resources they depend upon. On top of this, being subject to government policies, such as the requirement for property deeds or the enclosure of commons, or falling through the cracks of responsibility between various ministries or departments, introduces its own survival uncertainties. Women experience additional factors of uncertainty when men in their families must migrate in search of wage work, leaving them desperately seeking sources of income more reliably close to hand, disadvantaged by patriarchal norms, including wage suppression, while remaining simultaneously responsible for the care of the young, the elderly and the ill. Often, they must travel ever farther to access water, find fuel or avail other essential resources and services.
Today, it is all these factors working together that lead to what the authors of Politics of Climate Change term “radical uncertainty,” wherein traditional knowledge systems or coping strategies no longer provide adequate guidance for adaptation. This forces already marginalised people to undertake riskier, less familiar, more labour intensive, less provisionally supportive livelihoods—what the authors call “distress diversification”—which does little to surmount their vulnerability. For example, in the face of saltwater intrusion into their fields, some communities of wet rice farmers in the Sundarbans have switched to farming betel leaf, requiring them to take loans from moneylenders at high interest rates. The shift away from growing food they could eat in favour of a cash crop they must farm dangerously close to the water’s edge, and the undertaking of loans to do so, bring these farmers into a riskier livelihood strategy, taken on only because all better options have fallen away in the new, market-led subsistence environment.
It is these lived realities that climate change action plans must address if they are to succeed in protecting people or in delivering them meaningful development. One way to begin is for scientists and other authorities to engage those with indigenous experiential knowledge, to understand what constitutes the best survival response for them. At the same time, officialdom also stands to learn from their familiarity with the land, with plant or animal breeds that yield better in drought, for instance, or their knowledge of how patterns of precipitation have changed, which can then even be useful for scientific modelling.
And yet, as Shrivastava and her colleagues point out,
While India is on track to achieve—or even surpass—its ambitious INDCs [Intended Nationally Determined Contributions, a country’s declared goals for emissions reduction], which is a positive signal, questions remain on the fundamental premise of being closely linked to a green economy discourse that is associated with business and market-friendly principles, technological optimism and neglect of issues concerning power inequity, marginalisation and resource distribution … prioritising mitigation in state-led discourses on climate change within cities has led to the dominance of market-driven agendas and business ventures, often in the name of energy efficiency and the green economy.29
Prioritising metrics such as GDP growth, rather than easing vulnerability or creating bottom-up strategies to advance wellbeing, generates a homogenising notion of development that draws all peoples further into the orbit of industrial capitalism. But, when this economic system ultimately seeks to extract more resources for less investment—whether in terms of money or the general wellbeing of humans and other living things—funnelling the greatest benefits upward to those at the centre, while “externalising” the costs to the margins, including the most powerless human and non-human communities, and the commons, including the atmosphere, the waterways, the oceans, the soils, and all forms of wilderness, it compounds the vulnerabilities of the marginal. Indeed, it is this very logic of capitalism, as several authors in both Climate Justice and Politics of Climate Change allude, that ultimately drives climate change and other forms of environmental breakdown.
Another thought that arises from Politics of Climate Change in its discussion of environmental uncertainty—though the authors do not directly grapple with this angle—is that bureaucratic nation states are by design ill-equipped to deal with the compounding uncertainties that the changing climate deals out. For instance, governments need to know when, what and where to plant, predictably, across years; their top-down systems falter when conditions change drastically and suddenly, requiring a rapid response. Modern governments want everyone to settle into fixed addresses, with papers proving property ownership. They want people to maintain steady, formal employment and consume market-traded commodities in a relentlessly growing economy, and they want industry to be able to maximise their extraction of resources and labour as cheaply as possible, both to serve the appetites of their citizens who belong to the mainstream and to remain economically competitive in the global market.
These governments can manage change, even crisis, if it comes with slow trendlines and predictability. If not, the systems they manage begin to sputter and fail, as was visible during the COVID-19 pandemic. But the acute threat of the pandemic fortunately receded within a few years, before medical and other systems were rendered broken beyond recovery. Climate change, however, is just getting started. It will continue to change relentlessly and aggressively for decades, if not centuries. And, while its global patterns have been modelled and are broadly foreseeable, the character and magnitude of its localised effects remain unpredictable, beyond mastery.
It is no wonder that the SAPCCs remain inadequate to the task of translating the goals of the centre into the practical schemes needed to deal with pressing local issues like migration, livelihood insecurity, access to water, contestations over land rights, urbanisation, and social and economic disenfranchisement. The plans’ deficits are not likely to be rectified by merely changing the bureaucratic processes. They are, after all, produced by a system that is built to preserve the status quo: the top-down arrangements of power, the finance-centric ideologies and presumptions of civic development. Plans and visions that seek to protect this sociopolitical edifice cannot and do not question the system itself. As such, they will never be adequate to the task of confronting climate change, which is not a crisis lying atop this system but rather a crisis lurking within its very machinery.
INDIA’S ONGOING DEVELOPMENT toward an industrial economy has produced at most 3.4 percent of cumulative atmospheric carbon emissions since 185030. And, though India’s emissions are rising, each individual in India today emits, on average, 1.9 tons of carbon dioxide annually, placing us well below the global average of 4.9 tons.31 But this again masks deep inequalities within India. The carbon footprints of the wealthier segments are up to seven times higher than those of the poorest32, with the wealthiest ten percent carrying an average carbon footprint closer to five tons—matching the global average—which also means that most Indians produce far less than two tons of carbon emissions annually.
In order to equitably meet the goal of limiting global heating to under two degrees Celsius, nobody’s carbon footprint should ideally exceed the range of about 1.6 to 2.8 tons33, closer to the level of the average Indian. So until all of us adjust our lifestyles to bring down the consumption and emissions of the wealthiest to a similar level as the average, allowing the poorest to raise their consumption levels, this argument enables access to resources for the upper classes, while glossing over the damages we cause.
Achieving development in the way the West has done cannot be separated from the intensive material extraction, pollution and habitat destruction that inevitably result in ecological overshoot, including climate change. Increasing our fossil fuel infrastructure and dependence upon growing rates of energy consumption can never be a path toward emissions reduction, just as promoting nicotine addiction before banning smoking is not a way to stop people from smoking. A systemic “addiction” to fossil fuels and overconsumption is, in fact, a key part of the problem faced by the West, impeding their own hopes for social and economic transition. It will not behove India to get more deeply mired in their same predicament by chasing the same illusions of development.
Meanwhile, most of us continue to envision a future in which we commute to our jobs and send our children to school to prepare them for the kinds of work we do in an economy similar to the one that presently employs us. This is in denial of the fact that the planet around us is fundamentally changing. In truth, we face an increasingly unknown world: a changing climate regime and shrinking of the biosphere unlike anything any human community has experienced since the dawn of humanity. It is a fact so startling that it hovers beyond our imaginations, even as it engulfs us in real time. Meeting our moment in history will require us all to engage in broader imaginative exercises. It is this that Ashish Kothari and KJ Joy have attempted in Alternative Futures. Contributed by a broad range of social and environmental thinkers and activists, the essays in this volume go well beyond the usual prescriptions to reduce private vehicle usage, increase public transit, plant more trees and more closely monitor tiger populations—all of which are in their limited ways important, but will not amount to nearly enough. Rather, this fresher imaginary suggests that, using as guides a range of principles long understood by communities who have lived much closer to the land, more heedful of ecological limits, it is possible to envision sustainable societies of the future.
For example, official land use policy has so far amounted to creating exclusive patches of protected forest, casting out the peoples who had sustainably stewarded it for generations while simultaneously encouraging industries to inflict extreme environmental harm to the vaster tracts outside of these reserves in the form of logging, mining, obstruction of waterways and other economically privileged activities. But fragmented patches of exclusionary conservation cannot support the same breadth of biodiversity as larger, whole forests once did. Nor can wildlife crowded into these small, protected enclaves move freely between them to expand their ranges or their available gene pools. So, if the goal is to preserve biodiversity, the present methods are poorly conceived. Similarly, targeting individual species for protection, such as tigers or turtles, without also maintaining their fully intact ecosystems can lead to ecological imbalances that cause other problems, including overpopulation of some species and conflict with humans.
Despite this modern history of accelerating environmental harms, however, India has managed to retain enough biodiversity to remain one of the world’s 17 megadiversity countries. In one essay in Alternative Futures, Kartik Shanker, Meera Anna Oommen and Nitin Rai suggest this is largely due to India’s much longer history in which its various communities had found ways to live alongside other species, often building indigenous forms of conservation into their cultural practices. But indigenous knowledge and conservation systems have been increasingly pushed aside, especially since economic liberalisation resulted in increasing exploitation of forests and other wilderness resources. Today, even protected areas have been commodified, first for tourism income and now as repositories of carbon.
In contrast to the present schemes, the authors suggest reconciliation ecology, an approach that advocates creating mosaics of openly conjoined landscapes that simultaneously fulfil a multiplicity of uses for both people and wildlife, allowing for greater movement and coexistence of human and non-human beings. Among other policy impacts, the socioeconomic costs and benefits of various agrarian practices, urbanisation, transit and other considerations would have to be weighed more equally with the ecological costs and benefits, such as watershed replenishment, soil health, forest integrity, plant pollination and animal migration. No doubt, this challenges the paramountcy of the industrial capitalist paradigm that defines land use development. But, especially in India, where a great diversity of subsistence practices and lifeways still exist, including regions of low-intensity agriculture and common land tenureship that remain friendlier to biodiversity, reconciliation ecology could be a viable strategy for conservation into the future, one that is far more sensible than importing Western notions such as exclusive wilderness.
Shripad Dharmadhikary and Himanshu Thakkar imagine a future in which water is valued as an integral part of many different ecosystems, rather than solely for its usage by humans. “One of the central and defining features of our prevailing mindset,” they write, “has been the notion that any drop of water that is not extracted out for human use is a ‘waste.’”34 But India has well-developed traditional knowledges for water conservation and harvesting technologies, which do not rely upon building large-scale, environmentally catastrophic infrastructures, such as river interlinking systems and dams. Addressing India’s water stresses would mean, among other policy changes, handing over the management of water bodies to local communities—returning them to the public commons. In so doing, water can be conserved and managed where it falls, protecting local wetlands, sustaining watersheds and recharging underground aquifers. Farmers would have to adjust their cropping patterns to fit the local ecology, rather than trying to grow crops in environments unsuited to them, as access is democratised through the cooperative decision-making that once characterised commons management.
In a similar vein, Pallav Das uses the example of Mendha Lekha to observe how Adivasi movements are attempting to resist state and corporate power. In this Maharashtrian village, the Gond community voted to reassert their traditional system of working the land as a commons by transferring all two hundred hectares of their farmlands into the ownership of their gram sabha—village council—representing 52 families. Now, the villagers make collective decisions regarding the land and control the management of their own forest produce, water-harvesting, and any related projects for income generation. In this way, all the villagers are fully locally employed, according to their capabilities. Men and women share power equally in the village committees. Das asks whether it is “possible to replicate this experiment elsewhere in India”—a question that resonates with those also posed by Aruna Roy, Nikhil Dey and Praavita Kashyap, whose essay traces the history of people’s movements against elite capture of political power since Indian independence.
Or let us imagine, with Ilse Köhler-Rollefson and Hanwant Singh Rathore, a future in which pastoralists are again given range to roam with their herds. Millions of Indians still follow pastoralist ways, despite the disappearance of the commons through which they once freely travelled. Their ancient, decentralised mode of care for their herds significantly benefits the health of the animals, the environment and the people who depend on their produce. Travelling herds can enjoy a robust diet of wild grasses and crop stubble, which they turn into wholesome milk, meat and fertiliser. That fertiliser not only plays a crucial part in upholding the fertility of the landscapes the animals are a part of, it is also a key component of KJ Joy’s vision: a biomass-based production system that would revitalise rural landscapes and livelihoods through renewable energy and materials in a bountiful, but circular, economy.
These are a mere sampling from a thick repository of frameworks and ideas, each of them thoughtfully argued and enthusiastically imagined, many based upon a combination of historical data and living proof-of-concept projects the authors are involved with. Taken together, the essays in Alternative Futures do not constitute a singular blueprint. Nor do they promise pat answers. But all of them are conceptually sourced from India’s indigenous strengths, knowledges, environmental realities and experiential understandings, wherever bits and pieces of sustainable and equitable strategies have arisen and persisted. On the whole, the essays implicitly or explicitly recognise that human beings are part and parcel of nature—the more human societies have attempted to separate themselves from the rest of nature, the more unsustainable those societies have become. And the authors work with the understanding that any human economy is a subsystem of the larger ecological system in which it occurs, and is therefore bound by its ecological limits.
Each of these vast concerns of any human society—from the conservation of water, land and biodiversity to matters of democracy, governance and legal structures; strategies for managing natural resources, human livelihoods, and patterns of production and consumption; visions for sustainable and equitable urban and rural living; support for arts, languages and education—are deeply intertwined, as the essays make clear. From the way we distribute social power and material wealth to the way we distribute water. From the way we build our cities to the way we use the countryside. These essays and ideas like them need to become part of the discourse on climate, the environment and India’s future for, unlike market-based, technological solutions, they can provide a framework for a more sustainable and equitable future. As Sharachchandra Lele and Geetanjoy Sahu put it in their essay on environmental governance,
environmentalism would not be just about sustaining a certain lifestyle into the future, but also about rethinking the content of that lifestyle itself, as well as its repercussions on others (human and non-human) in the present, that is, quality of life, sustainability as well as environmental justice. Closely coupled to these values would be concern for social justice (concern for the marginalized). Conversely, economic growth as a social goal would be replaced by a focus on meeting basic needs and the quality of life for all within environmental limits—with the understanding that these limits may be flexed through technological innovation but may not be broken, and, in tinkering with them, one must observe the ‘precautionary principle.’ Finally, there would be a deep commitment to democratic governance, for its own sake, as the process to be adopted in taking decisions about balancing between material needs, non-material quality of life, long-term sustainability, equity, and justice.35
SO MANY PEOPLE today are flummoxed by global and domestic lack of progress in staunching climate change. After all, if we have known about this threat for decades, why is so little actually being accomplished? With all the plans and models and scientific knowhow, why does nothing seem to be working? But the answers to these questions are not at all surprising. First, those with power and wealth do not easily concede their power or wealth or the mechanisms that enabled it, though precisely this is what is required to effectively respond to climate change. Second, most plans to “solve” climate change involve doing more of what caused the problem in the first place, which was to work against natural systems, rather than with them, by diverting excessive amounts of energy and materials toward our narrow human project of constructing deep social hierarchies based around expanding overconsumption, a process that has reached its zenith under fossil-fuelled industrial capitalism.
Pursuing any increasingly energy- and materials-intensive growth strategy is not a path to a liveable future. Any appropriate and salutary response to such a deeply systemic problem as climate change caused by ecological overshoot—or anthropogenic climate change—will not vainly attempt to rectify it through the logic of markets that seek to churn ecosystems into industrial profits. It will have to reshape more profoundly the present systems and cultural institutions that are unsustainable. Even the usually staid and conservative IPCC admitted this in its 2018 report, saying that “limiting warming to 1.5ºC is possible within the laws of chemistry and physics but would require unprecedented transitions in all aspects of society.”36
Any effective response to this planet now reinventing itself under our feet and over our heads will be, by definition, revolutionary. The end of petroleum-mining alone—whether that is reached by choice or by resource exhaustion—is a world in which most products we use in our everyday lives, made of ultra-cheap plastics, will no longer be feasible to produce. A vast range of industrial materials, from paints and lubricants to medical equipment and pharmaceuticals—all petroleum products: gone. This is a reality that no power grid transition can relieve. This is not to say that renewable energy sources will not be needed—electricity is required for essential considerations such as cooking and transportation—as the world transitions. But it is unavoidably clear that 1.4 billion Indians cannot consume energy and materials at the rate of the wealthiest ten percent. Questions about moderation and limits must become part of the national, and international, discussion. We need to be asking who benefits and who loses with each next lot of coal or lithium mined, or forest razed, or river dammed, or each next megaton of carbon dioxide burned off. Where do we locate the justice in that unit of extraction and pollution and destruction? How is it sustainable? How much is enough? And what, do we figure, will come next?
Meeting our moment in history requires of us the most difficult task of all: an individual and collective reckoning with our past, with our present, with who we are and who we want to be as a people and as a world. Building a sustainable and resilient human enterprise is neither the task of corporations nor the promise of modern technology. It is the work of humane societies and the promise of communities. It begins with telling stories about what is possible and desirable that are different from the stories that brought us to this brink.
If India truly wants to leapfrog the mistakes of the West and develop differently, it can begin by ceasing to follow it through any further missteps along the path of industrial consumerism, careening further into ecological overshoot and its existential risks for human beings and other living things. India can, instead, make good on the opening pledges contained in its INDC statement, apparently pulled from the deepest cultural substrate of this subcontinent:
To put forward and further propagate a healthy and sustainable way of living based on traditions and values of conservation and moderation, including through a mass movement for ‘LIFE’– ‘Lifestyle for Environment’ as a key to combating climate change. …
To adopt a climate friendly and a cleaner path than the one followed hitherto by others at corresponding level of economic development.37
But, at present, these words resound with the muffled thud of empty rhetoric.
___________________________________________________________________
NOTES
1. Floods in Godavari put focus on plight of those displaced due to Polavaram project by Srinivasa Rao Apprasu. Hindustan Times, Aug 21, 2021
2. Polavaram—displaced and nowhere to go: Ineligible for rehabilitation, many in a fix by Shagun. Down to Earth, Dec 15 2021
3. Box, J.E., Hubbard, A., Bahr, D.B. et al. Greenland ice sheet climate disequilibrium and committed sea-level rise. Nat. Clim. Chang. 12, 808–813 (2022)
4. State of the climate: How the world warmed in 2022 by Zeke Hausfater. Carbon Brief, January, 2023
5. Climate Change: Global Sea Level by Rebecca Lindsey. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA, April, 2022
6. Warning of unprecedented heatwaves as El Niño set to return in 2023 by Damian Carrington. Guardian, January 16, 2023.
7. Earth is on track to exceed 1.5C warming in the next decade, study using AI finds by Gabrielle Canon. Guardian, January 30, 2023
8. For a discussion on the matter, see the webpages of the Stockholm Resilience Center.
9. India’s Updated First Nationally Determined Contribution Under Paris Agreement (2021-2030)
10. ibid
11. National Electricity Plan (Draft) Generation Vol-I. Ministry of Power. Central Electricity Authority, September, 2022
12. India set to achieve 450 GW renewable energy installed capacity by 2030. Ministry of New and Renewable Energy, October 2021
13. Mapping India's Energy Policy 2022 by By Prateek Aggarwal, et. al. International Institute for Sustainable Development, June 2022
14. Coal in 2022: India’s Climate and Energy Evolution by Madhura Joshi. E3G, January, 2022
15. Coal will stay strong even as solar shines in India’s energy transition by Kundan Panday. Mongabay, September 21, 2022
16. Q&A: What Does India’s Updated Paris Agreement Pledge Mean for Climate Change? Aruna Chandrasekhar in Carbon Brief, September 2022
17. State Climate Change Planning: Has It Reached the Mainstream? by Elizabeth Gogoi. India in a Warming World, p 371
18. From Margins to Mainstream? State Climate Change Planning in India by Navroz K. Dubash and Anu Jogesh. India in a Warming World, p 362
19. India’s Engagement in Global Climate Negotiations from Rio to Paris* by Sandeep Sengupta. India in a Warming World, p 137–8
20. India in International Climate Negotiations: Chequered Trajectory by D. Raghunandan. India in a Warming World, p 188
21. Present at the Creation by Chandrasekha Dasgupta. India in a Warming World, p 151
22. Energy and Climate Change: A Just Transition for Indian Labour by Ashim Roy, Benny Kuruvilla, and Ankit Bhardwaj. India in a Warming World, page 286
23. Preface and Acknowledgements by Prakash Kashwan. Climate Justice in India, pg xvii
24. Caste Discrimination in UP’s Bundelkhand is Worsening the Water Woes of Dalits by Khabar Layariya. The Wire, June 7, 2019
25. Climate change is bad for your kidneys by Jeremy Plester. The Guardian, June 20, 2016
26. Introduction by Prakash Kashwan. Climate Justice in India, pg 13
27. See also Dishonoured by History: Criminal Tribes and British Colonial Policy by Meena Radhakrishna. Sangam Books, Ltd. 2001
28. For a range of details on this topic, see Shifting Ground: People, Animals, and Mobility in India's Environmental History by Mahesh Rangarajan and K. Sivaramakrishnan.
29. Climate Change and Uncertainty: Politics and perspectives by Shilpi Srivastava, Lyla Mehta, and Hans Nicolai Adam. The Politics of Climate Change and Uncertainty in India, pg 5
30. Analysis: Which Countries Are Responsible for Climate Change, Simon Evans in Carbon Brief, May 2021
31. CO2 Emissions per Capita, Worldometer, 2016
32. Climate Change and Uncertainty: Politics and perspectives by Shilpi Srivastava, Lyla Mehta, and Hans Nicolai Adam. The Politics of Climate Change and Uncertainty in India, pg 5
33. Bruckner, B., Hubacek, K., Shan, Y. et al. Impacts of poverty alleviation on national and global carbon emissions. Nat Sustain 5, 311–320 (2022).
34. The Future of Water in India by Shripad Dharmadhikary and Himanshu Thakkar. Alternative Futures: India Unleashed, pg 64
35. Environmental Governance in Future India: Principles, Structures, and Pathways by Sharachchandra Lele and Geetanjoy Sahu. Alternative Futures: India Unleashed, pg 52
36. Foreword to the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, 2018
37. India’s Updated First Nationally Determined Contribution Under Paris Agreement (2021-2030)
Comments