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The survey, preceding as it does the annual budget, is a document of the government’s outlook on economic matters. As such, it is important that a subject as critical as climate change does not receive short shrift. Some of the reasons for my disappointment with the survey’s treatment of climate change-related challenges are:
The apparent dismissal of mitigation: Stressing that India’s aspiration for low carbon growth presents trade-offs, the survey essentially dismisses the progress made on renewable energy by admitting that “effectively harnessing and scaling these resources remains challenging due to the lack of viable storage technologies and limited access to essential minerals.”
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Nothing wrong with this, per se, but why use it as a lead-up to an adaptation focus in the survey’s chapter on climate? If anything, it highlights the need for taking a holistic approach to problem-solving by addressing all aspects of any given value chain, a priori, as well as evaluating the range of low-carbon pathways available to the country in a systemic manner.
Adaptation is an indispensable part of a climate action strategy for any country. India is no exception. Given our massive population and highly skewed income distribution, it is true that the larger part of India does not have the resilience to deal with any shocks. And, while various measures being taken by the government to make India a developed country by 2047, like investing in mobility infrastructure, facilitating access to markets, etc, could help build this resilience, ensuring equitable access to the fruits of these efforts up-front will go a long way in building resilience.
It will also take time, while climate change is already upon us, with 2024 being the first full year to surpass the world’s 1.5° Celsius temperature-rise cap. We’re already experiencing the impact of extreme events, as is the rest of the world.Â
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So, building adaptive capacity and putting in place adaptation measures are urgent needs. For this, we need an action plan to build capacity in and strengthen our public institutions, support and build on the good work being done by grassroots NGOs, and identify vulnerabilities at an appropriate geographical scale so that strategies can be developed to address them, among many other actions.Â
Resilience in general can be created by various developmental initiatives. But resilience to climate change has to be built even in the world’s most developed countries. We need to clearly articulate these concepts and design interventions, including capital allocations, appropriately.
Urban resilience: India’s cities are challenged by inadequate spatial planning, unplanned-for growth driven by a migrant influx, poor infrastructure and services, ghettoization and suchlike. Their environmental footprints are large and growing due to inadequate planning and waste-disposal provisions. The survey has rightly focussed on this subject, but has only listed various government programmes under this heading. It doesn’t explain the difference these initiatives have made or the scale of the remaining challenge.Â
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Building climate resilience is not about providing basic services that should have been part of urban planning and development anyway. It is about the impacts of extreme events: increasing heat waves, over and above our already hot climate worsened by severe heat-island effects, the routine deluge suffered by cities unable to cope with normal rainfall, the health effects of climate events that remain undocumented, and so on.
Agriculture: The chapter on agriculture and food management too does little to address the vulnerabilities created by climate-related extreme events. Apart from a listing of initiatives, it curiously references a few academic papers. There is no reference to the urgency of stemming runaway land degradation where it addresses the need to increase the productivity of land, nor any practical reference to addressing the challenges of food waste or indeed crop damage from climate events.
Energy transition: While learning from international experiences is a good practice, it is important to use an appropriate set of countries as benchmarks. India’s energy context is very different from that of most developed countries, including our resource endowments.Â
India needs its own solutions to problems of energy access that developed countries do not face. The failure of developed countries to transition away from fossil fuels does not justify our continued dependence on fossil energy.Â
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We have our own set of opportunities provided by our resource endowments—including biomass, flexibility on path dependency, demographics, etc— based on which we have to chart our future energy-development course. We need to explicitly recognize the long-term implications and vulnerabilities of choices made today and not be cavalier about it.
There is much that remains to be said, but most importantly, it would help if the team behind the Economic Survey took some time to pause and reflect upon the purpose and utility of the document in the climate context and the criticality of crystal-gazing through current complexities for clarity on the future we seek to create.
The author is an independent expert on climate change and clean energy.
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