Policies and People | On climate adaptation, what India needs to do

India must develop new routes for raising internal finance for adaptation and localise climate science for administrators and communities

Twenty-five years ago, Anuj Kumar and his wife, Sarita, came to Delhi to work as daily wage labourers at a construction site. They planned to work for a few months in the city and then move back to their village in Bihar. But they stayed on because the contractor gave them regular work. They earned ₹25,000 per month. But in the last couple of years, their income has dropped to x` ₹12,000 per month. The reason: The climate crisis.

High temperatures would also hurt economic growth. (PTI)

“We knew that working at a construction site meant braving extreme weather conditions. But over the years, it has become unbearable to work during the day. We do not understand the science, but we are experiencing changing weather conditions. It is tremendously hot these days and the humidity from May onwards makes it impossible for us to work outdoors,” said Kumar. “Our productivity has declined and we fall sick more often now. Sarita has suffered two major attacks of heatstroke and we have lost count of dehydration episodes”.

Anuj and Sarita’s case is not an isolated one. A New Delhi-based contractor, Ramraj Mishra, told Climate Trends, a communications strategy initiative, that the productivity of labourers is declining due to increasing heat stress, and the construction window in the city is already shrinking.

The recently released Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s AR6 Working Group 2 report on Impacts, Adaptation & Vulnerability warns that populations in developing countries (for example, Mexico City, New Delhi, and Jakarta) may be especially vulnerable because they lack the resources to adapt to heatwaves. According to a report cited by IPCC, all Indian states will have regions that experience wet-bulb temperatures up to 30°C or more. A wet-bulb temperature, which combines heat and humidity, of 31°C, is hazardous for humans.

High temperatures would also hurt economic growth. Last year, writing in Hindustan Times, Anant Sudarshan, South Asia director, Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago, said that their research has found that high temperatures consistently hurt economic output by reducing the productivity of human labour. During hot spells, people were less productive at work and more likely to be absent. “At an individual level, this is not surprising but aggregated together, we found that factories produced about two per cent less revenue for every degree rise in annual temperature. It is probably not a coincidence that previous scientific work over the last decade has found that countries consistently show lower Gross Domestic Product output and growth in hot years. Unproductive labour may be a big part of the explanation,” he added.

Adaptation: Little progress

Adaptation plays a crucial role in reducing exposure and vulnerability to the climate crisis. The lack of adaptation measures hinders the immediate socio-economic goals of a nation and its efforts to meet the 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals.

Unfortunately, as the IPCC report says, adaptation gaps exist between current levels of adaptation and levels needed to respond to impacts and reduce climate risks (high confidence). Most observed adaptation is fragmented, small in scale, incremental, sector-specific, designed to respond to current or near-term risks, and focused more on planning rather than implementation (high confidence). In addition, adaptation is unequally distributed across regions (high confidence), and gaps are partially driven by widening disparities between the estimated costs of adaptation and documented finance allocated to adaptation (high confidence).

The report adds that adaptation costs would go up to ₹300 billion per year within the decades, only to multiply further in the coming decades. But, unfortunately, a mere fraction of climate finance is spent on adaptation: 92% of global finance is used for mitigation and 8% for adaptation.

Bridging the funding gap

At a recent media roundtable, Professor Purnamita Dasgupta, Chair, Environmental Economics and Head, Environmental and Resource Economics Unit, Institute of Economic Growth, spoke on the finance conundrum.

“There are two ongoing parallel narratives. First, adaptation finance was pitched as a global dialogue earlier, acknowledging that $100 billion as climate finance is insufficient, especially to cover adaptation costs for developing countries. If the negotiations at recent COPs are indicators to go by, there is a shift in this narrative. Now the responsibility for raising adaptation finance is being imposed on developing countries,” she said.

Second, Dr Dasgupta added, that there is a need for a secondary narrative on internal finance with this shift. “We need our financial institutions, both public and private, to leverage their portfolios to bring returns from these investments and play a crucial role in this change. COP26 was a major disappointment to the scientific and climate community in terms of adaptation finance. This ever-widening gap for adaptation funding requires external finance, which in turn will help strengthen our internal frameworks. The trust deficit on this issue between the North and South needs to be bridged. Multilateral and bilateral financial institutions can play a unique role as catalysts for this change”.

To address the gap in capacities on climate finance, there is a need for a sound strategy and operationalising and execution of the plan. How can capacity be improved across multilateral, bilateral and domestic financial institutions? For example, she added, private institutions launching adaptation programmes will be packed with resources, but stakeholders who will be impacted by this need to be engaged.

While talking about solutions, Dr Dasgupta explained, there is a need to address critical questions: What’s in it for the business model; what kind of regulatory environment — compliance frameworks, and incentive structures — made available to support industry and sectors.

Localising climate science

Along with finance, there is a solid need to localise climate science and involve the communities. For example, while planning at the village panchayat level, how do you incorporate historical data, models, projections, vulnerabilities of the communities into planning, and do it systematically?

“To channelise climate information, develop simple structures of making climate information available to local communities that can guide the planning process. However, this needs to be systematised within the government process,” said Ashish Chaturvedi, head, environment, energy & resilience, UNDP.

There is a need to simplify vulnerability assessments that policymakers, as well as communities, can understand.

“Science has to be localised and simplified. You will have to find pathways to incorporate climate information at different levels of governance and planning. In the absence of this, development plans will overturn and lead to maladaptation,” added Chaturvedi.

The views expressed are personal