Environmentalism in the age of climate change

NAVROZ K. DUBASH

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INDIAN environmentalism has been an important, even defining, element of a distinctly Southern brand of environmentalism.1 Largely rooted in local struggles over access to and control over resources, a stylized Southern environmentalism is closely connected to concerns over social justice and driven by subalterns rather than professionals.2 From this perspective, the recent emergence of climate change as a meta-narrative for global environmentalism is profoundly unsettling. Introduced as a problem by scientists, carried forward by professional environmentalists from the North, and debated in the language of techno-managerialism and legalism, climate change would appear to be the embodiment of an ‘ecology of affluence’.3

In this article, I examine the tensions and challenges of Indian – and indeed Southern – environmentalism in an age of climate change. Like no other single issue, climate change has brought environmentalism into the political mainstream. Commerce and finance ministers increasingly register their presence at global environmental negotiations. Climate change is high up the agenda of mainstream global talk shops from the G-8 to Davos. In India, climate change has become a bone of foreign policy contention, and opinion columns are filled with climate commentaries, including by those who have demonstrated little interest in the subject before.

However, to many Indian environmentalists, this is a largely unrecognizable form of environmentalism – the environmentalism of the boardroom and the negotiating table. Does engaging with the climate change debate necessarily require embracing a different vision of environmentalism? Or is there a way to engage with climate change even while harnessing the energy and ideas of an environmentalism of the South? I suggest that there is indeed a way for Southern environmentalists to productively engage the climate change debate and, indeed, that it is necessary to do so. After laying out the tensions between climate change and Southern environmentalism, I spell out one way to conceptualize climate change that is consistent with the lived experience of local level environmental governance challenges.

To begin with, it is worth recalling the characteristics of climate change that have propelled the issue up the political agenda – the scale, scope, and potential implications of the problem.4 Climate change operates on a global scale. Greenhouse gases emitted in one place have a global aggregate effect due to the ‘greenhouse effect’ by which the sun’s energy is trapped within the atmosphere, and no specific effect on the place from which are emitted. As a result, reducing emissions in one place brings little gain unless emissions are reduced from enough places to make an appreciable difference to total emissions; climate change is truly a global collective action problem.

 

Moreover, the problem is almost inseparably linked to the historical process of industrial development. Carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas, is an inevitable waste product of fossil fuel burning, which has, since the early days of the industrial revolution, been the key to industrialization. If countries wish to increase living standards of their populations through industrialization, they either have to emit greenhouse gases or find dramatically new ways of living, or new technologies.

Finally, the scale and scope only matter because of the potential impacts of climate change. The projected impacts on India include water stress, lower crop yields, coastal flooding, more intense and frequent storms, greater disease burden, and accelerated biodiversity loss. At higher levels of emissions, the projected impacts are catastrophic and irreversible ‘runaway’ climatic change that could alter the basic conditions of life on the planet.

Despite these characteristics, Indian environmentalists have been reticent about engaging with the global climate change debate for at least two reasons. First, Indian environmentalists accurately view climate change as a malaise of fossil-fuel addicted industrialization and consumerism and, therefore, a problem largely caused by the North. The numbers back up this perception. Industrialized countries are responsible for about 77% of the accumulated stock of greenhouse gases.5 While emissions from developing countries have risen over time to the point where responsibility for current emissions, or flows, are about evenly divided between North and South, it is the stock of accumulated emissions that is salient in determining the impacts of climate change. A focus on the stock of greenhouse gases suggests that the North has used up available ‘development space’ to the detriment of the South. Climate change is, therefore, a matter of equity.

 

In the early days of the climate change debate, Southern environmentalists did engage with the issue based on this equity analysis.6 Their prescription was that the biosphere’s ability to absorb greenhouse gases should be treated as a global commons and allocated on a per capita basis to all the globe’s citizens. Those who have exceeded their quota of emissions, including historical emissions that are still in the atmosphere, should then be required to buy the right to emit from those who have a surplus.

This argument, perhaps unsurprisingly, has foundered on the rocks of political reality. A system based on per capita entitlements to emit greenhouse gases would imply massive wealth transfers today and into the future from industrialized to developing countries. Whether fair or not, industrialized countries have rejected an equity-based formulation in favour of one that requires countries to incrementally reduce emissions from their current levels that, in effect, grant squatters rights to existing emitters. For many Indian environmentalists, this response confirms the largely imperialist overtones of the issue, and leads them to argue instead for a de-linking with the climate debate. As Agarwal and Narain conclude in their landmark 1991 report on climate change: ‘Those who talk about global warming should concentrate on what ought to be done at home. The challenge for India is thus to get on with the job at hand and leave the business of dirty tricks and dirtying up the world to others.’7

 

A second reason for detachment has to do with climate imperialism with regard to other environmental issues. Climate change, it is feared, will unduly divert attention from other pressing environmental concerns. Some of these, such as indoor air pollution, are already a massive problem, and impact the lives of many of India’s poorest. Climate change may also skew trade-offs with other environmental and social concerns. An overwhelming concern with fixing carbon would call for aggressively promoting tree plantations, but this approach may come at the expense of policies aimed at biodiversity, or at the cost of people dwelling on degraded forest land. The imperative of climate mitigation is already leading to a nuclear power renaissance, despite decades of opposition to nuclear power for reasons of waste disposal, risk of accidents, and hazards to workers and populations.

Environmentalists are concerned that many decades of careful debate and learning about managing environmental and social issues within a democratic framework will get swept away by a single-minded focus on climate change. That the primarily policy tool discussed in climate circles is a carbon market, which would price carbon but not the other attributes of natural resources (carbon over biodiversity) or leave unpriced the social gains of productive activities (carbon over jobs), only reinforces these concerns. Once again, the reaction has been largely to disengage with national and international climate change discussions, or to engage reluctantly, from a stance of presumed resistance.

From the vantage point of an environmentalism of the South, both sets of concerns are meaningful and serious. However, if we take seriously the threat of climate change, disengagement with climate change is the wrong answer.

 

Delinking from the global debate as a response to Northern imperialist tendencies is unlikely to be productive. The cost of a failed climate regime would be borne disproportionately by India’s poor in the form of climate impacts. As a nation, displaying an inward looking stance denies us a full voice in crafting a global collective action response to climate change, however imperfect. In particular, effective participation in global discussions is necessary to keep the pressure on the North to act, even if what we win is well short of the principled ideal.

In addition, disengagement by Indian environmentalists risks leaving the field open to Indian votaries of a growth-first strategy, many of whom may have scant regard for concerns of social or environmental sustainability. While Indian environmentalists are engaged in a pitched battle over India’s development trajectory at home, they risk being uneasy bed-fellows overseas with growth-first advocates, for whom equity is a useful shield in the climate war of words. Indian environmentalists must be fully engaged to argue for a global regime that is both environmentally effective and equitable, and to avoid their agenda getting subverted to other purposes.

 

In response to the tendency to prioritize climate change over other environmental issues, stepping back from the debate is similarly limiting. While there are undoubtedly trade-offs between climate change and other issues, on the whole carbon intensity is a fairly good proxy for unsustainable development trajectories. For the most part, arguing for a climatefriendly world also brings local environmental gains. And there is little doubt that climate change impacts will indeed magnify other environment and development challenges. For example, climate change will negatively impact forest health and accelerate water scarcity. Hence, for many issues, there are local ‘co-benefits’ to effective climate mitigation and adaptation. Where the trade-offs are stark, such as on nuclear energy, it is particularly important to remain engaged in the debate to ensure that past victories are not un-done.

What, then, is the best approach to engaging with the climate change debate that retains the spirit of Southern environmentalism? The starting point is a re-formulation of climate from a diplomatic problem to a developmental problem. To do so, it may be effective to think of climate change as a problem of ‘multilevel governance’.8 This notion, which arises out of the European Union experience of governing across levels, is more metaphor than well-articulated theory. But it is useful in placing the emphasis on the ways in which policy solutions to complex problems require integration across different levels of governing – sub-national, national and global. The notion of multilevel governance also highlights that governance is increasingly the outcome of interaction between state and non-state actors, whether communities, civil society organizations or business. The starting point, however, should always be the least centralized entity – the principle of subsidiarity – whether the panchayat, the municipality, or the community.

 

For example, in thinking through linkages between forest use and climate change, the starting point should be community perspectives on forests and debates over related institutions, such as committees for joint forest management. The next levels to engage would be state and national, requiring engagement, for example, with contemporary arguments over whether and how to pursue compensatory afforestation. Only at the final level of analysis should these discussions be linked to climate change related debates over a proposed mechanism to promote Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). The relevant question to pose would be whether and how climate change discussions provide either a challenge or an opportunity for domestic objectives of sustainable development. This approach stands in contrast to the current tendency, which is to scramble to find some climate-related forest measure within India as a diplomatic tactic to win advantage or money from the global negotiations process.

 

The electricity sector presents a similar narrative. Instead of building our policy around barely credible scenarios of future power consumption, as is the conventional approach, we may be better served by examining our energy future from the ground up. What potential exists to systematically infuse our energy use with an end-use efficiency paradigm?9 What are the variety of ways in which we could provide reliable, cheap and clean power to that half of India’s population that is currently unelectrified? How do we harness new electricity regulatory institutions to both incentive energy efficiency and new renewable technologies, as also ensure that these efforts do not become a new avenue for rent seeking? All of these measures also carry implications for India’s energy security. A domestic analysis of necessary institutional and technological change required, and of parallel and related objectives such as energy security, should be the basis for our negotiating stance rather than crude numerical projections.

Water policy is perhaps the most intriguing prospect for interesting links between domestic and climate policy. Climate science projects that India will suffer increased uncertainty of water availability and considerable water stress in the midterm future due to melting of glaciers in the Himalayas. One response to these projected impacts is to build more water storage, and dams in particular, which is in keeping with the supply orientation of India’s water establishment. Another is to take steps toward doing more with available water by vastly increasing the efficiency of water use. Efforts at efficiency could impact urban building design to embrace on-site recycling of water, force better linkage between electricity use for irrigation and water, and lead to a rethinking of crop choice in water scarce environments. Climate change could conceivably, with the appropriate support of research and advocacy, provide the basis for tipping Indian water policy away from a supply and toward a demand and efficiency orientation.

 

These examples suggest that instead of insulating our policy-making establishment from climate change, we should instead insistently ask what implications climate change holds for our development priorities. While the Indian National Action Plan on Climate Change (NAPCC) formally, at least, adopts elements of this approach, the plan formulation process has largely been a closed door process, limited to ideas generated within the bureaucracy. Moreover, despite official protestations to the contrary, the NAPCC was initiated to generate output for external, diplomatic consumption rather than to drive change at home, and has too often (although not exclusively) borne the imprints of a marketing exercise.

With their long tradition of critical engagement with development policy-making, Indian environmentalists have an important role in stimulating a broader public discussion, and bringing to bear the realities of local implementation experience. Approaching global climate change from the ground up helps both retain a focus on domestic priorities, and provides a basis for a negotiating position.

However, it is important not to entirely link domestic measures to concerns of financing, either through a carbon market, or through a climate finance mechanism funded by the North. Funding is no doubt important, but many of the innovation in forests, energy and water require domestic institutional change which is not entirely, or even largely, dependent on money. Indeed, tying domestic change to carbon finance risks holding domestic policies for sustainable development hostage to the whims of the global climate regime.

 

As it turns out, the politics of global negotiations is moving in a direction consistent with the broad approach described here – climate change as a problem of multilevel governance. Developing countries have been arguing that while the North should take on absolute targets, the developing South should formulate ‘Nationally Appropriate Mitigation Actions’ or NAMAs. This language provides a way of linking domestic debate about sustainable development to global climate negotiations, but on terms consistent with an environmentalism of the South. While the promise of this approach depends heavily on negotiations to come, it is, at minimum, a useful starting point.

While climate change is indeed a major problem globally and for India, the imperialist overtones of the climate discourse are also a problem. However, for those who work on environmental issues in India, disengaging with the climate debate is not a productive option. Instead, it is more useful to engage fully, using a framework that allows constructive engagement with climate change, while retaining the insights and spirit of an environmentalism of the South.

 

Footnotes:

1. I draw on (and take some license with) with the work of Guha and Martinez-Alier who juxtapose a Southern environmentalism against a Northern ‘ecology of affluence’. Ramachandra Guha and Joan Martinez-Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South, Earthscan, London, 1997.

2. There are, no doubt, other strands of Indian environmentalism, notably a recent version of judiciary-driven environmentalism and even a version of corporate environmentalism. But the environmental imagination in India is still most closely associated with social movement led environmentalisms, notably the Chipko Andolan, the Narmada Bachao Andolan, and the struggle for justice following the Union Carbide industrial disaster at Bhopal.

3. Guha and Martinez Alier, 1997.

4. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report is widely regarded as the authoritative source on climate science: www.ipcc.ch

5. Based on carbon emissions from 1850-2000, with emissions data from the Carbon Analysis Indicator Tool, www.cait.org. This number decreases to 59% if carbon emissions from land use change are included.

6. This is one version of what is now a wide range of prescriptions that, in essence, focus on some version of a per capita allocation of a right to emit greenhouse gases. An early, and extremely influential articulation of this formulation is Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain, Global Warming in an Unequal World, Centre for Science and Environment, New Delhi, 1991.

7. Agarwal and Narain, p. 20.

8. There is now a large literature on multi-level governance. A starting point for entry of this literature to the climate change debate is Michele M. Betsill and Harriet Bulkeley, ‘Cities and the Multilevel Governance of Global Climate Change’, Global Governance 12(2), 141-159, 2006. A broader theoretical overview is available in Liesbet Hooghe and Gary Marks, ‘Unraveling the Central State, But How? Types of Multi-level Governance’, American Political Science Review 97(2), 2003.

9. There are hopeful signs that the Government of India is pursuing these questions through the Energy Efficiency mission of the National Action Plan on Climate Change.

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