Climate change: Politicians want to shirk responsibility

The election campaign is underway in most parts of the country with political rallies, roadshows, and door-to-door campaigns. The proverbial political temperature is rising and so is the ground temperature.

This time, the election process spanning over two months is the longest in many decades and is taking place at the peak of Indian summer. The India Meteorological Department has predicted above-normal temperature peaks and more heatwave days than normal from March to June.

The Election Commission of India has issued a heatwave advisory but it covers only polling stations. Extreme weather conditions like heat waves pose a threat to human health and life. The rising incidence of extreme weather events - heatwaves, heavy rainfall, unseasonal snowfall, hailstorms – in recent decades is linked to climate change. This needs urgent action along with mitigation measures like cutting emissions. Yet climate change is missing from the election agenda.

Several factors are responsible for this situation. Climate change is a complex issue, which politicians find difficult to understand themselves and also to break down for voters and offer immediate and tangible solutions. Addressing climate change needs a long-term horizon, whereas political parties work on a five-year cycle.

Even in constituencies where urban flooding, landslides, deforestation, groundwater depletion or crop loss due to extreme weather are major problems, climate change or the environment does not become a poll issue as these are considered ‘local issues’ best left for municipal or assembly elections. Despite it impacting people’s lives and livelihoods in highly vulnerable regions like coastal areas or the hills, voters are still unclear if extreme weather events are just ‘nature’s wrath’ or a result of man-made actions and wrong policies.

How climate change is framed in voters’ minds through public discourse, civil society activism, and media framing also matters. There is still scepticism and denial about climate change. In reporting on international climate negotiations, India is projected as a leader and the rollout of ambitious green energy projects and the focus on electric mobility are touted as great success stories of climate action. This masks slow or no action on other fronts. On the other hand, independent voices and activists have lost steam or have been silenced. The coverage of climate change in popular media is episodic and sporadic. Because of all this, voters don’t perceive the severity of climate change as a problem which results in low demand for climate action during the election season.

Elsewhere in the world, climate change has not been a consistent political issue. In America, for instance, Al Gore single-handedly made climate change a political issue with his iconic, Oscar-winning documentary The Inconvenient Truth. All the gains in terms of changed public perception and shift to renewables were undone with a climate sceptic, Donald Trump, rising to the presidency a few years later. Climate change became an election issue in Australia after the conservative government of John Howard pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol. Germany’s Green Party – vocal against the fossil power industry – became more pragmatic after it joined the ‘Traffic Light’ coalition, now in power, two years ago.

Climate change is inherently a highly political issue at the global, national, and local levels. Powerful lobbies are working to derail or influence climate science, negotiations, adaptation and mitigation actions, and a transition to non-fossil energy. Politicians of different hues are a party to this game. By projecting it as something benign that requires people to take action on their own, politicians want to shirk their responsibility of taking tough action on policy and regulation fronts to address climate change. For climate change to become an election issue, voters will have to become aware of this.

(The writer is a columnist and author based in Delhi)