Is climate change an election issue in India? Premium

The Hindu looks at how Indian voters perceive climate change, what climate agenda is centred in political campaigns and if this could be India’s year of voting for ‘green’ policies.

In 2024, the field is set for some of the most crucial election contests in recent times. More than four billion people will head to polls across 64 nations. Almost a fourth of them will vote in the 2024 Lok Sabha elections in India. Elections in the time of a climate crisis, however, complicate issues.

This year’s political action unfolds against an unprecedented backdrop of environmental turbulence. 2023 was the hottest year on record in at least 173 years, and global average temperatures, for the first time, crossed the 1.5° Celsius warming threshold. India houses the largest population exposed to extreme weather events, a proportion of people that has increased since 2010. Climate change is moving from the periphery to capture electoral interest as the earth shows visible signs of impact, says Aarti Khosla, founder of Climate Trends. Parties have in turn weaved green policies, renewable energy targets and pollution-free mandates into their election manifestos.

Others, however, note the churn is slow and separate, affecting people but not always influencing outcomes. The Hindu looks at how Indian voters perceive climate change, where it ranks in their list of electoral concerns, and the tide of ‘green’ agendas in India’s 2024 political wars. 

2024 is the midway point to the 2030 Agenda, a year by when scientists say Earth should have halved its greenhouse gas emissions. India saw extreme weather events almost every day from January to September 2023 — the new ‘abnormal’ in a warming world, according to the Centre for Science and Environment. Another report showed nine Indian States are most at-risk globally due to environmental decay. As Cyclone Michaung submerged Chennai and neighbouring districts last month, a DMK MP in the Parliament drew attention to the repeated damage to life and livelihood as Chennai goes under water. “Roads have become rivers,” and rivers like sea, as the city could not withstand nature’s fury, he said.

“India hosts the largest population that is threatened daily by rising cyclones, floods, rising sea levels, heatwaves, and droughts,” explains Roxy Koll, a climate scientist at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology. Millions have already become climate refugees.

Researchers have argued that all issues on the ballot in India in 2024 — unemployment, education, healthcare, economic growth, caste inequality — are linked to climate change. Studies link rising child marriages in West Bengal to natural disasters in Sunderbans, and domestic violence to heat waves. People living in slums and informal housing in Ahmedabad were more likely to be exposed to extreme temperatures, inequalities “robustly linked to a higher number of heat-related deaths among low-income groups,” a paper noted. The International Labour Organisation finds erratic rains and temperature shocks worsen unemployment and create conditions for precarious and informal work. Dr. Koll notes that securing food, water, jobs and energy for India’s billion-plus population is a mandate for any government, and “without tackling the impact of climate change, there is no way to address the issues in these sectors.”

Extreme weather events may also have a bearing on political outcomes. A working paper found temperature shocks before an election year increased voter turnout, influenced the composition of the candidate pool, and favoured those candidates with an agricultural background. The extreme weather “increased the value voters place on agricultural issues and on policies which mitigate the effects of extreme temperatures, such as irrigation,” the researchers argued. In the 2019 Maharashtra Legislative Assembly Elections, the BJP and Shiv Sena lost seats in flood-ravaged western districts such as Kolhapur, Sangli and Satara. In one district, former Agriculture Minister Anil Sukhdeorao Bonde lost to a farmer leader. Dr. Koll, who wasn’t part of the research, concurs with these findings, adding that agriculture outcomes along with government response such as disaster relief to extreme weather become a deciding factor for rural voters. “A bad monsoon alone may not affect electoral fortunes, but its management definitely will,” he adds.