We are in the midst of a difficult time that’s also made one thing very clear... that what got us here will not take us where we want to go. Climate change is one such urgent and complex issue that calls for nothing short of reimaging our world. It’s not just a phenomenon that’s harming our environment; rather it’s potentially a trigger for large-scale devastation leading to social, economic, and political chaos. From where I am, as a leader of a non-profit that’s been working consistently on disasters in urban and rural India in the last two decades, I notice that in the last few years peoples’ struggle has gone from sustenance to survival in a big way.
This is deeply connected to the increasing frequency and unprecedented nature and scale of disasters in cities and villages alike. While people in rural India – farmers, fishermen, women, tribals, landless labourers etc. were already facing floods, cyclones etc. for many decades, the increased frequency and intensity of disasters has irreparably devastated generations. On the other hand, people in the cities are now experiencing more weather extremities while many geographies are caught off guard by completely reversed climate extremities like flooding in Srinagar, New York or London.
As many of us, in development work, earth sciences and other related fields will tell you… we can’t anymore ignore the call for change. BUT much like a caterpillar that needs to shun the very cocoon that holds it, to transform into a butterfly, we as humanity need courage and fearless to shun some fundamental ways that hold us together, for our collective survival.
In this regard three overarching foundational aspects need to change. First – shunning of ‘one solution for everything’ approach – we have to embrace the complexity of our world and go with plurality as a design element of any solution. It also alludes to a ‘systems’ instead of a ‘silos’ approach that thinks both vertically and horizontally, like a tree in a forest. The Second aspect is around inclusion; about including the voices of ‘them’ with the present voices of ‘us’. While there can be many different ways of defining them and us, one way to do that is to see ‘them’ as people/entities who don’t have a voice and are powerless right now and ‘us’ as people and entities who have the power and voice right now.
The upside of this will be the fresh input of insight and resource to our present capabilities and capacities in addressing climate change. The difficult part will, of course, be holding power accountable and putting the onus of action where the power is, instead of asking the victims of climate change to take the biggest action. The third aspect flowing from the first two principles is around technology– for it to be customized and contextualized to the diversity and complexity of our world.
Whether it’s green economy, carbon emissions, net zero, climate neutral technologies, we need to see technology through the lens of the local context and diversity. This will involve the difficult task of reorienting technology to a more distributed and diverse nature of our world; whether it’s agriculture, sustainable cities or any other SDG goal, one size fits all technology has already proven to be redundant.
Right from hybrid seeds to organic farming to electric cars and solar energy etc. it’s time to embrace the need for plurality of technology, especially to include the often side-lined grassroots technology, wisdom and knowledge. It’s already emerging on some fundamental aspects like water; even with great advances in technology we are facing a planetary water crisis while a few decades ago we had a lot of wells, ponds and other village water bodies with the least (widely) recognised technologies. Perhaps it’s time to value the local knowledge and practices also as technology.
Covid caught us by surprise and taught us, on a global scale, that even though it affected both the rich and the poor, the direction, distribution and diversity of the impact was experienced differently at the two ends of the society. The questions of inequality, indignity and injustice became bigger globally as a lot of already (pre-Covid) missed out people found themselves further ignored and neglected, threatening their very survival. Covid also taught us that the traditional humanitarian work has a lot of catching up to do, with its reactive, largely top down, supply driven approach.
Contrast this with the increasingly frequent, unprecedented and devastating nature of disasters and the gaps start to surface. One example in the initial months of Covid was that while the attention and resources got rightly channelized to health related work, hunger aggravated for people who worked daily to feed themselves. Unlike health, food and hunger didn’t find enough attention or resources immediately. In India and in many other countries Covid-19 has also been a crisis of joblessness.
Whether it’s green economy, carbon emissions, net zero, climate neutral technologies, we need to see technology through the lens of the local context and diversity
At Goonj and for many other non-profits globally, our twin goal in the last over a year has been (a) to keep people alive and (b) find them a means of dignified sustenance. Our rural livelihood initiative Vaapsi, has been mainly about restoring peoples’ livelihood in new ways by valuing their traditional wisdom and knowledge. Recognising this changed reality is critical to applying a lens of equity and social justice, to decide where and what to focus on, in the larger scheme of things.
We also need to change our lens around climate change and situate it in a larger perspective. All the work around risk assessment, modelling and mitigation cannot be done without the participation of the communities closest to the ground. And that’s why climate change solutions must be localised to have a groundswell of diverse triggers of positive results for our environment.
India as world’s lab for climate change innovation: Where we are today, I believe that this world has a lot of thinkers already, what we need urgently is: more doers, many different solutions and scale. It can no more be about any one initiative. It has to be about many initiatives partnering to create a new ecosystem.
And India is perfectly placed to be this lab for a new ecosystem making for responding to Climate Change. Why? Because India is among the most affected countries in the Global Climate Risk Index 2021, according to a latest report and as a country with aspirations of transitioning from a developing to a developed economy our rich tapestry of geographical and social diversity opens up immense possibilities.