1655386263_1w1YW9_shekhar.jpg 
Neeta Misra leads Policy Matters; a global initiative focused on economic recovery from COVID-19, centering on the economy, people, and vulnerable communities. In this edition, she speaks with Shekhar Chandra, a doctoral student in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT on climate change.
Photo Credit :
What are the core issues at stake in the climate change discourse?
One issue is concerned with the counterfactuals of relevant climate parameters such as temperature and humidity using climate models under assumed increases in greenhouse gases (GHG) over pre-industrial levels. The second issue pertains to estimating the impacts of these expected changes on our economies and the necessary dollar cost to mitigate or manage these changes. Due to the dynamic complexity of our climate system and the non-linearity in the feedback effects caused by the underlying physical and chemical processes, these models give a wide range of estimates under various emission scenarios. This modeling assessment leads to three kinds of inquiries. Climate scientists strive to reduce uncertainties in these estimates by deploying even more sophisticated assessments. Policymakers use these estimates to envision politically and economically feasible long-term GHG reduction strategies to ward off the worst impacts of climate change. Denialists use this uncertainty to question whether climate change is at all real. In the background of these inquiries is lost the everyday implications of climate change, the sociology of climate change, and the disruptions in our social institutions caused by the changes in our climate rarely get the necessary attention.
What are the everyday implications of climate change?
Without access to data from climate models, ordinary individuals can tell us about falling water tables, increases in the average day- and night-time temperatures, and changes in seasonal rain patterns. All these changes together are affecting the lives of the people. Inter- and intra-regional migrations are causing stress to the family as the primary social institution. India’s poorest such as farmers and laborers are abandoning their ancestral villages in search of new livelihood opportunities due to the impact of climate change on local economies and prevailing extreme heat conditions. These laborers mostly settle in urban slums leaving behind their elders and communities. As summer temperatures touch human survivability limits, such patterns will become more common. Last year about 14 million people migrated due to climate change, which will treble by 2050. Unfortunately, these disruptions in our social institutions are not getting adequate attention in the debates on managing our climate because the focus primarily remains on checking the growth of GHG emissions.
How do we move forward?
We need to make adaptation part of our climate strategies. We need to pursue both mitigation and adaptation simultaneously, for mitigation helps in controlling unchecked growth in GHG emissions, and adaptation is crucial to managing those changes which are inevitable or have already started to impact human lives. The resilience response should be community led so that different communities could respond according to their specific needs in a way that helps them live the lives they have been living. The resilience infrastructure should be aimed at identifying and preserving the capabilities of the community, including their relationships with the land and other community members, that are disrupted by climate change. The identification allows us to include those capabilities in designing more equitable and just resilience solutions, specific to the needs of the community, making it possible for them to live lives that they value. Such change demands that we revisit our focus on climate change merely in terms of numbers and focus more on actual changes that are already occurring.