2024 Lok Sabha Elections: A Tipping Point For How India Will Handle The Climate Crisis

With its large electorate, India surpasses elections in the European Union and the United States of America by a mile. It has another key difference; climate and sustainability are not the focus of the main political contenders.

This also impacts how the country will shape its priorities for the next few years to come as India approaches the halfway mark to its Net Zero by 2070 goal.  

For India, there is still a long path to tread between the understanding of climate change as a major tipping point versus its status as an auxiliary issue, not in the same league as economic and communal questions facing the nation.

Per Climate Trends polls, only 8 per cent of Indians as of November 2023 and 14 per cent in December 2023 saw climate change as a major issue. Similarly, climate change was not mentioned as an issue in the election manifestos of the BJP and the Congress party until the last Lok Sabha elections in 2019.

Elections And Climate Change: A Global View

In contrast, a stance on the climate crisis is deemed to be one of the hot topics for swaying voter confidence, both in the past as well as the present in the US and Europe. 

For instance, the 2023 elections in the Netherlands, touted to be one of the most ambitious countries on climate change, saw its two leading political parties, GroenLinks (GreenLeft) and right-wing PVV, take up the climate discourse. They platformed heavily on green transition, climate funding, and emissions mitigation, along with the question of regulating corporate impact on the climate.

For the European Commission elections in June, a recent election survey demonstrated how citizens considered action against climate change as one of the top four priorities they want the elected Parliament to tackle. It lagged behind poverty, public health, and a tied stance on economic support as well as defence and security. 

In the US, survey trends reveal how most voters want the government to address climate change better and are vocal about the priority. This is not merely a 2024 hot topic but has been a consistent and pressing concern over the years.

The Yale Climate Opinion Maps Project, which combines these responses since 2008 with demographic data from the US Census, shows a pattern of interest from citizens on which sustainability issues are in focus, what kind of support they ought to receive, and who should be institutionally responsible for tackling the said issues. 

The 2023 results showed that over 66 per cent believed developing clean energy should be a priority for the President and the Congress.

Limited Focus On Climate Change In India's Parliament

In India, while lawmakers do raise questions in parliament on heat waves, rainfall and earthquakes, the larger issue of climate change isn’t discussed much. 

This is despite climate disasters ravaging several states in the recent past. The 2018 floods and landslides in Kerala, the 2019 floods in Maharashtra, the 2019 floods in Bihar, and the current water crisis in Karnataka exemplify the significance of attending to the human-made conditions for the accelerating climate crisis.

Researchers from Azim Premji University and The Snow Leopard Trust in Seattle have shown that climate change as a topic formed a very small percentage (∼0.3 per cent) of the total number of parliamentary questions asked during 1999 and 2020.

Of these questions, a minuscule 0.007 per cent or six questions in 21 years were concerned with the impact of climate change on socio-economically marginalised communities such as women, indigenous tribes, etc. with “no questions related to differential impacts based on caste.”

This indifference is in stark conflict with data that shows how caste, marginalisation, and climate change are entwined in the country.

“People considered to be from a marginalised lower caste are more than three times as likely to migrate from certain parts of India due to the impacts of climate change,” noted a 2022 working paper from the International Institute for Environment and Development.

Party Manifestos And Climate Change 

The tide appears to be turning to some extent as is evident in the latest election manifestos of the national parties. Clean air appears to be a topic of integral interest across parties, which is the pulse of the electorate as well.

Notably, a survey conducted in Delhi in March this year by Warrior Moms, a collective of mothers founded in 2020 in India to combat climate change, revealed that “clean air (35 per cent) and waste management (25 per cent) were the top concerns of residents, especially those belonging to underprivileged backgrounds.”

The BJP manifesto, Sankalp Patra 2024, provides quantifiable and specific targets to assess specific environmental questions on clean air, green transition, as well as waste management. But the controversial impacts of its biodiversity and energy conservation policies, which have been rolled out without regulatory frameworks to curb unbridled corporate exploitation, loom large behind these pledges.

On the other hand, the Congress party seems to have a comprehensive and keenly targeted view when one compares the commitments and vision among the many manifestos. 

The party puts emphasis on climate finance, the Green New Deal takes its inspiration from global benchmarks, such as the European Green Deal and the US$ 370-billion Inflation Reduction Act from the US. The Congress party has an explicit focus on eliminating manual scavenging, which has dehumanised over 1.3 million Dalits and marginalised caste groups in India. 

The Election's Carbon Footprint

Despite the turning tide, election issues and focus areas of an elected administration both impact and are affected by the public consensus. Thus, there is urgent scope for action in exemplifying and demanding best practices when it comes to climate change by all stakeholders: political parties, voters, the media, and the Election Commission (ECI) as well.

For instance, considering the enormous footprint of the election process in India—estimated to be equivalent to burning 244 million litres of fossil fuel—the ECI can establish a framework in line with global standards. 

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change could be a good model to emulate. The ECI can then develop a method for assessing the complete carbon footprint of individual candidates as well as political parties.

To put theory into action, political parties can start with regular assessment and reporting of their environmental footprint in terms of emissions, energy usage, water and waste management, etc. to ensure accountability and environmental responsibility.

(The author is a climate and sustainability researcher at the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) in India. Views expressed are personal)