Time to adapt

India's efforts to address climate change are misaligned with what is required to protect its people and farms from extreme heat

- LAVEESH BHANDARI

The COP29 meetings have quite unambiguously revealed that the developed world will not pay for its sins. Consequently, developing countries in general—and India more so—will neither receive aid nor subsidised credit on the scales required. For this commentator, what has happened was entirely predictable. Aid on the scales required would not have been politically feasible anywhere in the developed world today. At best, they could have promised substantial credit facilities, which would have meant the Global South being straddled with inordinately high levels of debt. Anyhow, the transition-related debt problem will now not be faced. Instead, we now need to focus on the basic problem, namely, how to survive and prosper in an era where climate changes far more rapidly than we had hoped.

The challenge is not small. Evidence suggests that both the extent of change and the associated income losses are likely to be higher than expected. Climate models indicate that South Asia will be among the most highly impacted regions. It is now obvious that while average temperature increases will far exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, temperatures in specific locations on certain days will be much higher than we are used to. Therefore, the recent experience of 50 degrees Celsius-plus in North India was just a glimpse of what could happen much more widely and frequently.