It is no surprise that 2024 is following in the footsteps of 2023, the hottest year ever recorded globally. Parts of India hovered near 50°C in June 2024, and many regions are now seeing flooding and landslides due to heavy monsoon rain. Last year saw 240 climate-related extreme events, the highest ever, claiming more than 12,000 lives — 30 per cent higher than in 2022. Further, India lost 86,000 homes and 1.25 lakh animals in 2023 due to extreme weather events.
As the world inches closer to breaching the 1.5°C threshold for global warming, weather-related extreme events such as heatwaves, floods, and droughts will become even more intense and frequent. This will impact lives, livelihoods, agriculture, infrastructure, and service delivery, including in crucial sectors such as health and education. These are also the primary areas in which Indian philanthropy and corporate social responsibility invest.
Out of the total annual spending of about Rs 26,000 crore in CSR by Indian corporates in 2021-22, only about 10 per cent is focused on environmental and climate themes. Despite the growing evidence on the impact of climate change on human health, nutrition security, agriculture, water availability, infrastructure, livelihoods, and more, we see limited CSR and philanthropic investments integrating a climate lens. But this is crucial to ensure that their interventions are resilient and relevant in a warming world.
Pick any sector, and soon, one can identify how the changing climate affects it. For instance, in healthcare, climate change would lead to new vector-borne diseases, greater heat strokes, especially among farmers and outdoor workers, and inundation of healthcare infrastructure. As per the World Health Organization (WHO), between 2030 and 2050, climate change is expected to cause approximately 2,50,000 additional deaths per year from undernutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress alone.
In agriculture, India saw up to 15 per cent decline in wheat output in 2022 due to the early onset of heat. For water investments, say, watersheds, the changing rainfall patterns would mean that current designs and structures would not be adequate and may even wash away in the coming years. Enhancing the capacity of human, natural and built resources to be adaptive and resilient to such climate impacts is essential if philanthropists and companies are genuinely interested in impact.
How to integrate a climate lens
Philanthropies and CSR must start by integrating a climate lens into each investment and not treating climate investments separately or as an afterthought. However, this is easier said than done. It requires building capacity and hiring talent with the ability to assess climate risks and design climate-sensitive solutions. Here are a few ways in which Indian CSR and philanthropists can start integrating the climate lens.
Ask how relevant and resilient your investments would be in a 1.5-2°C hotter world. For instance, how valuable is promoting capacity building of farmers for a horticulture crop in a region where that crop can no longer be grown in 10 years? It would be a futile investment. Similarly, building a hospital with an infrastructure design that will not withstand intense floods five years down the line would be a sunk investment — quite literally.
Invest in understanding the local impacts of climate change in your intervention areas. Each institution could invest in building such an understanding in their regions of interest. But it would be even better if they could collectively, with other philanthropies, invest in creating publicly accessible solutions that map granular climate risks in various sectors—health, agriculture, livelihoods, natural resources, water, and built infrastructure. Investing in platforms such as a climate risk atlas for India would be useful for all public and development sector stakeholders.
Assess the differentiated impact of climate across gender, social, and economic classes in investment regions. Those invested in the overall development of a village, panchayat, block or district must understand that not everyone in a local community is equally resilient to climate change impacts such as a heatwave.
According to a recent report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), a 1°C increase in long-term average temperatures is associated with a 34 per cent reduction in the total incomes of female-headed households, compared to male-headed ones. Thus, specific interventions targeting the more vulnerable such as women and girls in families and poorer groups are essential to mitigate the worse impact of climate change.
Focus on climate change mitigation and adaptation simultaneously. According to a study by the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), 80 per cent of Indians already live in districts vulnerable to extreme climate events. Thus, it is important to build communities’ adaptive capacity for the immediate and long-term impacts of climate change. Simultaneously, many of the interventions can also yield important climate change mitigation benefits (often with a few tweaks in programme designs).
For instance, training farmers to adopt agroecological practices such as 365-day cover crops (crops that cover the soil year-round) and mixed cropping would both withstand extreme weather and help sequester more carbon in the soil and reduce farming-associated emissions. Encourage such investments with concomitant climate adaptation and mitigation focus.
Investments focused on economic upliftment should encourage a place-based economy that builds greater self-sufficiency and resilience in communities. As supply chains become more and more globally interlinked, they increase the resource and emission footprint as well as the vulnerability of the system.
In a climate-changed world, philanthropy can step in to derisk and catalyse economic activities via sustainable use and management of local bioresources such as the promotion of biomaterials instead of plastics and natural fibres instead of polyesters. Moreover, CSR and corporations, in particular, can kindle market demand for such locally produced solutions to help accelerate such place-based economies.
Appreciating climate change’s intricate impacts on everything we do is the first step in resetting our mindsets. It affects people and businesses alike. We need to reshape our aspirations, agendas, and actions.
Abhishek is a Fellow and Director at the Council on Energy, Environment and Water (CEEW), and Sameer is the CEO of the Rainmatter Foundation. Views are personal.
(Edited by Humra Laeeq)