Only 895 Parliamentary questions related to climate change were raised by 1,019 MPs in the past two decades, just .03 per cent of questions asked, the study entitled Climate change: the missing discourse in the Indian Parliament showed
Amid the backdrop of India more and more witnessing rising temperatures and erratic rainfall and Europe being engulfed by a heatwave, a new study shows that not enough questions have been asked over the past two decades in India’s Parliament about climate change and its impact.
The study entitled Climate change: the missing discourse in the Indian Parliament showed that merely 895 unique parliamentary questions (PQs) related to climate change were raised by 1,019 Members of Parliament (MPs) from 1999 to 2019.
That’s just a fraction (0.3 per cent) of the total parliamentary questions asked, the study revealed.
As per The Hindu, the study conducted by Seema Mundoli, Zubin Jacob, Ranjini Murali and Harini Nagendra Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability, Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, and The Snow Leopard Trust, Seattle, USA, was published in Environmental Research – Climate.
The study examined Parliamentary questions (PQs) as a “crucial oversight tool” available to parliamentarians in all democracies.
“In a well-functioning democracy, parliamentary oversight can play an important role in climate change policy, ensuring that climate concerns are represented in national agendas. India is the largest democracy in the world and one of the countries’ most vulnerable to climate change,” says the study.
Let’s take a closer look at what the study revealed about India’s Parliament:
The researchers considered four questions:
How often are PQs raised about climate change?
Are vulnerable constituency interests being represented in the Parliament?
What kinds of questions do parliamentarians ask?
Where do parliamentarians get their information on climate change from?
As per The Quint, the PQs were largely concerned with the impacts (27.6per cent) and mitigation (23.4per cent) of climate change.
Impacts on agriculture (38.3per cent), coastal changes (28.6per cent), and health (13.4per cent) were of main interest, along with mitigation issues related to energy (43.6per cent), agriculture (21.8per cent), and aviation (9.1per cent), as per the report.
“The conversation on climate change is not broad and mainstreamed, so the discussions around economic effects and lifestyle concerns do not get correlated with policy understanding at the levels of politicians,” Aarti Khosla, director at Climate Trends, a non-profit, told Down To Earth.
Climate change is a technical and research-oriented subject; politicians are unable to see how it affects decisions in their constituencies, commercially, economically and socially. This is why they have failed to pick up this issue, Khosla added.
The study added that despite the significant and growing vulnerability of India to climate change:
“PQs related to climate change were largely missing. Although they have increased over time, we still find there is substantial room for growth, especially in critical areas of climate justice and adaptation relevant to the Indian context.”
The most questions (104) were asked in 2015, the largest spike in questions was in 2007 where the number of PQs jumped from just eight in 2006 to 53 in 2007, as per the report.
As per Down To Earth, 2015 incidentally was the year ‘Ministry of Environment and Forests’ was expanded and renamed as ‘Ministry of Environment Forests and Climate Change’.
“In these two years, questions were not related to the NAPCC and the change in the ministry’s name as such. The overall interest in climate change peaked with external events,” lead author Seema Mundoli, senior lecturer at Azim Premji University’s school of development, told Down To Earth.
Most PQs came from Maharashtra MPs (181), Andhra Pradesh MPs (105), Tamil Nadu MPs (99), Uttar Pradesh MPs (98), and Kerala Mps (69), while the least came from Manipur, Meghalaya, and Punjab (two each) and Mizoram (0).
A total of 92 women MPs asked 117 PQs and 927 men MPs asked 1,245 PQs, as per The Quint.
As per News18, only 10 per cent (91 questions) of the total questions asked by the MPs referred to a relevant source for their information. The MPs mostly cited studies (58.9per cent) done on climate change, followed by newspaper articles (22per cent), a conference held (11per cent), institutes as sources (5.6per cent), and international agreement (1.1per cent).
“Despite the importance of climate change for India’s future, we find that questions on climate change represent a very small fraction of all questions in India over the study period. Worryingly, questions on issues of climate justice, and differential impacts of climate change on vulnerable constituencies such as women, children and the poor are absent,” the researchers said, as per News18.
Despite the significant and growing vulnerability of India to climate change, the lack of focus on adaptation was particularly concerning. “With increasing risk from climate change, there is an urgent need to raise the discourse on climate change in Parliament,” the study concluded, as per News18.
India and climate change
As per News18, India is one the most vulnerable countries when it comes to climate change–ranked 29 out of 191 countries–due to its geographic size, climatic conditions and large population especially of vulnerable groups.
A man and a boy walk across the almost dried up bed of river Yamuna following hot weather in New Delhi, India. AP
“Extreme events like floods or heat waves seem to be becoming more frequent very quickly, and we need a scaling up of climate action plans, especially climate adaptation plans. More than climate denialism, people seem to be climate-blind, not seeing the urgency and intensity of the threat,” Harini Nagendra and Seema Mundoli, co-authors of the present study, told The Swaddle. “For this, a greater focus on climate change discussion in the House of Parliament will certainly help.”
As per The Hindu, temperatures over the Indian Ocean have risen by over 1?C since the 1950s, increasing extreme weather events.
India is the fourth worst-hit in climate migration with heat waves in India claiming an estimated 17,000 lives since the 1970s. Labour losses from rising heat, by one estimate, could reach INR1.6 lakh crore annually if global warming exceeds 2?C, with India among the hardest hit, the newspaper warned.
Further, climate change-induced disasters would have been India’s biggest red alert in recent years were it not for COVID. The recent heatwave in Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, and New Delhi; torrential downpours in south India in 2021; and the super cyclone Amphan that battered West Bengal and Odisha in 2020 are symbols of man-made climate change.
“But India, like elsewhere, still attributes these catastrophes to the wrath of mother nature rather than anthropogenic global warming,” the piece in The Hindu warned.
With inputs from agencies
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