
A liveable planet must remain on the agenda

Summary
With a rising climate crisis causing health threats and economic losses in India, integrating public health into climate action is crucial.“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once," noted author Ray Cummings. However, with landslides and floods hitting Kerala, Rajasthan facing scorching heat and water scarcity, urban flooding in Bengaluru, severe cold waves in Northern India, Himachal Pradesh’s prolonged monsoon season lifting its dengue case count, forest fires devastating Uttarakhand, and India experiencing its hottest October in 123 years in 2024, it feels as if the climate crisis is unfurling simultaneously across the country against a ticking clock.
A study recently found that more than half of India’s population residing in over 340 districts are highly vulnerable to the health effects of climate change. This can also escalate healthcare costs, threaten access to water and food, impact livelihoods and productivity, and deepen poverty. Heat exposure in India in 2022 alone resulted in an estimated income loss to the tune of US$219 billion--6.3% of the country’s GDP, according to an India Spend report that cited Lancet data. Observing the interconnectedness of India’s climate and health crises presents an urgent reminder that our window of opportunity to act is closing and we cannot afford to carry on business as usual, in today’s day and age.
A critical target that we must steer action towards is reshaping the climate action agenda around health – and the World Health Organization’s emphasis on embedding health into conversations at the UN COP29 marked an encouraging step forward. As we approach the upcoming Union Budget FY25-26, we hope to see a greater impetus for climate action that also integrates a focus on public health, with allocations across clean energy, climate surveillance and research, and community-level interventions to mitigate adverse effects. It is paramount to highlight that climate change does not affect everyone equally – and efforts to build resilience into our systems must focus disproportionately on protecting the climate vulnerable.
Certain groups face the highest climate-induced health risks, from marginalized and low-income populations to women, children, the elderly, and those with pre-existing health conditions. Health effects vary — for instance, Indian women spend 150 million workdays annually fetching water, according to the ORF Gender Compendium report. By 2050, warming is expected to increase the time women without household access to water spend collecting it daily by 30% globally, says a Nature study. Physically demanding tasks like fetching water and cooking – especially with carbon monoxide-emitting wood-burning stoves – place considerable burden on women. The emotional toll, such as of caregiving responsibilities, is also significant.
Other consequences include water-borne illnesses and displacement threatening coastal populations, as well as the hazardous impact on labourers, construction workers, and farmers exposed to extreme temperatures for long durations. It is immensely clear: if unaddressed, the changing climate will continue threatening the well-being of our communities and the quality and speed of healthcare delivery that can reach them. We must warm up to climate action and health equity before it’s too late, and the upcoming budget presents an opportunity to spearhead this focus.
The government’s involvement, such as to implement the ministry of health and family welfare’s National Action Plan on Climate Change and Human Health, can invite scalable efforts—for instance, its framework lays out region-specific plans tailored to their vulnerabilities. We have reasons to be hopeful that this, particularly with the recently inaugurated ‘Mission Mausam’ initiative to enhance weather surveillance, will benefit sectors including health and agriculture, and minimize the impact of natural disasters. Investing in central data management and informatics systems issuing alerts and predicting outbreaks can offer immense benefits.
Uniting stakeholders is also vital – for example, the government and academia can work together to prioritize climate-health research and support clean energy policies. Further, corporates can contribute by funding research on air quality monitoring, introducing workplace employee health programmes, and reducing their carbon footprint by investing in clean energy and building supply chain resilience.
Philanthropies, too, play their part: advocating for large-scale climate policies, bridging funding gaps equitably, and building connections across stakeholders to accelerate climate action particularly supporting vulnerable communities. They also engage directly with communities on-ground for climate resilience planning. Simultaneously, they support initiatives ranging from mitigating the impacts of infectious diseases to offering cooling centres for heat-related health concerns. One example to accelerate solutions for the climate and health crises is the India Health Fund, a non-profit organization seeded by the Tata Trusts, to address issues related to infectious diseases. Through such models, innovations like AI-based imaging tools can be funded and incubated, such as to detect TB by scanning chest X-rays while considering contextual factors like air quality or to detect respiratory disorders with just a cough sample.
To truly scale up these efforts, we must also advance collaborations, which hold great potential for knowledge-sharing, advancing research to scale local mitigation strategies, financing, and climate education. Taking a cue from this, we incubated the India Climate Collaborative, a first-of-its-kind platform at the intersection of climate and philanthropy to accelerate community-led climate action and build a resilient ecosystem in India.
As India stands at a crossroads, facing escalating and extreme weather conditions, the need for transformative and decisive climate-smart action has never been more critical. Today, it is the seventh most vulnerable country to climate change globally, according to the Global Climate Index. The effects of this on the health of underserved communities, from cholera outbreaks to child stunting, have been especially pronounced.
Now, particularly with the budget on the horizon, is the time to accelerate purposeful innovation and build resilience within our systems so that we can respond equitably to pressing threats, together. The future of our people and our nation’s natural resources depends on it. India has not contributed to the global climate crisis given the low level of our per capita greenhouse gas emissions, but we must be a part of the solution.
Siddharth Sharma is the CEO of Tata Trusts.