As I've mentioned in previous blogs, the health effects are now well documented. In India, fuelwood (aka "traditional biomass") remains the main energy source for cooking in rural areas, accounting for 75% of total rural energy demand – a statistic which in itself reveals the extent of rural poverty in the country. WHO ranks the resultant indoor air pollution as the third highest risk to health in India, after malnutrition and unsafe water, with women and children most affected. Recent research (you can download a PDF report here) suggests it is responsible for an estimated 570,000 premature deaths each year in India.

Traditional cooking methods create lots of smoke

There's now increasing recognition of the contribution of traditional cookstoves to global warming, via emissions of soot, or "black carbon". Although short-lived in the atmosphere compared to greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, black carbon is a powerful absorber of solar radiation and therefore a significant contributor to global warming. For the first time through long-term field-based monitoring, researchers at The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in India have quantified the major contribution of traditional cooking practices to concentrations of black carbon (again, you can download the full report here).

As well its effects on health and global warming, widespread reliance on traditional cookstoves is a major source of drudgery for women, who in many rural areas spend several hours each day collecting fuelwood. This activity also contributes to degradation of forests. It's clear that if something can be done to reduce reliance on traditional, dirty cookstoves, we can expect multiple benefits – in terms of health, poverty, climate change and environmental sustainability.

On the face of it this might not appear a particularly difficult challenge, but in practice there are lots of barriers. These include a lack of appropriate technologies (for instance, stoves that deliver significantly better performance at an affordable cost), a need for clear performance standards and certification systems, lack of viable business models for distributing stoves to households, access to consumer finance, and insufficient awareness of the benefits of adopting improved cookstoves.

Overcoming these barriers will require complementary action by governments, the private sector and NGOs. The Indian government hopes that its National Biomass Cookstove Initiative will deliver a breakthrough on the sort of scale that's required.

At DFID, we are supporting these efforts through a new five-year partnership with TERI. The aim is to support research and development of new technologies and business and financing models, working with government, the private sector, banks and research institutions, to scale up deployment of new, improved cookstoves. The partnership will help TERI to expand and deepen the work it has already started on clean cooking energy – watch the video below for more on this:

We're excited about the prospects offered by our work with TERI. Past experience with cookstove initiatives suggests success is far from guaranteed, but hopefully with new approaches and more concerted action the chances will be better than before. And given the evidence on the development gains at stake, it's a risk worth taking.

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This blog is part of Blog Action Day - #BAD11 - an annual event that focuses bloggers around the world on one topic, for one day. Coinciding with World Food Day on 16 October, this year's Blog Action Day topic is 'food'.

Find out more about DFID's work in food and nutrition and get the latest updates on the food crisis in the Horn of Africa.

In between these imperatives, one of the issues that’s occupied most of my attention is that of access to energy. As I’ve highlighted in previous blogs, more than 400m Indians do not have access to electricity, and 75% of the population rely on fuelwood to meet their cooking energy needs. And the links between lack of access to modern energy and poverty and ill-health have been well documented – most recently in the 2010 edition of the World Energy Outlook, published by International Energy Agency and the UN Development Programme. 

The problems of a lack of electricity are plain to see, but encouragingly, promising solutions are at hand. Visit a remote village in India after dusk and the chances are that you will find dimly lit homes, closed shops, dark deserted streets and very few signs of life. This is true for the majority of remote villages in India, but not for village Ranidhera in Chhattisgarh state, which I visited recently to review a DFID-funded energy access programme implemented by Winrock International. 

In Ranidhera, a poor tribal village of 110 households, every evening after sunset, homes come alive with the magic of electricity. Kids gather under the soft white light of compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) to complete their homework, radios and TVs inform and entertain the elders and people from neighbouring villages bring their mobile phones to be charged for a payment. Outside, the shops are open until late and the village streets are lit by towering streetlights giving the village the look of a small town. Interestingly, every watt of this power comes from within the village. 

Matthew Wyatt, Head of DFID's Climate & Environment Dept, watches the children of Ranidhera use the village computer powered by the village mini-grid.

The residents of Ranidhera through their Village Energy Committee (VEC) and a women’s self help group run a power unit of three 3.5 KVA generators with 7.5 KVA backup capacity. The power unit provides three hours of domestic and three and a half hours of street lighting every night. To top it all, these generators are run on straight bio-diesel (without processing) produced from Jatropha seeds grown and pressed to extract oil in the village itself, thus making the village self-sufficient in energy production. The power unit also has a computer in its premises which is used to train village kids in basic computing skills - you can see the kids enjoying this facility in the accompanying picture. 

Supplying electricity to 97 tribal households, the Ranidhera power unit has been running successfully, with zero down time, for the last four years. There is almost 100% collection of service charges from the user households since the collection is managed by the VEC whose members are elected from the user households themselves. The costs to households, at Rs 25 (£0.33) per month for an 11 watt CFL and Rs 35 (£0.47) per month for a plug point, are offset by savings in spending on kerosene. The power unit has also enabled new sources of income for villagers, for example from a rice de-husking mill and from sale of de-oiled Jatropha pressed cakes. 

The project has demonstrated the potential for biomass-based Decentralised Distributed Generation (DDG), using standalone mini-grids to meet the energy needs of villages in remote areas. Although it costs more to generate power from biomass than conventional fuels, the costs of extending the electricity grid to remote areas can make such schemes economically viable. Village mini-grids and other off-grid solutions are also much less prone to leakage than the centralised grid which experiences transmission and distribution losses of up to 40% (a problem that DFID is helping state governments to address separately). 

I haven’t even mentioned the environmental benefits yet: not only is the biomass power carbon-neutral, by substituting for kerosene it also helps to cut down on indoor air pollution, a major cause of ill-health in poor rural households. 

Street lighting in Ranidhera

Where do decentralised renewable energy schemes like the Ranidhera mini-grid fit into the bigger picture? The Indian government recognises the major role they have to play in bringing electricity to remote villages for which central grid extension is unlikely to be economically viable, and provides capital subsidies for DDG schemes through some of its programmes. I think they are likely to prove attractive to a much larger number of villages which notionally are connected to the grid, but which suffer from the severe shortages in grid supply that are common across much of the country. Ranidhera in fact is one such village – electricity lines were extended to the village outskirts by the state power utility about three years ago, but it has yet to receive a single KwH of electricity through these lines. 

Despite the potential, and proven viability of the technology, schemes like that in Ranidhera remain thin on the ground. A few social enterprises such as Husk Power Systems (which operates in Bihar, one of India’s poorest states) and Desi Power are active in the sector, but the total number of plants remains tiny in relation to need. There are many issues that need to be addressed if such projects are to operate successfully on a sustainable basis, including how to ensure fuel supply, how to access commercial financing, how to involve and train local villagers in the management of plant operations, how to ensure maintenance, and how to price services and manage collections. 

In short, what sort of business models will be needed to enable renewable energy mini-grids to really take off on a large scale, and what policy frameworks are needed to support this? These are the basic questions we will be working to try to find answers to, in partnership with the Indian government, private sector and civil society, over the next four years. They are equally relevant for other renewable energy products, such as solar lighting and clean cookstoves, which we will also be working on. For more on these watch this space!

Actually, there seems to be interesting seminars and conferences on climate change all year round in Delhi – far more than I can attend and still get my job done. It’s a positive sign of the rising level of interest and engagement with climate change issues here, and one of the things that makes this such a stimulating place to work.

The role of finance in relation to climate change has been a common theme in many of the recent events I’ve managed to get to. It was firmly on the agenda at the International Renewable Energy Conference (DIREC) held in Delhi at the end of October. DIREC was part trade fair, part policy forum, and quite an event – with over 10,000 participants registering on the first day alone. Getting lunch was an ordeal in itself.

Alternative livelihoods: solar power engineer Meenakshi Dewan. Picture: Abbie Trayler-Smith / Panos Pictures / DFID

I then organised a session on financing of climate change adaptation at an international workshop co-hosted by DFID, GTZ, USAID, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank. And just last weekend I joined a discussion on financing constraints for India’s National Solar Mission organised by the World Economic Forum.

Financing will be a crucial area of discussion at the Cancun climate summit, informed by the recently released final report of the UN Secretary-General’s High-Level Advisory Group on Climate Change Finance (AGF). While the AGF’s focus has been on options for mobilising the $100 billion a year by 2020 in international financing for developing countries agreed at last year’s Copenhagen summit, international resource mobilisation isn’t the only issue.

Developing countries such as India may wish to act on climate change for reasons of domestic self-interest, and there’s a lot still to be learned about how to mobilise and deliver the financing that will be needed.

Some lessons can be drawn from past experience with general development finance and efforts to catalyse private investment in infrastructure, for example, but these challenges are further complicated when it comes to climate change.

Consider investment in renewable energy. The bulk of this will need to come from private sector sources. The throng of business people and bankers present at DIREC was a sure sign that that the private sector sees huge opportunities in renewables. But there are many risks that need to be overcome to turn these into reality.

These include newish and often unproven technologies, a lack of experience on the part of developers and banks, and the fact that renewables projects typically require stable and predictable policy support in order to generate adequate returns.

The barriers are even greater in the case of off-grid renewables. These often offer the greatest potential to reach the poorest and most marginalised communities. But they are hampered by, among other things, the small scale (and therefore higher transaction costs) of such projects, challenges of serving remote markets including marketing, distribution and after-sales servicing, and not least the low incomes of customers.

At both the DIREC and WEF events I spoke to Harish Hande, CEO of SELCO, a Bangalore-based private company with a deserved reputation for successful innovation in off-grid renewables. According to Harish, off-grid receives much less policy attention than larger on-grid projects, despite delivering greater social impacts.

This urgently needs to be rectified, in his view, to encourage the creation of many more companies like SELCO and achieve coverage at the scale required to make a dent in India’s huge energy access deficit – around 400 million people do not have access to modern energy services. Although SELCO has to date reached 120,000 households, improving the incomes and quality of life of around 600,000 people, these numbers pale in comparison with the unmet need.

How can developing country governments, donors and the private sector work together to jointly overcome the many risks currently deterring private financing of renewables? Precisely what is needed to mitigate these risks will vary between technologies and countries, but it’s likely to require a combination of innovative financial mechanisms, capacity building for banks and government, and supportive regulatory and subsidy policies.

DFID is currently talking to institutional investors, financial institutions and multilateral development banks to better understand what’s needed. In India, we’ve been working with the Ministry of New & Renewable Energy to help design an improved subsidy scheme for off-grid renewables.

While there’s a lot that can be done through national policy initiatives and financial instruments, the potential impact of an international climate agreement should not be underestimated. A point made just recently by a group of private sector investors aiming to send a pre-Cancun message. Agreement on emission reduction targets, on international financing and reform of the Clean Development Mechanism, for example, could help provide the policy stability and predictability investors need, as well as unlocking much larger amounts of finance for investment in renewables and other areas.

Finally a word on adaptation to climate change, where the issues are quite different, but financing is no less critical. On the face of it, private financing would appear to be less promising for adaptation needs, given that they often involve higher costs, and benefits are felt mainly in the long term. Consider the issue in more depth however, and it’s possible to think of policies that might encourage private investment for adaptation.

One interesting angle discussed at last week’s workshop was how to design policies to encourage private sector innovation and deployment of adaptation technologies, such as efficient irrigation, clean drinking water and drought-resistant crop varieties. If market demand for such products can be assured, could these become as interesting a business opportunity as renewable energy? I’ll leave further discussion of this interesting possibility to a future blog…

Nothing demonstrates better how, to a very great extent, climate change will exacerbate existing development challenges. Take the fact that, with about 17% of the world’s population, India has just 4% of global freshwater resources. Plus, over 70% of annual rainfall occurs between June and September during the southwest monsoon. And almost a quarter of India’s total land area is prone to drought, and 12% to flooding. Either weak or excessive monsoons can result in economic loss and increased suffering on a large scale – as seen during the drought of 2009, and the monsoon floods of 2007 which displaced millions of people across northern India. 

Unpredictability and extremes of either shortage, or excess, are as much the problem as is average per capita availability of water. And these are precisely the problems that will intensify in future with climate change, according to scientific predictions. The Indian government has recognised the importance of better water resource management in addressing climate change, drawing up a national water mission as a key element of its national action plan on climate change. 

I’m not a water specialist myself. As an economist I count myself as strictly a layman on such matters. Luckily – and undoubtedly one of the boons of working in DFID – I have several colleagues based here in India who are water specialists, and can teach me a thing or two. So I asked them to share some of their wisdom for this blog. 

First up was Guy Howard, currently responsible for managing DFID’s research work in South Asia, who has spent most of his career working on water issues: 

Guy

 “Do you know how important groundwater is? In the UK 35% of domestic water supplies use groundwater, but in many developing countries it can account for 80% or more of water used. In the UK, we understand our groundwater resources very well, but in South Asia and Africa we have no idea how much is there, how long we can use it for or whether it is contaminated. And we know very little about how climate change will affect groundwater – this was obvious from the last round of Intergovermental Panel Climate Change (IPCC) reports. But we do know it is likely to be used even more as rivers and lakes become less reliable sources of water with changing rainfall. I was recently discussing climate change and water resources in South Asia with colleagues from the World Bank and was yet again struck by the lack of expertise in our partner countries. India, for example, relies very heavily on groundwater from its tubewells to irrigate the land that has driven the green revolution, but probably less than 15% of officials working on water are groundwater specialists. So what do we need to do? Well for a start we need understand better the climate impacts on groundwater. In South Asia, DFID will be working with others to help improve and coordinate research on this issue. But we also need to do more to help build up government, community and private sector capacity to manage the ‘hidden seas’ that lie beneath their feet, and we are looking at ways at how we can do this in future.” 

Next, Clare Shakya, regional climate change and water adviser for South Asia:  

Clare

 “I have just got back from Nepal where we had the donors meeting on the South Asia Water Initiative – a programme we, the Australians and Norwegians support through the World Bank to improve regional cooperation on water management, particularly in light of climate change. Our focus is on the rivers running south from the Himalaya – the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra rivers, that support the lives and livelihoods of 700 million people (take a look here to find out what is happening on the Himalayan rivers). But over the last year we have mostly looked at the Ganges – home to 500 million odd people – and the initial results of the World Bank’s analysis are pretty startling.  Also because we don’t understand the monsoon very well, climate change models are not well tuned into the region – and they all tell us different things. For this reason the IPCC calls this area a white spot. But what has surprised us in this first round of analysis is the things we thought were obvious – win-win things to do no matter how the climate changed, look like they may not work. The best example of this is that Bangladesh, India and Nepal were all expecting they could store water in Nepal to reduce flooding in the summer and release it in the dry season. But it looks like the mountains are too steep – and there just isn’t the storage available to reduce flooding in the main river.”  

Ashufta Alam is our senior infrastructure and urban adviser in India, with a special passion for the importance of toilets in development: 

Ashufta

 “Years ago, as a trainee engineer, I constructed latrines and installed handpumps. Working for DFID is less physically rewarding but the prize is much bigger: helping partners to deliver water and sanitation to millions of people. Here in India, where diarrhoea kills one thousand babies every day and harms the life chances of many more through poor nutrition, this really counts. My career has progressed but one basic truth has pretty much remained: that it is rarely the technology that matters - what counts is ‘how’ services get delivered and sustained, how community awareness and demand come about. A recent piece in the British Medical Journal does a fuller job in describing these challenges. A scientific approach will be increasingly vital for us as we learn almost from scratch how climate change will affect basic water and sanitation services, like in Bihar, which recorded floods in some districts and drought in others at the same time last year. Where do you defecate when your latrine is flooded? What will happen when traces of your excrement pass into your, or your neighbour’s, drinking water source? My basic truth will need to be upgraded to accommodate a possible need for newer technologies. What will remain the same will be the central role of communities in leading the charge.”  

Last but not least, Virinder Sharma is our rural livelihoods and environment adviser. Among other responsibilities, including advising on DFID India’s efforts to reduce its own carbon footprint, Virinder leads on DFID’s rural programmes in Madhya Pradesh (featured in my earlier blog post) and Orissa: 

Virinder

 “DFID’s innovative rural livelihoods programmes have demonstrated the role of better soil and water conservation, alongside other investments, in reducing poverty and strengthening the resilience of the rural poor to climatic stresses. We have documented this for our western Orissa programme. At the same time the Indian government has hugely increased the resources it is allocating through programmes such as the Integrated Watershed Management Programme (IWMP), and the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS). NREGS is the largest rural employment programme in the world and is now commonly referred to as a ‘green jobs’ and climate resilient programme as it is focused on natural resource conservation, including water management. It’s encouraging to see that the IWMP guidelines have incorporated lessons from donor and civil society supported innovations, evolving from purely natural resource-centric programmes to community participation and livelihood generation programmes over the last 25 years. Despite the increase in public resources, however, a lot of challenges remain as far as implementation and impact of these programmes is concerned, such as coordination at the village level and targeting of poverty and climate vulnerability.” 

My thanks to Guy, Clare, Ashufta and Virinder for sharing their perspectives. Groundwater, glacial melt, waterborne disease and micro-watersheds – it’s clear that the impacts of climate change on water will be felt in many different ways, and that taking these impacts into account adds a new complication to existing challenges which will test donors and policymakers alike. 

Read more water stories this Blog Action Day from our friends at the Foreign Office

First I paid a visit to Beddington Zero (fossil) Energy Development, or BedZED, the UK’s first large-scale sustainable community in south London. Following that I participated in a national conference in Delhi, co-sponsored by DFID, on sustainable and climate-resilient cities.

Although the motivation behind these two initiatives was quite different, what they both demonstrate is how climate change and sustainability call for fundamental changes in approach and thinking about development.

BedZED was motivated by the idea of ‘one planet living’ and the search for practical solutions to reduce the ecological footprint of people in developed countries in particular. Currently, if everyone in the world enjoyed the same lifestyle as the average western European, we would need three planets to support us. Through a holistic approach to sustainable living – including energy efficiency, solar energy, sustainable construction materials, sustainable transport, water conservation and recycling – BedZED has enabled its residents to reduce their ecological footprint much closer to ‘one planet living’.

Sue Riddlestone, co-founder of BioRegional which initiated BedZED, explained how practical lessons are being learned and are influencing the policies of the local authority and the central UK Government, as well as other countries. As an exemplar of visionary leadership, attention to detail in design and implementation and achievement on the ground, I found BedZED and BioRegional truly inspiring.

Back to Delhi and the national conference co-hosted by DFID and the Rockefeller Foundation on 8 - 9 September. City leaders and planners, policymakers, researchers and practitioners were all brought together for this conference. And it was clear from discussions that the priorities for India’s cities are somewhat different to that of the BedZED founders.

According to Navin Kumar, joint secretary in the Ministry of Urban Development, the critical issue is how to deal with increasing vulnerability, particularly poor communities. Although Mr Kumar also acknowledged the potential for reducing greenhouse gas emissions in the way services such as energy, waste management and transport are planned and provided.

Some context may help to illustrate why these issues are so important. As Ashvin Dayal of the Rockefeller Foundation noted at the conference, 350 - 400 million Indians are currently living in cities and a further 250 million will be added by 2030. This is the fastest rate of urbanisation outside China.

Urbanisation has become an important driver of economic growth and poverty reduction in recent years. But with it brings the danger of locking in vulnerability to climate change impacts such as water scarcity, flooding, extreme heat events and cyclones. As several speakers pointed out it is the increasingly numerous urban poor, concentrated in the most marginal areas (as depicted in the film Slumdog Millionaire) and with the fewest assets to fall back on who are most vulnerable.

At the same time, the fact that so much urban infrastructure remains to be built (in contrast to the UK and other Western countries) provides an opportunity to plan cities in ways that reduce both local environmental problems and greenhouse gas emissions. Cities such as Gorakhpur, Indore, Surat and Kolkata, all of which participated in the conference, are just starting to get to grips with the practical challenges of planning for climate change.

One of these is how to break down bureaucratic barriers and get different agencies to cooperate, given the range of responses needed. Such as land use planning, disaster planning, energy, water, solid waste management, transport planning and building standards. Another is how to involve local communities and other stakeholders in understanding the issues and identifying responses. A third is how to interpret information on climate change impacts, including scientific models, in ways that can inform practical courses of action. Planning for climate change in other words, is inseparable from the overall need for sound city governance that benefits all citizens, including the poor.

The Indian government has recently launched a sustainable habitats mission, under its national action plan for climate change, to support and encourage states and cities in this process. DFID is one of the leading donors in urban development in India. Focusing on poverty reduction, delivering basic services and strengthening city management. Having already planned support to over 40 cities over the next five years, DFID is well placed to help the Indian government implement its action plan.

We don’t have all the answers. Nobody does, yet. What was really encouraging therefore was to see so many institutions working in this area. Such as the Integrated Research and Action for Development, The Institute for Social and Environmental Transition (ISET), The Energy and Resources Institute and the Gorakhpur Environmental Action Group playing an active role in the Delhi conference.

In the words of Marcus Moench from ISET (who ironically had to rush off after the conference to help some friends affected by a climate-related disaster in his home town of Boulder, Colorado): "shared learning, both within cities and between technical agencies, will be one of the keys to success".

Agricultural Production Commissioner RN Senapaty addresses the workshop, with Principal Secretary Environment and Forests, UN Behera, seated on his left

A couple of weeks ago I found myself back in Bhubaneswar, the state capital of Orissa (see the Government of Orissa website), to attend a workshop convened by the state government as part of consultations about its Climate Change Action Plan(the draft Action Plan is available for public consultation on the government website). I always enjoy returning to Orissa, one of four DFID “focus states” in India on which I worked for several years and where I have many friends. It’s a hidden gem in many ways – a unique mix of outstanding temple architecture, history, natural beauty, wildlife, beaches, tribal culture, arts, and great cuisine. But is perhaps better known for its well-documented development challenges.

Participants at the workshop in Bhubaneswar

Actually the state has done pretty well in several respects over the last few years, turning around a public financial crisis and becoming a leading destination for private investment in India. Despite this the poverty rate remains the highest among all states, with 57% of the population living below the national poverty line. This single uncomfortable fact provides the crucial backdrop for the state’s evolving climate change strategy.

In India’s federal system, action by state governments will be needed for progress to be made at a national level – for this reason the central government recently asked all states to prepare their own plans in line with the National Action Plan on Climate Change (available at http://moef.nic.in/index.php). Orissa has been especially quick off the mark in acting on this. To my mind, no other state better demonstrates the importance of factoring climate change into development strategy.

Why? Looking at a range of criteria including floods, droughts, cyclones, heatwaves and agriculture, Orissa is among the most vulnerable states, if not the most vulnerable, to the impacts of climate change. It has been called the “disaster capital” of India. And it’s the poorest – so disproportionately represented in Orissa’s population – who will be least able to cope with the effects of climate change.

And looking at the sources of economic growth in the state, Orissa’s investment boom rests entirely on its huge mineral resources including bauxite and iron ore. In addition to local pollution effects, these mineral-based industries are major consumers of both energy and water. The future path taken by Orissa will therefore provide a test-case in how to reconcile economic transformation and job creation with environmental sustainability and carbon efficiency.

An impressive amount of analysis and consultation across all government departments, as well as a wide range of NGOs and private sector organisations, has gone into the preparation of the draft plan. Nevertheless Mr U.N. Behera, the senior state government official who has tirelessly led and overseen the process, made the point that this should be seen as the first step rather than a fixed and final plan. I thought this was spot on – given the limited international experience in planning for climate change, he understands that Orissa will be “learning by doing”.

Mr Behera and his colleagues deserve to succeed. The world should be watching to see how they fare. As a confirmed friend of Orissa, I certainly will be.

Panelists, L to R: Anupan Khanna, Prof U Shankar, Prof MS Swaminathan, Shantanu Mitra, Prof Sudhir Chellarajan

In Chennai recently to attend a conference organised by the Madras School of Economics and the South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics, I was honoured to be asked to participate in a panel discussion (Challenges in Mainstreaming Climate Change Adaptation: Research, Training and Policy Possibilities) chaired by Professor MS Swaminathan, the agriculturalist largely credited with the Green Revolution which transformed agricultural yields and food security in India. Although there’s considerable debate about the legacy of the Green Revolution, there’s little about the status of Prof Swaminathan, a truly legendary figure named by Time magazine as one of the 20 most influential Asians of the 20th century. (Find a summary of the conference here)

Many people nowadays talk of the need for a “second Green Revolution” to cope with the threat of climate change to agriculture. Swaminathan remains closely connected to live policy issues at the age of 85, most recently, as is clear from this interview, in the debate within India about genetically modified (GM) crops – a difficult and complex issue which could have an important bearing on the resilience of Indian agriculture to future climate change.

So I listened particularly carefully to his comments during the discussion, in which he talked of food security and water security as the most critical challenges due to climate change. Among the many points he made: that local action will be crucial for successful adaptation to climate change; and that greater “climate literacy” would be needed to enable this to happen.

Villagers showing a “resource map” they had created for their village – the green patches represent land newly irrigated under the project

Illustrating this point, the conference had heard earlier from a farmer from Andhra Pradesh who had been trained as a local “climate risk manager” under an initiative of the professor’s own MS Swaminathan Research Foundation. The job of these individuals is essentially to monitor important climatic data and disseminate it in real time to farmers; farmers accessing this information have seen their yields increase.

Just last week, Prof Swaminathan’s words came to mind when I found myself in Dindori, a remote rural district in central India, with rates of poverty and malnutrition among the highest in the country. Visiting largely tribal villages and talking to field-level staff, I saw how the DFID-funded Madhya Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Programme, working through institutions of local government, is building the resilience of poor communities through, among other things, helping them improve water availability, boost agricultural productivity, and diversify their sources of income. See this PDF for more information on DFID rural programmes in India.

A biogas plant now providing clean fuel for cooking, and potentially lighting, to a household without electricity

Many households have also been helped to install biogas plants which use manure – readily available locally – to generate clean cooking gas which is piped into their homes. District Coordinator, Dr Sailesh Shakalya, and other programme staff took me to visit the household whose biogas plant you can see in the photo. Inside, whilst making chai for us on her new, clean and efficient biogas stove, the lady of the house explained how the new device was saving time previously spent gathering firewood, and had also reduced the indoor air pollution which, as noted in my last blog is responsible for so much ill-health across rural India.

The programme struck me as an excellent example of climate change adaptation in practice, illustrating the large overlap between good development practice – especially in areas already suffering from climatic stresses such as drought – and resilience to climate change.

All this has been achieved, however, without explicitly addressing the “climate literacy” that Prof Swaminathan talked about. It left me wondering how much more effective the programme might be if it did so. Work is just getting underway on a similar programme in another state, West Bengal, which I hope will enable us to answer this question. Another illustration, if one was needed, of how climate change forces us to re-examine “traditional” development practice and learn new lessons.

One clear strand of opinion – especially prevalent among environmental campaigners and India’s strong NGO community – is that Copenhagen was a disaster for the world’s and India’s poor, who are most vulnerable to climate change. A typical reaction is that of the Centre for Science and Environment, one of India’s leading environmental thinktanks.

At the same time, the Indian government has come under fire from those who believe it went too far in announcing, on the eve of Copenhagen, a voluntary target to reduce India’s "emissions intensity" – the amount of CO2 emitted per dollar of economic output – by 20-25% below 2005 levels by 2020. According to these critics, India should have made no such commitments given its poverty levels, its very low carbon emissions per capita and the historical responsibility of the developed countries, who have failed to meet their own emission reduction targets.

Other domestic voices – admittedly a minority – have praised the Indian government for showing a willingness to be part of the solution even though India bears no historical responsibility, thus playing a constructive role in negotiations.

By far the most interesting and encouraging sign for me, however, is that India is not standing still waiting to see what emerges from the Copenhagen Accord. In the absence of a strong and binding international agreement, action on climate change will have to be driven by domestic benefits – and there’s every sign of this happening in India. Earlier this week the Minister for Environment (who featured in my last blog) gave a strong message to this effect.

Two impressive initiatives launched shortly before Copenhagen are the Jawaharlal Nehru National Solar Mission which aims to expand India’s solar power generation from its currently negligible level to 20,000 MW by 2022; and a new National Biomass Cookstove Initiative. The latter is truly exciting in that it promises to reduce carbon emissions whilst also tackling indoor air pollution – rated by the WHO as the third greatest risk to health in India.

There are many more examples of action, many of them from the “bottom-up” – from the private sector or local governments. It’s fertile ground for DFID cooperation, since we aim to put development and poverty reduction at the heart of our work on climate change. Improving the health of the poor, for example, is one of the main objectives of DFID overall in India. Last Wednesday I was chatting with Sabina Barnes, one of DFID’s team of Health Advisers here, who helped organise a conference a few months back on climate change and health. The conversation turned to the new cookstove initiative and how this could contribute to better health, particularly in rural areas. Sabina immediately saw the links, and we agreed to stay in touch on this issue.

The annual march to Parliament of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations

Finally, a word about the photograph. I took this at the annual march to Parliament of the National Confederation of Dalit Organisations, representing India’s former “Untouchables” and other socially-excluded people. It was just before Copenhagen – and for the first time ever, “climate justice” featured as one of their key demands. I wondered whether this was a sign of things to come, and if the voice of the poor themselves will start to be heard in the debate now hotting up.

As it happens, the other week Lord Stern – one of the protagonists of my first blog – was in Delhi, where he is well known in academic and policy circles as a longtime friend of India. On the Monday evening he delivered a public lecture to an audience of several hundred people, on the need for a global deal on climate change that is both ambitious enough to minimise the risks of catastrophic climate change, and that takes account of the deep inequity in emissions, both historically and (on a per capita basis) currently, between rich and developing countries.

I won’t go into detail about the content of Lord Stern’s lecture – his presentation is available here. But I wanted to highlight two points made by India’s Environment Minister, Jairam Ramesh, in his remarks following the lecture.

Jairam Ramesh is interviewed at Climate Week. Credit: Matthew McDermott

The first was that in his view, India is more vulnerable to climate change than any other country – “forget the Maldives and Bangladesh”, he said, “we are in the frontline”. He cited several reasons for this: the dependence of Indian agriculture on the vagaries of the monsoon; the crucial role played by threatened Himalayan glaciers in regulating water supply for hundreds of millions of Indians; the vulnerability of major population centres to sea level rise; and the fact that almost all of India’s considerable mineral wealth lies buried beneath forests – how to get at these without contributing to further climate change?

The story however is not simply one of vulnerability and costs – the Minister’s other really noteworthy point was that climate change also offers huge opportunities for India to become a leader in developing and supplying cleaner technologies to the rest of the world, bringing wider benefits in terms of economic prosperity and jobs. The potential scale of these opportunities is highlighted in a recent report from the UN Environment Programme which found that new investment in clean energy reached $155 billion worldwide in 2008, of which developing countries accounted for about $37bn – 27% up on 2007. If India has managed to become a world leader in information technology, why not low carbon technology?

I found the juxtaposition of these two points – vulnerability on the one hand, opportunity on the other – particularly interesting, and relevant. As I’ve heard it put by more than one person, if Martin Luther King had said “I have a nightmare”, it’s unlikely his words would have had quite the same effect!

We're working to help communities in India take a "green" path to development. Click the image for more info. Credit: DFID / Abbie Trayler-Smith

At DFID we are particularly interested in policies and investments that promote long-term economic growth and poverty reduction whilst simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions. It seems to me that technology is an issue which offers great potential for meeting these twin objectives; the roles of technology in addressing climate change, and of technological change in driving long term economic growth, have been long recognised.

The question is, what needs to be done to take advantage of the opportunities that Minister Ramesh talked about? Fundamentally it comes down to incentives and capacity, but the measures needed to create these will be many and varied. Many will require policy and cooperation at the international level, which is why technology is seen as a key pillar of any global climate deal. The role of supportive trade policies in the development and transfer of clean technology will also be important – when talking to the head of the UK government’s Trade Policy Unit last week I was struck by the extent to which she saw the WTO negotiations in terms of the knowledge economy, technology and innovation.

Domestically too, there is much that countries can do to position themselves to reap these opportunities. Conducive policies will be needed to support quality basic research, to enable new ideas to be commercialised as efficiently as possible on a large scale, and to improve the business environment more generally. That’s why DFID is working with InfoDev, a programme housed within the World Bank, to find ways of helping to stimulate innovation in clean technology in India. The conclusions of a recent conference bringing together technology innovators, entrepreneurs, financiers and policymakers to brainstorm ideas on how best to do this can be found in our news room.

Other parts of the UK government are also active on this issue - for example, the UK Research Councils have recently launched a joint research initiative with the Indian Department of Science and Technology on solar energy.  

As Minister Ramesh suggested, it’s an issue that really resonates with the Indian government, which has proposed setting up a network of innovation centres for clean technology, and recently hosted a major international conference on global cooperation for climate technology.

Technology innovation however is only a part of the story. There’s huge potential for already available technologies, in renewable energy for example, to be deployed on a much larger scale in ways that bring direct benefits to poor people. DFID programmes in India are also helping to demonstrate how this can be done – but I’ll leave that story for another time.

Bjorn Lomborg. Credit: Urban Mixer

If someone had suggested to me six or seven years ago that I would end up working on climate change, I would have taken it with a pinch of salt. If I thought much about the issue at all I would probably have been in the Bjorn Lomborg camp – the lauded and vilified (in equal measure) author of The Skeptical Environmentalist. Surely the predictions must be exaggerated a tiny bit by the green lobby groups? Surely there were more pressing priorities to spend money on, meeting basic needs in the here and now? I remember voicing these doubts in front of well-intentioned people brought in to tell us why we should take climate change so seriously. 

Admitting to this is a little embarrassing frankly, in view of my current job. There are so many committed people who have worked on the subject for years and really earned their credentials. Am I merely jumping on the climate change bandwagon? It’s a fair question. 

Sir Nicholas Stern speaking at the DFID Conference. Credit: Geoff Crawford

The truth is that my intellectual transformation began some years ago. I date it to 2006 when I read the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, led by the then-Chief Economist to the British Government, Sir Nicholas Stern. This book addressed the big questions that had been bugging me, considered the costs, the benefits, the risks and uncertainties associated with climate change, and did so dispassionately. I believe Sir Nick is on record as saying he had no views about climate change before he started work on the Stern Review. That, to me, made it all the more convincing. It changed my world view. 

At the time I was working in Indonesia. We held a brown-bag lunch in our office to discuss the Stern Review. That same week I caught The Simpsons movie, which also contributed to my environmental awareness (not really, but it is about the environment, and made me laugh quite a lot). But what made the issue real for me in Indonesia was seeing at first hand some of the work being done under a DFID-funded forestry programme. Deforestation accounts for about 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but about 80% in Indonesia. What was crystal clear was that no lasting solution would be possible that did not take fully into account the interests of the millions of predominantly poor people who live in or around these forests, and depend on them as sources of income. In other words, tackling climate change is intimately linked with tackling poverty. 

Since moving to my current job last year, the closeness of the links between climate change and poverty have been driven home to me. Despite its reputation as an emerging economic power, India is home to over 450 million poor people (19% more than the whole of Africa) and has one of the world’s highest rates of child malnutrition. These are the people who will be – indeed, already are being - most affected by climate change, which will increase poverty, hunger, child mortality and disease, and threaten access to safe drinking water. 

At the same time, any plan for reducing growth in greenhouse gas emissions in India, one of the world’s fastest growing economies, would be neither morally defensible nor politically saleable if it did not allow the economy to keep on growing fast enough to lift those 450m plus out of poverty. This in turn will mean expanding access to safe, reliable and affordable energy, which remains a critical unmet need for the majority of India’s poor. 

This perspective – the urgent, pressing challenge of safeguarding economic growth and poverty reduction – is central to the Indian government’s approach to any global deal on climate change. It is also central to the British government’s approach - I’m delighted to say, otherwise my job would be a lot more difficult. 

Rajendra Pachauri at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting. Credit: WEF

Finally, there’s one more critical element of my intellectual journey, which is the overwhelming scientific consensus that human-induced climate change is real and accelerating. Very few serious scientists now dispute this. It’s a body of evidence that is personified for me by Dr Rajendra Pachauri, the Indian scientist and Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore). 

One of the privileges of my current job is getting to interact with Dr Pachauri from time to time. Speaking to DFID staff recently at an event organised by The Energy & Resources Institute, which he heads, Dr Pachauri’s sobering message was that that even the bottom end of the range of IPCC projections for climate change would have serious damaging effects – which are already starting to be felt. Dr Pachauri has considerable faith in the power of scientific evidence to compel political action – I wonder if he will be proven right. 

Before I sign off, allow me to apologise for my self-indulgence – as it’s my first blog I hope I’ll be forgiven! In future posts I will aim to share with you some of the lessons we are learning as we grapple with the practical challenges of climate change and development.

This blog features as part of Blog Action Day and the Act on Copenhagen campaign