Climate change is more about real and tangible changes in everyday lives than some catastrophe waiting to happen in the future, a Nobel laureate said.
“We should start thinking about climate change not as an increased probability of some extraordinarily bad event in some uncertain future. We should think about concrete, distinct, real changes in the quality of our lives now,” said Esther Duflo, who won the 2019 Nobel Prize in Economics with Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee and Michael Kremer.
On January 26, the final day of the Coal India Kolkata Literary Meet 2025, in association with The Telegraph, Duflo spoke about “climate change and the moral debt”. She was in conversation with industrialist Rudra Chatterjee.
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) has confirmed that 2024 is the warmest year on record. It was the first year to pass the 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming limit.
Duflo talked about the effects of this record heating to make her case.
“This year was the hottest year on record. You had massive heatwaves in India and Pakistan. One of the things that people tend to focus on is disasters. The rising sea level and the California fire. But more important perhaps for the lives of most people are not those disasters.... On one day in July this summer, 40 per cent of the world had... temperatures above what is sustainable for the human body over a long period.
“It is a combination of the temperature and humidity. The insufferable period is particularly insufferable if you are poor. In addition, it creates long-term damages that may or may not be visible. For example, kidney damage that may start in the young. The damages affect the quality and duration of life,” she said.
Chatterjee, whose companies produce fine tea and carpets, shared trade examples that ranged from north Bengal to Uttar Pradesh.
“Ten years ago, there was a rare instance of the temperature being more than 40 degrees Celsius (in north Bengal). Last year, we had 33 days of 40 degrees plus temperatures.... It still hasn’t happened to Darjeeling to that extent. But it will also change the character of tea if that were to happen,” he said.
“In carpets, it has affected every aspect. In Mirzapur, where we produce carpets, we usually have a 95 per cent to 100 per cent on-time delivery. In the months of May, June and July last year, this fell to 60 per cent because people could not work. In Australia, there was a drought and the sheep had 30 per cent less wool. Every aspect of the value chain was affected,” said Chatterjee.
He asked Duflo if climate change affected all countries equally. The economist said the effect was more pronounced on poor people.
The audience at the session
“It even affects people like you, who generally live a privileged life. It even affects me, to a certain extent, when I try to work in a non-air conditioned house in France in the summer. But it doesn’t really affect us nearly as much as it affects your workers; the ones who are less fortunate because they cannot afford not to work when it is very hot, or generally poor people,” she said.
Climate change is hitting hot countries harder, where a bulk of the world’s poor population lives, she said.
“Most of the countries, where a lot of the world’s poor live, are places that are already hot — parts of India, Bangladesh, Brazil, sub-Saharan Africa.... If you are starting from a hot baseline, then it is adding a lot of those hot days, days above 40 degrees Celsius.... So, it is much worse for hot countries and hot countries are where poor people live.
“Using what happened in the past and extrapolating to future climate change, a team has calculated how many more people will die because of climate change by 2100 if we do nothing.... What they find is that an extra six million people a year will die. That is about the same number of people who die from cancer today. Or the same number of people who die from old infectious diseases today. But here is the rub. Almost all these extra deaths due to climate change will take place in poor countries.... Even in poor countries, it is affecting the poorer more than others,” she said.