Sunday 24 / November / 2024
New Delhi: Over the next three and a half decades, given the current global warming conditions, India is bound to experience many risks of climate change. The risks include heat waves, depleting water reserves, rising sea levels, and food shortages due to recurring droughts and dry spells.
The dangers are also likely to exacerbate national security concerns due to persistent aggression and possible migration from neighboring countries, which face the dangers of inundation. Thus, the impact is expected on ecological and socioeconomic systems as well as national security.
This is not true only for India, but many other countries are expected to face a similar fate if remedial actions are not taken on an urgent basis. The only way to deal with these multifaceted challenges is not to tackle each problem individually but rather arrive at solutions that simultaneously tackle the multifaceted demons.
To provide solutions to looming ecological disasters, India made a major global intervention with the launch of 'Lifestyle for the Environment- LiFE Movement.' The spirit of LiFE movement has been welcomed both nationally and internationally. Global leaders like Bill Gates and Prof. Cass Sunstein has felicitated India, and organizations like the World Economic Forum, UNEP, and UNDP have thanked India for the much-needed action and look forward to learning from it.
With the launch of LiFE, India has acquired a central proposition in the global fight against environmental degradation. The launch of LiFE mission at COP26 meeting at Glasgow can potentially revolutionize the discourse and action plans for sustainable development worldwide. What is the motive of the LiFE movement? As mentioned, the present environmental conditions call for multi-dimensional and intertwined policy measures. The multi-dimensionality arises in terms of their ecological outcomes, stakeholders’ involvement and sectors impacted by them.
Thus, the idea is to exploit all forms of interlinkages emerging from our actions on the environment. The LiFE campaign intends to increase the stakeholder base, incentivising everyone to act for the environment. The goal is to create a general consciousness that each of us has an opportunity cost attached to our choices and actions, realizing that each one stands to lose if we slack. The idea is simple: when we increase the number of stakeholders for environment conservation and justice, we eliminate the problems of adverse selection and free ridership. The idea for this movement is not to discipline individuals by taxing or fining them; rather, it is to create a common environmental consciousness for the long haul.
A sceptical mind would see the movement as a pro-corporate approach, where we burden individuals to be pro-environment, setting the corporate off the green leash. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The campaign brings everyone under the green leash, whether individuals, businesses, governments, or institutions, holding them accountable for their actions and choices. LiFE propagates human-centric solutions and collective action to address environmental problems. The crux of the individual centric approach is that the changes in the demand side of the system will automatically set the changes in the supply side. Consumers' choices, pro-environment demands, and voices often compel companies to produce sustainable products with greener technologies and environmentally friendly practices. For instance, we have seen how consumer voices have spread awareness about greenwashing, compelling companies to ensure actually sustainable and green practices .
The LiFE movement bases itself on the accountability model, a model where all participants in the society have an active role in deciding what to create, consume and conserve. Individuals are no longer passive recipients; they are the active voices that producers have to listen to. They are the active decision-makers who choose what to eat, use, wear, travel by, and dispose of.
The movement calls for a rubric: each individual to ask themselves if their action makes them ‘pro-planet people’ or not. Conservation has always existed in Indian ethos, but LiFE has brought renewed and refreshed attention by institutionalizing the concept of ‘demand-side changes.’ These demand-side changes make consumers demand more environmentally-conscious products and thus hold companies accountable if their practices do not align with the pro-planet agenda.
Apart from the consumer and producer actions, the government is another crucial stakeholder in the LiFE movement. The accountability model completes when the government acts as an enabler, actively creating conducive conditions for individuals to adopt greener routes, either through incentive schemes or protection of the voices of the pro-planet individuals. For instance, the e-vehicle market in India is growing due to the incentives put forth by the government for both the consumers and the producers, thus enabling both parties to make pro-plant decisions. The surge in electric buses on Indian roads and the establishment of bicycle stands in various cities in India are just one of many examples of the Indian government putting an enabling mechanism in place.
The LiFE movement has three main tenets. First is the focus on individual behaviour, which calls for making one's life an environmental movement, and always making environmentally conscious decisions. This is important for bringing our attention to concerns like fast fashion, electricity wastage, and e-waste generation.
The second tenet is to co-create globally, contributing to knowledge creation, dissemination, and production of scalable and sustainable technologies. The third tenet, which calls for leveraging local cultures, is a call in disguise for an inclusive path to sustainable development. It promotes learning from indigenous cultures and practices to lead a pro-planet life. Pro-planet actions do not exist in isolation from society and the economy.
These actions have a holistic and multi dimensional outlook that targets issues like poverty, employment generation, public health and safety equivocally. Again, take the case of e-vehicles, for instance. The rising demand for e-vehicles is an employment opportunity for many start-ups, skilled and unskilled workers, with blatantly obvious health and environment benefits through pollution mitigation. Similarly, banning single-use plastic mitigates health and pollution risks and promotes the local culture, such as using cloth bags. Many international studies have hailed India’s emergence as a global leader in clean energy revolution.
The unwavering commitment was shown by establishing a ministry exclusively dealing with renewable energy resources in 1992. Moreover, over the last decade, the government has taken active steps to expand renewable energy landscape by providing incentives for renewable energy adoption and impetus to the entrepreneurial ecosystem. Thus, India is on the path to converting itself into a renewable energy hub, with the rapid expansion of electric vehicles, especially as a mode of public transport, and cleaner sources of electricity by tapping sun and wind capacity. India’s LiFE mission is not meant to be one of the jargon lost in time's tides.
Instead, India has given the world a talisman: "Is this a pro-planet behaviour?”. It is a call for an action-oriented multi-stakeholder approach to the environment. The action taken under this mission need not come from complex protocols but simple conservatory actions taken by each individual sitting at home, at work, or in other public-private spaces.
