Economist Abhijit Banerjee Warns Of 'Hundreds Of Heat-Related Deaths' In India Without 'Drastic Policy Shift'

Economics Nobel laureate Abhijit Vinayak Banerjee has gradually increased his focus on climate change over about a decade and has got so deeply engaged in the subject his latest book, due to be published next year, is on climate change.

Given that the poor and poverty has remained at the centre of his economic research, focussing on climate change is not surprising. That the poorest will bear most of the brunt of increasing weather extremities is common knowledge. In a 2019 interview, Banerjee had said, “the question of climate changes is central to the challenges that the poor will face in the next fifty years.” His 2020 book, Good Economics for Hard Times, co-authored with Esther Dufflo—wife and fellow economist with whom he shared the economics Nobel—features a chapter on climate change.

It is his new quest that took him to interview workers, especially construction labourers, porters and cart pullers, in the north Indian city of Delhi and southern India’s Hyderabad. The surveys convince him that hundreds of outdoor workers in India will succumb to heat related deaths unless India takes swift policy measures to adapt to the impending scenario of more extreme-temperature days.

“During those surveys, I asked them whether they worked on specific days when the temperature was around 50 degree celsius. They all said, yes. Workers in the informal sectors have no relief even in 50 degrees, which the body is not meant to tolerate,” Banerjee said during a session at the Exide Kolkata Literary Meet on January 27.

“We need to design schemes so that on very hot days people do not need to work and still get paid. Otherwise, many people will die,” he added.

Banerjee and Dufflo recently revised their award winning 2011 book, Poor Economics. They tried to figure out, on the basis of the new data, surveys and field visits over more than a decade, where they got it right and where their hypothesis turned out to be wrong and what were the big things that they missed in the 2011 edition of the book. Among aspects that found their place in the new edition are the role of gender and climate change.

Speaking at the Kolkata event, Banerjee argued for greater focus on adaptation measures over the current priority given to mitigation methods. Mitigations refer to ways to reduce global warming, including transitioning away from fossil fuel, while adaptation means increasing people’s adaptability to the “new normals” of increasing extreme weather events, heat being the most crucial factor in the Indian subcontinent.

Banerjee argued that if mitigation were truly that successful, then we should have come to a stage today where the world could declare the end of climate change. However, such a situation has not arrived.

“Right now, if there are no radical policy shifts in countries like India, the projections are for the climate to get 2.5% to 4.5% warmer by the end of the century. That will take a lot of lives,” he said.

The Paris Agreement (Article 9.4) of 2015 states that the provision of scaled-up financial resources should aim to achieve a balance between adaptation and mitigation. However, in reality, as of 2025, adaptation finance has remained at between 20 and 25 per cent of committed concessional finance across all sources, according to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

Developing or underdeveloped nations need these adaptation funds urgently, but the developed nations have not been keeping their promises.

In that 2019 interview, while acknowledging that the world had come to an “absolutely critical moment to act”, he also did not believe making lifestyle changes for reducing energy consumption to be “so hard to do.”

That optimism may have taken a few blows with US President Donald Trump helming affairs. “In many ways, the books and all my work comes out of what we may call a liberal hope or a liberal illusion that the world can be made a better place. Then, you hit moments when someone like Trump reflects the idea that no, the world can only be made a more unequal place,” Banerjee said.

He pointed out that the erstwhile Joe Biden administration invested a lot in redirecting US policies towards addressing climate change. The US, despite being the largest contributor to global warming, has been insistent on denying historical responsibilities—a stubbornness that the Biden administration was trying to reduce.

Then, suddenly, Trump came and took an opposite path, declaring a war against science and concerns related to climatic changes, leaving everyone paralysed, and eventually pulling the US out of the Paris Agreement.

While the US moves have dealt a major blow to the global fight against climatic changes, India’s position has further complicated the global negotiations, Banerjee feels.

India argues that it can not do much about climate change until one (developed nations) pays for it. Banerjee finds India’s position “reasonable and justified.” Indeed, considering the historical role in causing global warming, India’s contribution still remains negligible. At the same time, India’s energy consumption is only slated to rise, and rather significantly, over the coming decades.

Pointing to Global North’s failure in ensuring “climate justice”, India rejected a climate finance deal adopted at the United Nations COP29 summit in Baku in 2024, calling it unfair on developing nations. At the COP30 conference in Belem, Brasil, India pressed developed nations to first fulfill their finance obligations under Article 9.1 of the Paris Agreement. It also objected to trade-restrictive mechanisms.

“At the international level, India’s current position means a breakdown of negotiations. India is a very important voice holding the whole climate programme. Everybody is a bit frozen by the Indian reaction,” he said.

Banerjee agrees that the countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which together have the highest historical responsibility in warming the world with emissions, will have to come to the table for any deal to be broken. However, India, too, needs to open up a negotiating position. “We owe it to the world to negotiate a way forward,” he feels.