Environmental and climate policies must prioritise affordability to ensure that sustainable development benefits everyone, particularly poorer communities.
Higher costs of organic food, clean energy and pollution-control infrastructure risk making environmental solutions accessible only to the wealthy.
India needs agricultural practices that reduce production costs, improve farmers' livelihoods and make food more affordable without compromising sustainability.
Affordable wastewater management, safe reuse of treated waste and pollution prevention could help India address environmental challenges without relying on expensive infrastructure.
Clean energy must be accessible to those living in energy poverty, particularly women, because growth cannot be sustainable unless it is inclusive and affordable.
Affordability was on the ballot in the United States midterm elections. The reasons are obvious. The question we should be asking is why it has taken so long to bring it to the forefront of political debate, and what this shift now means for development in the US. I ask this in particular, as affordability lies at the core of sustainability for us in India.
In the US midterms, the Democrats’ “blue tsunami” swept the country, taking even states that had long been deeply and avowedly red Republican. The key issue was the Iran war, but what mattered most to voters was the rising cost of living — from the price of diesel to food to energy and, of course, medical bills because of the changes to the affordable healthcare provisions introduced in recent years.
This is an important signal for future policies in the US and beyond. For too long, environmental and climate strategies have discounted the need to be populist — or affordable. Environmental policies have often added to the costs of development and industries; the trend even extends to sectors like agriculture and energy. Consider organic agriculture. A green policy to reduce the toxic burden of pesticides often makes it more expensive than conventional agriculture. It then results in higher food prices, meaning that only some — the richer in society — can afford to buy this “good” food. It then becomes an elite choice.
This does not work in countries like India, where cost of food is critical not only for the poor but also for the government, which must procure vast quantities for its food distribution programmes. This is why, in our part of the world, we are discussing how agriculture can improve the well-being of farmers—not by increasing the cost of food production but by reducing it, making food more affordable and farming more sustainable.
We are learning the same lesson, albeit slowly, when it comes to water pollution. Initially, we adopted pollution-control models of the developed world — intercept sewage from each household by building underground sewage networks, then pipe and pump the wastewater, sometimes over several miles, to centralised treatment facilities. But we have learnt that this approach carries such high capital costs that it leads to inequity.
The state never has enough financial resources to provide these services to all. It then leads to pollution; treated sewage from a minority gets mixed with untreated sewage from the majority in our cities. I call this the “political economy of defecation”, because in this system the rich are subsidized, not the poor. This is because even the richest in our cities cannot afford to pay the “full” costs of water and sewage infrastructure. This is why India is now revising its strategies to manage water pollution by using the existing sludge transportation vehicles and not necessarily by building expensive underground sewage infrastructure.
But the game changer will be when we can turn the excreta, which is killing our rivers, into soil enrichment agents — manure for improving food productivity and replacing expensive chemical fertilisers. And we must do this without compromising soil quality and without toxification. This, then, means minimising the use of chemicals that are costly to remove and that make safe reuse of waste difficult.
This also means we must prevent pollution, or at least minimise it, rather than first pollute and then clean up. Consider the use of antibiotics in the food system. The answer is to reduce the need of palliative medicine use by improving animal care, hygiene and thereby preventing diseases.
The unaffordability of energy is really where the rubber hits the road. Today vast numbers of people, particularly women, are forced to live in energy squalor. They lack reliable energy even to meet their basic needs; cooking food means collecting and then burning twigs, leaves and cow dung in polluting stoves. Energy poverty is so high that even dirty coal or charcoal is unaffordable. Even those of us in relatively richer parts of the world—yours and mine—find the costs high. So, as we plan clean energy transition, we need to learn to do things differently. It is a happy situation today that China has built up surplus capacity in clean energy and that costs have dropped. But it is not enough – we need to ensure that this energy cost is affordable and accessible by large numbers.
The fact is that we need to change the way we have practised environmental and climate policies. We need to do so because growth cannot be sustainable, unless it is inclusive and affordable. This will then build a new generation of green practices—one that learns from the environmentalism of the poor so that we tread lightly on this earth, rather than pounding and pillaging it and then thinking that we have all the money to repair the damage. We do not.
