Emperor penguins. File Photo: Warner Independent Pictures via AP

India’s announcement of its revised Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) to the Paris Agreement — the term applied to the mitigation and other climate action targets that countries voluntarily commit to under the agreement — represents a considered step forward when India’s energy and development policies are encountering serious headwinds. It is clear that the government has opted for continuity and incremental advance with respect to India’s earlier NDCs. It is also clearly confident that its commitments will nevertheless be more than adequate in relation to its equitable share of global climate action, in keeping with climate justice and within its expected commitments as a developing nation.

Three climate goals

As the press communique after the Cabinet approval of the updated NDCs noted, there are three specific enhancements that have been committed. The first is an increase in the reduction of emissions intensity of its GDP, from 45% below 2005 levels by 2030 to 47% below 2005 levels by 2035. The second is ensuring that 60% of installed capacity for power generation is from non-fossil fuel sources, while the third is the enhancement of forest and tree cover carbon sinks to 3.5 – 4 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent above 2005 levels.

India’s climate policies are best understood in the context of its structural constraints as a lower middle income developing country, that determine its available choices for climate action. Over the last three decades, these constraints have not substantially changed, which is also why India continues to insist on the relevance of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). But apart from these, given the structure of the Paris Agreement that requires renewed and enhanced commitments to climate mitigation every five years, short-term considerations have also begun to have a considerable weight in the formulation of the NDCs. The rapid deterioration of the global environment for climate action over the last year has undoubtedly brought this issue to the fore.

Enthusiasm for climate action

Structural constraints have not, however, dampened enthusiasm for climate action in India, both at the level of the Centre and the State governments. There is a considerable range of activities designed to set India on the path to low-carbon development, drawing significant public and private sector efforts and resources, including electric vehicles, enhancement of energy efficiency, promotion and deployment of non-fossil fuel sources of electricity generation, new technologies such as green hydrogen and more recently, the active promotion of carbon capture and storage efforts.

But given India’s developmental levels today, it is clearly premature for India to convert all such efforts into the significantly more onerous and accountable commitments that are the NDCs, the progress towards which is to be reported every two years in the Biennial Transparency Report (BTR) to the UNFCCC.

A section of global and domestic public opinion has raised the issue of the adequacy of India’s NDCs relative to a global temperature goal of 1.5 degree warming above pre-industrial levels (the more ambitious part of the Paris Agreement’s goals). Some have downplayed the new targets, one commentator going so far as to call it “a walk in the park”. Others call for increased generation from renewables as the metric and not installed capacity. Even some sections of opinion that have welcomed the NDCs, appear nevertheless to be uncertain on whether these new commitments are genuinely the best that India can make at this time.

The cost of going green

All the above variants of the “India can (must) do more argument” ignore some critical realities that contextualise India’s climate actions. Given that India’s natural energy source is overwhelmingly coal, it is inaccurate to view improvements in emissions efficiency of GDP and the corresponding bending of its emissions trajectory as a “natural” corollary of India’s growth story. Priority to electricity from renewable sources comes with significant costs, including backing down readily available and often cheaper or comparably priced coal-based thermal power, further tilting a playing field that privileges renewable energy to sustain our climate commitments.

Renewable energy (RE) projects including utility scale battery storage have begun to make their appearance in India’s power sector. But the corresponding scaling up of India’s battery storage capacity, required for ensuring the stability of generation even from the proposed 2030 RE targets will run into a few trillion rupees at least. Part of such expansion would have to be funded by the government, deploying resources that would have been utilised in other sectors. At the very least, the deployment of such large-scale battery systems is not immediately feasible. The most globally widespread option of energy storage in reverse pumped hydropower systems, has very limited scope in India at present. Additionally, environmental concerns, and water needs for competing uses such as irrigation, as well as the regulatory challenges faced by all large hydro projects are likely to preclude any rapid expansion.

Optimistic RE projections, not only in India but even globally, have run into the lack of transmission capacity and the challenges of grid balancing, with the associated costs often omitted when referring to the cost-effectiveness of RE power.

Since, for India, coal is the mainstay of power generation when solar and wind cease, unlike the large-scale gas and hydro available elsewhere, the full utilisation of the available RE capacity will inevitably have to be “curtailed”, while adding to the operation and maintenance costs for thermal power operated in this cyclical fashion. These add further to the true cost that India bears for the pursuit of its climate commitments.

Improving energy efficiency in other sectors is also being pursued vigorously, including the introduction of mandatory emissions intensity targets in key industries. The early ramp up of electric vehicles, while the jump from BSIV to BSVI vehicle emissions standards was just coming into place, was another leap-frog moment, whose cost to the economy must not be underestimated. Since the 26th Conference of Parties of the United Nations Framework on Climate Change at Glasgow, every Central government budget has seen a range of initiatives and resource commitment across various aspects of climate mitigation. Indeed, a major knowledge gap today is that while future costs of increased mitigation action are routinely calculated, the cost burden attached to India’s mitigation initiatives undertaken so far, in the absence of any significant climate finance, have yet to be estimated in a reliable manner.

Accounting for India’s developmental future

At a more over-arching level, India’s mitigation challenge cannot be based on a simple extrapolation of the current structural features and trends of its economy.

India’s developmental future needs room for further large-scale growth in manufacturing and industry, expansion in the provision of goods and services to its population at adequate levels beyond the minimum, and an urban transition that has only just begun. In this context, the “India can do more” arguments that rely on such extrapolation of economic trends and the persistence of current structural features, miss the urgent need to hedge India’s developmental future.

India cannot commit its NDCs to preserving the Paris Agreement goal of limiting global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels, when the goal is rapidly slipping out of reach. This a trend that India cannot reverse, given that its per capita emissions are a third of the global average. Even otherwise, under the voluntary emissions reduction NDCs of the Paris Agreement, the benefits of India’s reduction in emissions below any business-as-usual baseline, are distributed primarily to the big emitters globally, due to their inadequate efforts, and proportionately less to India, especially when the largest historical emitter has walked out of all climate treaties and seeks to dismantle climate action both at home and abroad

India’s climate commitments have to be strategic and circumspect, while its NDCs are formulated in informed self-awareness of its, to use the language of the Paris Agreement, “national circumstances.”

(T. Jayaraman is with the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bengaluru. Views expressed are personal.)

Published – April 07, 2026 11:01 pm IST

It isn’t every day someone casually mentions they are heading back to a cabin near the North Pole. Yet, that is exactly what 57-year-old Hilde Fålun Strøm, a citizen scientist based in Longyearbyen, the world’s northernmost town, told me when we met last year in the frozen archipelago of Svalbard.

Norwegian by nationality, Strøm grew up outside Oslo in a family that spent long days outdoors. Her passion for the Arctic began in childhood and deepened after she moved to Svalbard in 1995, where she lives with her husband Steinar, who works for Statsbygg and oversees properties owned by the Longyearbyen government. The two have lovely grandchildren.

An explorer, polar ambassador and climate advocate, Strøm runs Svalbard Expeditions and is the co-founder, with Sunniva Sorby, of Hearts in the Ice, a pioneering citizen-science initiative. She advocates for Arctic protection through global platforms such as COP26 and contributes to projects like Arctic Call, an Inuit-led summit integrating traditional knowledge with modern climate monitoring. This year, it is slated for September 11-15.

When I visited the region, it was early spring, and Svalbard was buried under snow. The sun didn’t set at all, yet no trees grew. The starkness felt almost extraterrestrial, and yet inviting. No wonder it held Strøm so firmly.

“When I return from the cabin,” she told me, “it is never with stories of solitude or survival. It is always science, encounters with polar bears, and a kind of happiness I cannot quite describe.” Bamsebu, the cabin, is a 20 sq.m structure built in 1930 for summer beluga hunting. There is no insulation, electricity or plumbing. “No heating either, unless you count the wood stove,” she said. “I have been collecting driftwood for years.”

Absolute isolation

Longyearbyen is a land of glaciers and fjords, midnight sun and unending polar night. For part of the year, daylight never ends; for months afterwards it never begins. The trapper cabin Strøm referenced intensifies all of this: glacier winds, the silence of the tundra, and the absence of human life except for polar bears and reindeer.

“It is 145 km as the crow flies,” Strøm explained. “But the route cuts across glaciers, mountain ridges and two fjords that must be frozen solid to cross. It is not a casual commute.” She travelled by snowmobile, towing a sledge loaded with 400 kg of food, fuel, equipment, and sometimes her husky. The journey could turn dangerous quickly.

There was the time when a storm she likened to a hurricane ripped the windshield off her snowmobile. “It flew off and landed between two ice blocks by the open sea,” she said. “I just leapt off and grabbed it before it blew into the water.” When she reached the cabin, she often had to dig through drifts to reach the door.

These short trips were nothing compared with the 19 months she once spent at Bamsebu with Sorby as part of a citizen science expedition. It had long been Strøm’s dream to live as close to the North Pole as possible, but not alone. “And it was not going to be my husband,” she laughed. She met Sorby, a Canadian, at a trade fair in Alaska in 2019. Soon after, the two were packing supplies for a winter of isolation in the frozen Arctic.

Hilde Fålun Strøm’s husky Ettra by the shore of Van Keulen Fjord (Van Keulenfjorden) in the remote Arctic region of Svalbard.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Hilde Fålun Strøm

Their plan was to stay nine months. COVID-19 stretched the expedition to nearly two years. “We got a satellite message with a single word: epidemic,” Strøm said. “We did not have radio or TV. By the time we understood the enormity of it, no ships were coming. We were not exactly stranded, but we could not leave either.”

Even if they could have, they did not want to. “We had too much equipment, and there were polar bears in the area. Abandoning food stores would have been irresponsible. And scientists could not access the field. We were the only ones reporting on long-term studies of polar bears and the tundra.” Despite limited satellite bandwidth, their research reached far. “We spoke to 104,000 children,” Strøm said.

Northern lights.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Hilde Fålun Strøm

Wild encounters

Polar bears, she explained, struggle to survive without sea ice from which to hunt seals. They are among the species most vulnerable to climate change. “The Arctic is twice as vulnerable as the rest of the world to climate change. We wanted students to understand how melting glaciers here could reshape the entire planet.”

Strøm still marvels that she saw 104 different polar bears. One night, a bear slammed into the cabin wall and climbed onto the roof. “I grabbed my revolver, flare gun and rubber bullets and stepped outside. He was 30 m away. We locked eyes. Then he walked off.”

Sunniva Sorby and Strøm with her husky.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Hilde Fålun Strøm

Her days began at 7 am. She lit the stove, chopped ice blocks to melt and boiled water. Later in the year, the women melted snow or used a nearby stream. Meals were simple: oatmeal or granola for breakfast, reindeer or Arctic char for dinner. “We even had a tiny solar- and wind-powered freezer.”

Strøm walked her dog Ettra daily, even in storms and months of darkness, with lights on the dog’s collar and heat-sensing binoculars to spot danger. The women exercised each day, washed their hair every two weeks using melted snow, washed clothes “in the same bucket”, and dried everything “by the stove”.

Still a woman

One day, the new priest of Svalbard arrived by helicopter, carrying “fruits, vegetables and my husband”, Strøm recalled. Even in extremity, the women preserved small rituals. “I wore a dress on Christmas and New Year’s Eve,” she said. “Curled my hair. Put on makeup. It reminded me of who I was, strong, yes, but still a woman.”

Strøm with her husky.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Hilde Fålun Strøm

For those brief two hours, she and her husband “stood outside, holding hands in the snow, singing about how lucky we were to be alive. It was one of the most powerful moments of overwintering”. Overwintering taught Strøm how little one needs in life to be happy. How everything is interconnected, that we are not only part of nature, we are nature. How important storytelling is. And how much fun it is to be part of the solution, not the problem.

What about a toilet, I asked. “For the first six months, we went to the shoreline, 40 m away. Not fun in a blizzard for a woman.” But “this was not a retreat. It was resistance, against disconnection from the planet, against apathy in the face of climate change”, she said.

Longyearbyen in springtime.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Hilde Fålun Strøm

Strøm’s work today reflects that conviction. Beyond the data and the ice, Strøm’s legacy lies in her mission to cultivate more heartbeats in leadership, a shift away from cold, clinical approaches to climate change and toward empathy, collaboration and human connection. By bringing together women leaders, including indigenous voices, she hopes to combine traditional knowledge with modern science to protect the environments they call home.

Hilde Fålun Strøm boating in Van Keulen Fjord (Van Keulenfjorden) in Svalbard.
| Photo Credit:
Courtesy Hilde Fålun Strøm

She believes female leadership is essential to addressing the climate crisis. “Women are caretakers. We are resilient. If we educate girls around the world, we do not just save the planet, we create a more peaceful, sustainable world,” she concluded.

The writer is a Mumbai based author and cultural commentator.

During the Tamil months of Chithirai and Vaikasi (April to June), temple festivals gather momentum across Tamil Nadu. On festival days, village squares and temple grounds slowly fill up even as the sun beats down mercilessly through the afternoon. By evening, performances of song, dance, drama, and ritual begin; people drop in, stay awhile, applaud, and move on, as the night wears on. For the artistes, though, the work starts hours before the first drumbeat and stretches well past the last act, and includes long spells of waiting, preparation, and travel before the performance itself.

A living archive

Tamil Nadu has a vast tradition of folk arts that span rituals, storytelling, music, and movement — from Koothu forms and Oppari lamentations to Parai drumming, Devarattam, Bommalattam (puppetry), and performances in front of the village deity. Many of these traditions are inseparable from temple festivals, agricultural cycles, and caste- and region-specific practices, and form part of a living cultural archive sustained often through oral transmission. In recent years, the State has sought to safeguard and promote these traditions through cultural festivals, documentation, and platforms that bring rural artistes to urban audiences. However, artistes face multiple pressures — among them is heat stress, an overlooked but increasingly felt challenge while performing under open skies.

The Kaniyan Koothu is an ancient folk performance tradition practised by members of the Kaniyan, a Scheduled Tribe community, in Tirunelveli district. Combining music, dance, singing, and narration, it is typically staged at temple festivals, particularly in rituals dedicated to the folk deity, Sudalai, where performers invoke the deity’s spirit through the recital.

Ganesha Moorthy, 45, from Vadakkankulam, describes his art form as an oral tradition passed down through generations. Performing largely across Tirunelveli, Tenkasi, Thoothukudi, and Kanniyakumari, in a troupe of seven to eight members, he said, “We sing the stories of Sivasudalai Maadan, Pechiamma, Karuppasamy, and also Sivapuranam, Empuranam, Kannagi Puranam, and so on.”

Made to wait

Their performances usually run through the night, from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m. “After the show, it takes an hour or so to pack our things up, and then we are usually made to wait for a couple of hours for payment, as the village head has some work. Sometimes, we are given tea,” Mr. Moorthy  said, adding that the troupe typically arrives at venues well in advance during the day and spends hours waiting before the performance begins.

Hours spent waiting in open grounds, rehearsing under tin roofs, putting on and performing in heavy costumes are factors that are turning summer festivals into tests of endurance for folk artistes, who say rising heat is becoming another challenge layered onto the existing concerns such as shrinking patronage and dwindling audiences for folk arts.

About 74% of the people in Tamil Nadu are now living in areas where the air temperatures regularly hit over 35 degrees Celsius, according to a study released by the State Planning Commission (SPC) in 2025. Of the State’s 389 administrative blocks, 94 have experienced a ‘very high change’ in heat intensity from 1981 to 2023.

M. Chandrakumar, a resident of Kilnathur in Tiruvannamalai district, is an Oppari singer who has been performing for 30 years. While Oppari  remains his primary art form, he trained in Periya Melam to supplement his income, as he says Oppari performances occur sporadically, typically following deaths in and around his village and often only for a few days each month. Despite three decades of experience, he says he may not be able to perform as long as the elders, from whom he learnt. “Around katthiri (the peak summer), it is not easy to perform without wearing slippers,” he adds.

In addition to the rising average daytime heat, nearly 70% of the districts in Tamil Nadu now have “very warm nights”, with temperatures between 26°C and 28°C. High night-time heat creates a cycle of thermal stress with no breaks, because it prevents the human body from shedding the heat accumulated during the day.

Lack of nocturnal relief

When minimum temperatures stay between 26°C and 28°C, the body’s natural cooling mechanisms are disrupted, leading to cumulative exhaustion, poor sleep quality, and increased cardiovascular strain. This lack of nocturnal relief is particularly dangerous for vulnerable groups such as the elderly and outdoor workers, as it significantly diminishes physical recovery and long-term productivity, the SPC study notes.

According to the study, the number of administrative blocks recording high night-time minimums has surged from just six blocks 20 years ago to 80 blocks today. Several artistes say many among them live with chronic conditions such as diabetes and hypertension, which may force them to step away from performance earlier than expected. While some take comfort in their children’s education as a safety net, it also means the younger generation is less likely to enter the arts, as many folk artistes themselves hope their children will move on to greener pastures. With senior performers retiring sooner and fewer successors stepping in, what does this mean for the future of folk traditions? Anitha Pottamkulam, Director-Culture, Dakshina Chitra, says that while factors such as migration have always affected the continuity of traditional art, climate change has worsened the situation. “They are dislocated. There is a loss of habitat and a loss of access to the materials and ecological resources they need to practise their craft. To that extent, climate and ecological change definitely adds to the existing challenges,” she says.

According to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), traditional understandings of climate-related loss have largely centred on impacts that are measurable and monetisable, while non-economic losses — those not reducible to financial terms — remain significant yet under-recognised. Cultural heritage, in particular, has been largely absent from climate agreements and policy discussions, the UNFCCC notes. While heat affects everyone and all performances, its impact is not experienced uniformly. Human vulnerability to heat extends beyond physiological responses to include socio-economic factors such as income, access to healthcare, and housing conditions, the SPC study notes.

Little basic comfort

G. Sundarrajan of Poovulagin Nanbargal and a member of the Tamil Nadu Governing Council on Climate Change says folk artistes are frequently transported in cramped vans and rest at government schools, community halls, or in asbestos-roof shelters, leaving little scope for their bodies to thermoregulate. “When it comes to upper-caste arts, performances are often held in air-conditioned sabhas, but OBC and Dalit artistes usually perform in open rural spaces. Apart from differences in remuneration, there is a lack of basic comfort for the artistes,” he says.

For Shyamala and members of her Thirunangaiyar Kaali Aattam Kalai Kuzhu, an all-transwomen troupe from Cuddalore district, the discomforts are compounded. “We can’t even imagine using the restrooms at most places as they are all makeshift ones,” she says. As a result, they often avoid drinking too much water or even tea, even while wearing elaborate costumes and performing for long hours.

If performers face heat-related challenges, instrument makers — particularly those making thol karuvi or skin-based instruments — experience them even more acutely. P. Matheswaran, an Aadhi Melampractitioner from Salem district, describes enduring heat beyond performance hours. “The instrument we use is a thol karuvi. It holds the sruthi correctly only for a short period, so we have to keep heating it in a very specific way and for a set duration, not for too long, to get the right tone. During the summer months, it is a struggle to sit and hold the instrument, heating it over the fire,” he says.