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India has contributed little to climate change: Home to 18 percent of the world’s population, India has only 3 percent greenhouse gases warming the planet

But India is suffering from climate change. It’s happening now: A heatwave in the past three months has devastated northern India and neighboring Pakistan. Temperatures exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit. So hot that overheated birds fell from the sky A historic bridge in India, Gurgaon and northern Pakistan collapsed A flood released water after melting snow and ice in a glacial lake.

Scientists say global warming almost certainly played a role in the heatwave. Rising temperatures are making unusually warmer weather more common, not just in India and Pakistan, but around the world, including the United States.

The Indians responded by staying indoors as much as possible, especially during the afternoon hours. The government encouraged this, forcing schools to close early and businesses to change their work schedules. The measures have reduced deaths – a development from the heat waves that killed thousands years ago, with fewer than 100 recorded so far.

However, these measures have a cost. School time is getting shorter, so students learn less. People don’t travel to their jobs, so work is less productive. The heat kept some farmers indoors and stunted harvestThus, crop yields fell and global food prices rose. Social life is disrupted.

The situation reminds me of the mixed effects of Covid quarantines: Measures to adapt to climate change can help prevent the worst health outcomes, but they have real costs. “We are saving lives, but livelihoods are being lost,” said Roxy Koll, a climate scientist in India.

And many people still have to go outside in the heat. Koll told me that his son had been showing signs of heat stroke recently after returning home from school. (The episode prompted Koll and his wife to force the school to finish classes earlier.) In Delhi, the afternoon heat left Chandni Singh, a climate researcher, “extremely tired, with a throbbing headache and completely dehydrated” the next morning. Wrote in Times Opinion.

A global inequality

The geography of poor countries, most of which are close to the Equator, isn’t the only reason climate change is such a burden for them. Their poverty is another factor that makes them have fewer resources to adapt.

“Climate change is one of the deepest inequalities of the modern age,” said my colleague, Somini Sengupta, a global climate reporter who wrote. The Times climate newsletter. “Those who didn’t cause most of the problem already feel most of the impact.”

There is a paradox in the climate crisis. Because India has never fully industrialized, it has not released as many greenhouse gases as the US, European countries and other rich countries. But because it hasn’t industrialized, it has fewer resources to adapt than the wealthier, polluting nations.

Less than 10 percent of Indians have air conditioning in their home. Many do not have reliable electricity, which limits their ability to use fans. The problem has been particularly bad lately, a coal shortage causing power outages.

There is a tension here: To adapt, countries must adopt modern technologies. But because these technologies often require planet-warming oil and coal, their use aggravates climate change and therefore extreme weather conditions. Weather then requires further adaptation.

Rush for clean energy technologies, such as solar and wind energy, is an effort to break that tension – to give countries a way to industrialize without the pollution that is warming the planet. As climate disasters are already hitting much of the world, this effort is in a race against time to avert more crises like India’s.

Related: In the US, less access to air conditioning, pools, and even trees also causes poorer Americans to suffer more from heat waves. These latest photos from New York highlight the differences.

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