Simply put: Mundoli et al. (2022)

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This post is based on the paper "Climate change: the missing discourse in the Indian Parliament" by Seema Mundoli and others, in Environmental Research: Climate. The authors studied Parliamentary Questions (PQs) related to climate change raised in the Lok Sabha between 1999-2019. The study is designed to answer four critical questions related to PQs on climate change.

First, the authors ask, How often are PQs raised about climate change? The answer is only about 0.3% of the time.

Second, the authors ask, Are vulnerable constituency interests being represented in the Parliament? The answer, sadly, is No ("..there was no evidence for climate vulnerability or gender to have any relationship with the number of PQs asked"). To me, this suggests that our Parliamentarians have not yet appreciated differential vulnerability to climate change, and that there is much scope for granularity in their understanding of climate change.

Third, the authors ask, What kind of questions do parliamentarians ask? The answer is interesting. Impacts of climate change received the most attention, followed by the concept of mitigation. Adaptation was raised in only 3.9% of the PQs. Finally, the impacts on socially or economically vulnerable groups were raised only inn 0.007% of the PQs, reinforcing what the second answer above told us.

Fourth, the authors ask, Where do parliamentarians get their information from? And this, to me, begets the most interesting answer of all. Our honorable ministers referred to a source of information only 10% of the time! To me, this is both appalling and troubling. The lack of appreciation of the importance of citing a source in the first place precludes any further discussion of the quality of the source! Thankfully, studies from credible sources (IPCC, United Nations, World Bank) seem to have been cited the most among the meagre 10%. Newspaper articles were the next most cited source.

This was a simple study and it should be possible for the lay reader to understand most, if not all, of the paper. I will refrain from drawing too many conclusions here, because of my limited understanding of Parliamentary functioning and my limited ability to place these results in the most appropriate context. But to me, the results are not surprising and quantitatively reinforce the general perception that there is substantial scope for improvement in the quality of climate change discussions happening in our country as well as during the Parliamentary Question Hour. There is much more our leaders can do and should do.

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