Adverse Impacts - An Empirical Examination of the Impact of Climate Extremes on Inequality in India

Abstract: Climate change is receiving more attention; the public debate has started to note its significance, and the consequences have started to show. How societies are interlinked with their environment is as evident in the 21st century as ever before. This study is an attempt to examine the relationship between climate change and inequality in India. Climate change is quantified by investigating climate extremes, defined as excessive and insufficient precipitation and abnormal hot or cold temperatures. Distributions include consumption expenditure, food expenditure, land ownership and land cultivated, this being necessary to fully understand inequality of wealth and livelihoods. By utilizing five rounds of NSSO, between 1999-2012, and University of Delaware climate data in a fixed-effect regression, this thesis is calculating the impact of climate extremes on inequality at the district level in India. The most prominent finding is the non-uniform impact of climate extremes on inequality in India. The type of shock impacts distributional indicators differently and each distribution receive dissimilar impacts. To understand mediating factors on the impact of climate extremes, this thesis takes an interdisciplinary approach and utilizes a Vulnerability-Resilience framework, showing the importance of a societies’ coping and adaptivity capacity.