Making climate-friendly lifestyle choices isn’t always easy. India learned the hard way

For nearly four years, India’s government pushed an initiative to get people to think about how to make lifestyle choices that pollute less, like cycling instead of driving or using less plastic.

But in the country’s yearly budget announcement last weekend, the once-flagship program failed to get a mention — or any promise of future funding.

The Lifestyle for Environment Initiative — or Mission Life as it’s more commonly known — was once championed by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other senior ministers as a major step toward the country’s climate goals. The idea was to get the whole population working to slash emissions by cutting electricity use or skipping unnecessary private car journeys. But it’s fallen out of favor: Mission Life’s dedicated government website used to provide monthly updates on the initiative’s progress, but there hasn’t been an update since March 2024.

It shows how difficult making large-scale changes in people’s everyday lives really is, especially without financial incentives, experts say. But lessons learned can help shape policy in the future that could be more successful at getting a significant percentage of the population to ditch their more polluting habits.

Why is it so hard to make climate-friendly choices?

Latha Girish, who owns a company in Bengaluru that makes plastic packaging for industrial-scale food storage and refrigeration, says she’s occupied with making sure her business survives, not its emissions. Many small business owners “don’t have the luxury of thinking about the environment,” she said. “Ask anybody in our sector, I’m sure they won’t know about Mission Life or any other such initiative.”

Anything that puts her business’ prices up — like using more sustainable raw materials — means she loses out on customers who just want the lowest price. “They are looking only at how competitive you are and don’t look at what you are doing or not doing for the environment or sustainability,” she said.

But Sunil Mysore, the CEO of sustainability solutions company Hinren Engineering, said climate-friendly changes can be made as long as there is a motivation to live a “better life.”

“My home is completely off the grid now,” said Mysore. He said they reuse all the waste they produce to make energy, and their rooftop garden provides them with vegetables. They also harvest rainwater at home, meaning the household is better shielded from a growing number of water crises in Bengaluru, where he lives.

Prasad Gawade, who runs an ecotourism company where travelers stay with Indigenous communities in western India, agrees. He said his efforts to run an environmentally-friendly business are in spite of, not because of, government initiatives because smaller businesses don’t get the kind of incentives bigger ones do.

Part of the problem is that major projects that could change people’s habits — like changing a city’s infrastructure to make it more convenient to get around with electric trams or trains over private cars — weren’t part of Mission Life, said Sanjib Pohit, a senior fellow at the New Delhi-based National Council for Applied Economic Research. “Drastic infrastructure changes are needed for (Mission Life) to be successful,” he said.

India’s environment ministry did not respond to an Associated Press request for comment about the Mission Life program.

Could energy efficiency initiatives be a solution?

One way of cutting emissions without changing people’s lifestyles and habits is by simply making their current habits more efficient.

Everything that uses electricity or some form of energy — from refrigerators to lightbulbs — has the potential to be more efficient at how it uses that energy. Experts say efficient energy systems can be “low-hanging fruit” that can cut carbon pollution with little additional costs.

But the federal budget allotted no additional funds for energy conservation schemes or the regulatory bodies tasked with making India’s energy systems more efficient.

Girish, who owns the plastic packaging business, said investing in making her company more efficient would mean high upfront costs, which is unaffordable for her without government support.

According to the International Energy Agency, global energy efficiency improved only by a little over 1% in 2023. That same year, countries agreed to double energy efficiency by the end of the decade.

Efficient systems can get more out of existing infrastructure, said Jon Creyts, the CEO of the RMI climate thinktank. “It’s about being thrifty. It’s about saving. It’s about, in the end, producing less of something,” he said.

Does changing personal habits really make a difference?

While each person’s emissions or their small business’ don’t contribute much — the world makes about 41 billion tons of carbon pollution a year — addressing both individual emissions and calling on major polluters to address theirs is important, scientists say.

“Changing behavior is tricky and difficult,” said Ramya Natarajan from the Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy in Bengaluru. But Natarajan acknowledged that simply getting people to be conscious about their decisions — as Mission Life has set out to do — can make an impact.

“It is a forward-looking program and more of an advisory that everyone can adopt and follow, I think it’s been relatively successful in triggering thinking about this,” she said.

For Mysore, the sustainable solutions CEO in Bengaluru, finding more climate-friendly ways to live is about more than just slashing emissions.

“For me, it’s the pure joy of being sustainable,” he said. “I know that just me doing these things will not reduce carbon emissions in any great measure, but you never know when a spark can change into a fire.”

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