On The Contrary | Episode 5: How is the climate crisis affecting our jobs?

Harish Hande (Co-founder, SELCO) and Sabina Dewan (Founder and ED, JustJobs Network) debate pathways to sustainable livelihoods for those most vulnerable to the climate crisis.

"Let me start by just laying out a slightly broader picture. We are at the moment witnessing, experiencing several major transformations that are completely upending traditional employment models and changing the way that you and I live and work. And climate change is one, and that’s one of the biggest, but we’re also witnessing things like technology, the pandemic, urbanisation, migration of people, all of these different trends, demographic change; all of these different trends are completely changing labour markets, restructuring labour markets. And what this is doing is that it’s happening…this change is happening at a pace and scale that is faster than the ability of institutions, data systems to keep up. And this is causing a lot of insecurity and a lot of precarity in labour markets as well". - Sabina Dewan

"My fear is what I saw in COVID. The first casualty was the uncontracted labourers, etc., however you define it. And then you push them back into the so-called ‘go back to where you came from’. So you had this migration back to the rural areas in Africa, in Latin America, in India. The issue is, how can centralised business actually make sense at all? I mean, on one hand, America is suffering from centralised businesses pushing their manufacturing to China and that is why a lot of local entrepreneurship is gone, in other than the IT sector. We need to look at a much more decentralised job creation, where we are looking at a 25-kilometre radius, 50-kilometre radius, 100-kilometre radius, localisation of consumption, localisation of production, leading to localisation of livelihoods creation, we should have that as the model, rather than ‘too big to fail’. But actually the failure is taken by the poor and not by the boardrooms". - Harish Hande

The episode was produced by Maed in India.