“Climate refugees” are on the rise with people losing their lands and livelihoods due to climate hazards. India is one of the most vulnerable countries and suffers from the severity of the climate crisis. People living along the shoreline are in jeopardy because of extreme weather events. In the last 26 years, severe erosion has changed the coastline. Appropriate policy support is necessary to build climate resilience.
The remaining carbon budget available to the world to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius or to “well below 2°C” very small and is being rapidly depleted. The year 2021 has witnessed a flurry of pledges by countries to achieve net-zero emissions around the second half of this century. But the analysis shows the pledges of Annex-I parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change to be highly inadequate to limit the temperature rise to below 1.5°C. In this context, this paper reviews India’s climate change mitigation efforts and policies over the last decade and assesses the recently declared net-zero emissions pledge against a range of illustrative emissions pathways and the implied cumulative emissions of these pathways. The ambition of India’s pledge is assessed, with a discussion of the challenges that lie ahead for India’s energy sector.
The shifting discourses on the purposes, objectives, and forms of India’s environment regulations are discussed within the broader domestic, political, and economic contexts. The environmental law reforms are being designed to legalise and protect financial investments in projects, irrespective of their environmental performance, and to monetise their impacts and damages.
The decade of the 1870s was marked across Bengal by drastic rainfall variations, changing crop patterns and a devastating malarial epidemic that depopulated many villages. Though hampered by a paucity of data, this paper relying on contemporary records establishes the link between widespread incidence of malaria to not merely the declining water supply, but the increasing inaccessibility to existing water sources, thanks to the large-scale construction of embankments and the colonial reclamation of land.
