New book tells why and how India should deal with climate change

Bringing together voices of researchers, activists and policymakers, a new book on climate change is seeking to find the language and ideas for India to engage with the crisis. Titled, "India in a Warming world: Integrating Climate Change and Development", the book edited by Navroz K Dubash, talks about the climate change globally, while arguing that India, like other countries, can no longer ignore the problem. 

The Oxford University Press (OUP) book featuring a collection of articles by climate experts including Sunita Narain, Anil Agarwal, Dr Friederike Otto and Shibani Ghosh, makes an attempt to deepen the clarity on how India can and should deal with the environmental crisis. 

New book tackling climate change brings together voices of researchers, activists and policymakers

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According to the book, the challenge of dealing with climate change in India is "compounded by immediate concerns of eradicating poverty and accelerating development, and complicated by its relatively limited role thus far in causing the problem".

"This book aims to bring together the many, and growing, voices that seek to find the language and ideas with which to engage climate change, and to do so from a perspective that resonates with broader Indian development policy discourses.

"It is intended as an invitation to conversation," said Dubash. J Srinivasan, a professor at the Indian Institute of Sciences (IISc), noted in his chapter that the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas), deforestation, and other land use changes, had increased the amount of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere "by more than 40 per cent during the past 150 years".  "... This increased CO2 not only has direct effects on climate change but also has indirect effects, or so-called positive (accelerating warming) and negative (decelerat-ing warming) feedbacks.

"In an example of a positive feedback, an increase in global mean temperature caused by a rise in CO2 levels in turn leads to increase in water vapour, which then causes more thermal radiation emitted by earth to be trapped," wrote the scientist at IISc's Divecha Centre for Climate Change.

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The foreword of the book has been written by Nitin Desai, former Under-Secretary General (Economic and Social Affairs) at United Nations. He said the book should be read by "everyone whose primary interest as a researcher, policymaker, or enthusiast is in climate policy or in any one of these sectoral areas".

"Though many books keep coming out on the issue of climate change, there is no comparable book dealing with the Indian situation.  "Its five sections cover all the dimensions of the aforementioned debate ... also it is a valuable resource for anyone concerned about the long-term well-being of humanity," he wrote.

The book will hit the stands in November.

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