Navroz K Dubash

Visiting Senior Fellow and Chair of Advisory Council

ndubash@gmail.com

Navroz K Dubash is Visiting Senior Fellow and Chair of the Advisory Council at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC), an independent research and action group working on climate, energy and environment, and Professor of Public and International Affairs and the High Meadows Environmental Institute at Princeton University. Before this, he was a Professor at the Centre for Policy Research, an Associate Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, and a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute. Navroz has been actively engaged in global and national debates on climate change, air quality, energy and water as a researcher, policy advisor and activist for over 25 years. He helped establish the global Climate Action Network as its first international coordinator from 1990 to 1992. He has advised Indian government policymaking over the last decade as a member of advisory committees on climate change, energy, and air and water policy. He also coordinated a team that served as lead anchor institution for India’s Long-Term Low Emissions Development Strategy. Navroz was a Coordinating Lead Author for the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and a Lead Author and Synthesis Report Author for the Fifth Assessment Report, serves on the steering committee for the UNEP Emissions Gap Report, and has been a member of the Scientific Advisory Group of the UN Climate Action Summit. He currently serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Climate Policy Journal. He is also a member of the editorial boards of Global Environmental Politics, Energy Research in Social Science, Environmental Policy and Governance, and the Journal of Environment and Development. He has written widely on climate change, energy and the environment in Indian and global media, and contributes a regular ‘Expert Voices’ column to Science. In 2015, he was conferred the T N Khoshoo Memorial Award for his work on Indian climate change policy and the international discourse on global climate governance, and in 2018, his co-authored paper on interpreting model scenarios was awarded the Emerging Nations Award by Environmental Research Letters.

Publications

Opinions

Climate Policy

Climate and development: What opportunities, what threats?

Navroz K Dubash

ODI's Development Policy Review | 20 September 2024

While it may be in the interests of developing countries to do development differently for climate reasons, the technological fact of falling renewable energy prices by no means imply a post-equity climate politics. But with weak prospects for a grand global bargain around climate and development, we may be in for messy country-by-country approaches to low-carbon development transitions.

Opinions

Climate Policy

Towards Operationalising a New Climate Right for India: Unpacking the Ranjitsinh Judgment

Navroz K Dubash and Shibani Ghosh

The India Forum | 19 September 2024

The Ranjitsinh ruling of the Supreme Court is potentially far-reaching but its limited view of action on climate change risks causing an inadequate framing of policy. It is legislation that is built on a bottom-up approach that can act on the Court’s calls for balance across multiple objectives.

Books and book chapters

Climate Policy

Climate Change: Policy, Institutional, and Legal Framework

Navroz K Dubash, Aditya Valiathan Pillai et al

Oxford University Press | 23 July 2024

Transforming towards a low-carbon, climate-resilient society will require reimagining existing governance arrangements. This chapter in 'The Oxford Handbook of Environmental and Natural Resources Law in India' documents how India’s policies, institutions, and legal structures have changed in response to climate change.

Opinions

Climate Policy

A law around low-carbon climate resilient development

Navroz K Dubash, Aditya Valiathan Pillai and Shibani Ghosh

The Hindu | 8 July 2024

Authors lay out an institutional vision for India’s climate law - knowledge-based ‘low-carbon development commission’; ‘climate cabinet’ to drive strategy; executive coordination body; and mechanisms for federal engagement.

Opinions

Climate Policy

Court on climate right and how India can enforce it

Navroz K Dubash, Shibani Ghosh and Aditya Valiathan Pillai

The Hindu | 1 July 2024

Because India is still developing, is highly vulnerable, and yet to build much of its infrastructure, what the country needs is a law that enables progress toward both low-carbon and climate resilient development.

Opinions

Climate Policy

Unpacking climate policy

Navroz K Dubash

Science Magazine | 6 June 2024

Policies that can usefully address climate change mitigation extend far beyond what an earlier literature defined as “mitigation policy”, which incorporates policy instrument design to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by means of, for instance, carbon tax, cap and trade, or border carbon adjustment. Instead, there is value in thinking much more expansively about climate policy: Effective “climate policy” may not always be “climate” policy.

Climate Policy

Mission 1.5: Enhancing international cooperation, enabling meeting the Paris Climate Agreement goals

IDDRI | 30 May 2024

This Note is an expert perspective of the vision and key design elements of the Troika-led Mission 1.5 UNFCCC process in order to effectively address the significant gaps in action and support for transitioning to low-GHG and climate-resilient economies in line with the Paris Climate Agreement goals. It therefore contributes ideas to Mission 1.5’s design, as delegates and observers meet in Bonn in early June 2024 to advance climate negotiations.

SFC Perspectives

Adaptation and Resilience

Climate Policy

Energy Transitions

Environmental Governance and Policy

SFC Perspectives on Adaptation and Resilience, Climate Policy, Energy Transitions, and Environmental Governance and Policy

SFC

SFC | 19 March 2024

SFC Perspectives are intended to stimulate discussion by providing an overview of key issues and avenues for action to inform India's sustainable development trajectory.

SFC Perspectives

Energy Transitions

Enabling the Energy Transition: Technology, politics & institutions in India’s energy system

Ashwini K Swain, Sarada Prasanna Das, Suravee Nayak, Catherine Ayallore and Navroz K Dubash

SFC | 18 March 2024

Our research and engagements at SFC focus on rethinking the configuration of technology, politics and institutions in Indian energy as a necessary complement to techno-economic solutions for enabling the transition.

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