Public engagement
Opinions
Avoiding the Climate “Ambition Trap”
Navroz K Dubash
Science Magazine | 14 November 2025
Assessing climate ambition based on what a country says, rather than what it does or is likely to do, is a problem for at least three reasons: ambition is normatively loaded and hard to compare across countries; there’s little evidence of a clear link between ambition of pledges and what countries actually do; domestic political shifts, not global cooperation, have been a more effective driver of climate action.
Who Owns Tomorrow’s Emissions?
Aman Srivastava and Nikita Shukla
The Wire | 24 October 2025
Climate finance discussions should recognise future emissions are attributable to developed countries.
Labour, Nature and Capitalism: Exploring Labour-Environmental Conflicts in Kerala, India by Silpa Satheesh (2025): A Review
Sony R K
Doing Sociology | 22 September 2025
Silpa Satheesh’s book, ‘Labour, Nature, and Capitalism: Exploring Labour – Environmental Conflicts in Kerala, India’ makes a significant contribution to understanding how environmental conflicts unfold in contexts marked by economic precarity and institutional complicity. It offers a nuanced perspective from the Global South on how material interests, ideological alignments, institutional power, and contested understandings of nature shape ecological struggles.
In the news
The NDC death loop (Part 2): Demands for ambition, disappointment and relevance in a fractured world
Down to Earth | 9 October 2025
Navroz K Dubash spoke to Down to Earth on how climate governance can be reinvented, especially for the Global South.
The Hidden Cost of Heat, ft. Aditya Valiathan Pillai
The Boring Climate Podcast | 3 December 2025
“Heat is the ‘invisible’ disaster – it’s all around us, kills as many, perhaps more people, in India than other extreme weather events, yet doesn’t capture public attention like floods or cyclones” – Aditya Valiathan Pillai spoke on the hidden cost of heat, ways to act upon it, the policy interventions we need as our planet warms, and why this is not just a climate problem, but very much a human problem.
How Many People Die in India From Hot Weather? Nobody Really Knows
The New York Times | 17 November 2025
“The number of people who die from heat-related causes who were able to reach a health-care facility in time to be diagnosed accurately is a very small percentage. This is another reason reported deaths from extreme heat do not reflect the actual number” – Bhargav Krishna quoted in The New York Times.
Why Air Pollution Management Must Change: The Air Shed Solution
Earth Chakra | 12 November 2025
“What we’ve seen from national as well as global evidence is that, even low to moderate exposures to air pollution, especially PM2.5, can lead to cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, short- and long-term respiratory conditions like asthma attacks, as well as pre-mature births and low birth weight in babies, and various other cognitive developmental outcomes” – Bhargav Krishna in conversation with Earth Chakra, discusses how the threat of air pollution is a pan-India issue in cities beyond Delhi, such as Bengaluru, Mumbai, and Pune, in light of the rising air pollution in India’s urban centres.
Speaking engagements
SFC co-organised ‘Re-Imagining the Energy Future of Odisha’, with XIM University, on 21 November 2025 in Bhubaneswar. Ashwini K Swain and Sarada Prasanna Das participated in the sessions on Odisha’s energy future and grassroots initiatives on energy transitions. Key takeaways:
– The transition from predictable to more variable energy systems will significantly shape the energy future of Odisha and should be envisaged as an industrialisation opportunity for the state.
– Institutional planning should be strengthened to ensure long-term resource adequacy in the electricity sector.
– Horizontal and vertical coordination remain key issues among stakeholders that need to be addressed further.
These feed into SFC’s larger work on enabling energy transitions in Odisha and Eastern India.
Rashi Agarwal presented at the India Land and Development Conference (ILDC) 2025, organised by Landstack, from 18-20 November 2025. She spoke on ‘Landing India’s Renewable Energy Ambitions: Reckoning Community Land Dependencies and Opportunities as Part of Energy Transition Planning’, and focused on the need for mapping human and non-human community dependents that are often impacted by clean energy transitions; laying out the opportunities that could be explored across the lifecycle of the renewable energy project.
“While disaster responses, especially to sudden-onset ones are often organic, setting up grass-root level structures and strengthening them by having instruments like local level disaster management plans can play a huge role in building disaster resilience not just at the local level but also at higher levels of governance” – Neha Miriam Kurian spoke on local level planning tools as a means to institutionalise and strengthen grass-root level capacity and response to disasters at STEP Global Summit 2025, organised by Save Vibrant Earth Foundation on 8 November 2025.
“We should plan and execute nested policy actions from local to airshed levels, make health the basis for crafting mitigation actions, build future-ready regulators, and move from palliative actions to root-cause driven sectoral transformations to build resilience to air pollution” – Annanya Mahajan spoke about air pollution as an ongoing disaster in India at a webinar on ‘Invisible Disasters: Tackling Air Pollution through Resilient and Risk-Informed Systems’, organised by Sphere India Academy on 18 November 2025.
SFC recently held a dialogue with Nazaria, a Mumbai-based collective that equips youth from marginalised communities with creative tools, to explore how extreme heat can be visualised and told through everyday stories. Sonali Verma spoke with youth and their mothers about living with heat in Mumbai, especially inside their homes, what makes the city’s conditions more challenging, and the ways they adapt and find relief. Independent artist Pritish Bali also led a demonstration on using thermal imagery to document indoor heat. This workshop is part of a larger exhibit, ‘Making the ‘Invisible’ Visible: Indoor Heat, Unpaid Domestic Work, and Women’s Resilience’, which will be showcased at Godrej Design Lab’s Conscious Collective 2025 from 11-14 December, 2025.
