Arunesh Karkun presented on Different Paths to Clean Air: Global Insights for India’s Reform Agenda at the Two-Day National Consultation on ‘Combating Industrial Emissions: Forging a Cleaner Industrial Future with NCAP 2.0’ organised by the Centre for Science and Environment on 9 December 2025. The consultation saw active participation from senior officials of central and state regulatory bodies, including representatives from Odisha State Pollution Control Board, Gujarat Pollution Control Board, Punjab Pollution Control Board, and the Jammu & Kashmir Pollution Control Committee.

“The GRAP is designed as an emergency response to rapidly curb emissions and signal the severity of air pollution, and therefore cannot function as a year-round measure. However, given that air quality remains poor throughout the year, stronger continuous regulations, easier compliance mechanisms, and strict enforcement, especially for construction and demolition waste, are essential, alongside improved monitoring capacity in SPCBs, PCCs, and municipalities. While technological solutions are well understood, the real challenge lies in on-ground implementation, requiring a renewed focus on first principles: reducing emissions at source, containing their spread, and holding violators accountable. To meet today’s environmental burdens, India must reform outdated regulatory institutions and empower the CAQM to more effectively coordinate action across the NCR, potentially with stronger backing from the Centre” – Arunesh Karkun spoke on ‘Rethinking GRAP: How can we optimise the measures for the construction industry?’ at the launch of the report, ‘From policy to practice: Evaluating the impacts of construction activities in Delhi NCR’, organised by the Council on Energy, Environment, and Water (CEEW) on 2 December 2025.

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.