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.

“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.

“The Kerala State Disaster Management Authority [and other agencies] have been supporting the Local Self-Government Department [and the local self-governments in their climate resilience and disaster management efforts]. However, going forward, how do we ensure that this attains more continuity, and how can it be embedded into the system itself? There are national and state-level legal frameworks for issues such as waste management, but such an instrument is lacking for climate change; currently, disaster-related aspects alone are being taken under the Disaster Management Act. We need to understand how perhaps a climate change related legislation can do a huge part in institutionalising the actions that we are talking about right now” – Neha Kurian was a panellist in the International Seminar on Reimagining Decentralisation in Kerala: Local Governance for a Sustainable Future, organised by Grameena Patana Kendram Research Centre on 26 October 2025.