Public engagement
Opinions
India’s AI Push Is Quietly Draining Its Energy, Resources, and Space
Escandita Tewari
The Quint | 26 December 2025
India is rapidly expanding its artificial intelligence infrastructure, from semiconductor manufacturing partnerships like the Tata PSMC project to a projected 9GW data centre capacity by 2030. This AI-led growth brings significant environmental challenges, including high water and energy use, increased e-waste, and weak regulatory oversight. Can India achieve digital leadership without worsening environmental vulnerabilities?
Forest finance and the challenges money cannot fix
Ishan Kukreti
Mongabay India | 24 December 2025
Forest finance remains low, largely dependent on public funds, and flowing mainly to richer countries, even as deforestation pressures are highest in tropical regions. Brazil has proposed a new forest financing mechanism, the Tropical Forest Forever Facility, which aims to support standing natural forests for climate mitigation, an approach different from existing mechanisms. However, without addressing equity, weak monitoring systems, and outdated forest definitions, the initiative may fall short of delivering meaningful change.
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.
In the news
‘All being poisoned slowly’: Air purifiers offer only limited respite from India’s chronic pollution
The Straits Times | 30 December 2025
“The absence of serious, scientific long-term solutions, in a way, is forcing people to depend on purifiers as the only way to breathe clean air for at least a few hours a day” – Bhargav Krishna quoted in The Straits Times.
Inquinamento in India, una densa coltre di smog soffoca Delhi e i suoi 30 milioni di abitanti: è l’apocalisse sanitaria
Wired | 19 January 2026
Arunesh Karkun spoke to Wired on Delhi’s high AQI: “The only sustainable and effective path is to accurately assess the sources of pollution and their impacts on health, and then decisively limit the most polluting sources….The development and adoption of cleaner technologies must proceed in parallel, but the greatest impact is achieved only if polluters are effectively controlled.”
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.
Speaking engagements
Bhargav Krishna spoke on, A Hazy Status Quo: India and Air Pollution, at the webinar, ‘Beyond the Haze: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Air Pollution’ organised by the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute at Harvard University on 3 December 2025. Watch the entire discussion here: https://youtu.be/IlyejyYuO80
Annanya Mahajan spoke on how India’s policy response to air pollution should prioritise health by targeting the most dangerous pollutants to which people are most commonly exposed, at the first edition of the Act Now Forum, organised by Gaialink, in partnership with Habitat India, on 20 December 2025. The forum is a multi-sector dialogue aiming to understand the urban, and now rural, air crisis and is designed to turn expert insights into clear, actionable direction for the public.
Sony R K co-convened a panel titled, ‘Epistemic Uncertainties and the Politics of Scientific Knowledge in Environmental Governance’, with Ranjith Kallyani (Assistant Professor, Jaypee University of Information Technology, Solan, HP) at the First STS India Network Conference “Co-Shaping of Science, Technology, and Society in India”, organised by OP Jindal Global University and STS India Network in collaboration with IIT Delhi. The panel examined how scientific knowledge in environmental governance is shaped by uncertainty, power, institutional interests, and socio-political contexts, challenging the notion of science as a neutral or singular authority in decision-making.
Bhargav Krishna shared insights on translating research evidence into impactful policy changes, emphasising the importance of dismantling research silos and the significance of multi-sectoral interventions to tackle public health challenges, at the Third Annual Symposium, ‘Beyond the Halfway Mark: Scaling Impact at the Nexus of Environment and Health’, organised by NIHR: Global Health Research Centre for Non-Communicable Diseases and Environmental Change on 9 December 2025 in Hyderabad.
Aditya Valiathan Pillai moderated a panel, ‘Is the future of Comfort collective?’ with the speakers – Dr Rajan Rawal (CEPT), Sheila Sri Prakash (Shilpa Architects) and Madhav Pai (WRI) at Conscious Collective 2025, organised by Godrej Design Lab. They discussed the underlying social, cultural, and economic forces driving India into a heat trap and, more specifically, India’s buildings, urban form, and cooling expectations.
Bhargav Krishna was in conversation with Radhika Khosla (Associate Professor, University of Oxford) about the future of heat policy at Godrej Design Lab’s Conscious Collective 2025. The discussion covered how heat in India has shifted from an information problem to a lived crisis — one that demands action-oriented policy with clear entry points like public health. They discussed the need for discussions around HAPs to move from their number to their quality: locally informed, science-based, and transforming from a tool for disaster response to one that enshrined long-term urban liveability. Central to this shift is treating mitigation and adaptation as inseparable, and to have passive cooling, greener spaces, and stronger coordination between state and non-state actors at the core.
