CLIMATE CHANGE: Science, Impacts, and Pathways to Sustainability

I teach at a university in Dehradun. From the campus on clear winter mornings, you can see the Himalayan range — white and vast, carrying within its glaciers the freshwater future of hundreds of millions of people downstream. I have watched those glaciers in satellite imagery throughout my research career, measuring their retreat year by year through the spectral signatures of Landsat and Sentinel sensors. The numbers in the data and the view from the campus window have always felt, to me, like two windows onto the same crisis: one quantitative and global, the other immediate and intimate. It was that combination - the scientific data and the mountain reality — that first convinced me this book needed to be written. Climate change education in India, and across much of the developing world, suffers from a gap between the sophistication of the global scientific literature (IPCC reports, Lancet Countdown, IEA analyses) and the accessible, integrated educational resources that translate that literature into learning for undergraduate and postgraduate students. This book is my attempt to close that gap - to bring the full weight of global climate science into a single authored volume that is simultaneously rigorous, accessible, interdisciplinary, and grounded in the geographic and developmental realities of the world that students in India and South Asia actually inhabit.