1/3 Our new blog maps India’s public solar research, development, & demonstration (RD&D) landscape and explores where the country is placing its bets – on tried-and-tested technologies like traditional crystalline silicon PV systems or emerging areas like perovskites. shorturl.at/wmJoA

1/2 “So far India’s approach to its energy transition goals has mostly been ad hoc and supply-centric rather than targeted to end users, because it comes from a scarcity mindset. This has worked out so far,

1/2 @ndubash.bsky.social to @thequintindia.bsky.social - “The overarching point has to be that we think about how we weave our climate objectives into our development objectives. We cannot think about it as something that's out there and separate—something that we consider once a year at COPs”.

1/2 #OurTeamSpeaks: Ishita Srivastava is a Research Associate in the Environmental Governance and Policy vertical at SFC. Her work focuses largely on air quality governance and regulation, and health-focused air pollution policy.

1/3 “Shilpa 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.

1/3 India plans to boost capacity to 22.5 GW by 2032 and hit 100 GW by 2047 — a 12x jump from today’s levels. The 2025 Budget launched a ₹20,000 cr Nuclear Energy Mission to build at least five small modular reactors by 2033.

1/2 @ashwiniswain.bsky.social was a panelist at a discussion on ‘Accelerating Demand-Side Energy Transitions Through Collaborative Governance’ on 2 September at WRI Connect Karo 2025 (@worldresources.bsky.social) for People, Nature, and Climate.

1/2 #OurTeamSpeaks: Isha Sharma is a Research Lead, in the Climate Policy vertical at SFC. Her work focuses on green industrial policy, international, and domestic approaches to climate change governance and low-carbon development strategies.

1/2 #JobAlert: We’re #hiring a Manager / Senior Manager (#Communications) in New Delhi. The role involves providing editorial direction, crafting compelling messages, and designing strategies to engage key stakeholders — while building SFC’s public voice.

1/2 Starting today, we’re launching SFC Spotlight — a video series that takes you inside a day in the life of our researchers as they share what they’re working on and why it matters for India’s sustainable future. Our first episode features Annanya Mahajan, Research Lead,

1/2 #JobAlert: We’re #hiring a Fellow, Energy Transitions in New Delhi. Our work focuses on explaining the entrenched patterns in the Indian energy sector, identifying key bottlenecks to a clean energy transition, and finding solutions to ease its challenges.

1/2 NEW BLOG: "The Union government’s recent push for nuclear energy is part of its broader goal to meet rising energy demands while reducing carbon emissions. How does this push align with India’s energy transition goals? What are the challenges to realising this ambition?"

1/2 If there is one lesson from our journey so far, it is that institutions are sustained through both long-term strategic choices & daily acts that shape the positive experience of building something together. As many readers will agree, policy work is slow, demanding & can often be disappointing.

1/2 #JobAlert: We're #hiring a Fellow, Adaptation and Resilience in New Delhi. Requirements: - Ph.D. in a relevant social science discipline or applied sciences with demonstrable policy engagement and public impact - A minimum of three to five years of work experience is essential

1/2 #JobAlert: We’re #hiring a Manager / Senior Manager (#Communications) in New Delhi. The role involves providing editorial direction, crafting compelling messages, and designing strategies to engage key stakeholders — while building SFC’s public voice.

1/2 @ndubash.bsky.social is one of the experts featured in @carbonbrief.org on how COPs could be reformed: “A renewed international process should be focused on the hard, detailed work of enabling low-carbon, resilient development transitions and less on extracting statements of intent.”

1/2 #TwoYearsofSFC: It takes a community to build a think tank – we realised this very early in the journey of establishing the Sustainable Futures Collaborative. Two years in, we reflect on whether we are on the right track to tackle evolving climate, energy, and environment challenges.

1/3 Poonam Mangaraj presented her work on ‘Rethinking crop residue burning (CRB) through the lens of high-resolution observations’ at India Clean Air Summit (ICAS) 2025 organised by Center for Study of Science, Technology, and Policy.

1/5 SFC hosted Rohit Azad, Associate Professor at the Centre for Studies in Economic Studies and Planning at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi and Shouvik Chakraborty, Research Associate Professor at Political Economy Institute at University of Massachusetts, Amherst,

1/2 #OurTeamSpeaks: Rashi Agarwal is a Senior Research Associate in the Energy Transitions team at SFC. She works on just energy transition and energy governance in India. She is also interested in gender equality and social inclusion, natural resource management, and international climate policy.

1/2 #JobAlert: We’re #hiring a Fellow, Energy Transitions in New Delhi. Our work focuses on explaining the entrenched patterns in the Indian energy sector, identifying key bottlenecks to a clean energy transition, and finding solutions to ease its challenges.

1/3 @ndubash.bsky.social, with fellow Co-Editors-in-Chief W. Pieter Pauw and @yacobmulugetta.bsky.social, writes in a new @climate-policy.bsky.social editorial: Climate policy is now a more multi-stranded and complex area of inquiry than ever before. In these uncertain times,

1/2 #JobAlert: We're #hiring a Fellow, Adaptation and Resilience in New Delhi. Requirements: - Ph.D. in a relevant social science discipline or applied sciences with demonstrable policy engagement and public impact

1/2 Aditya Valiathan Pillai spoke on why extreme heat merits coverage to the latest cohort of the Oxford Climate Journalism Network, housed at the @reutersinstitute.bsky.social. The network brings together journalists from across the world to stimulate climate coverage.

1/3 “The report isn’t just dealing with heat but with urbanisation, deforestation, and land-use change, so it questions what development should look like and how to structure institutions and policies in a way that integrates climate adaptation into day to day development.

1/4 REPOST: This issue brief by Nikita Shukla, @aman-srivastava.bsky.social, and @easwaran.bsky.social, outlines key considerations that can help shape a comprehensive definition of net-zero emissions for India, not by prescribing implementation strategies,

1/2 “Local governments are acknowledging heat as a problem. But they have no imagination of what long-term climate resilience even looks like. India's densest and poorest areas are often excluded from cooling efforts like tree-planting or water-body restoration because of land ownership and -

1/2 #OurTeamSpeaks: @sonyrk.bsky.social is an Associate Fellow in the Adaptation and Resilience team at SFC. His interests are at the intersection of conservation, development, and action, with research interests spanning environmentalism, environmental politics and justice,

1/3 Aditya Valiathan Pillai presented at a capacity building programme organised for Iloilo province in the Philippines, organised by the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA) on 30 July 2025.

1/4 “Despite growing public and policy awareness, the way we represent #heat—both visually and through data—hasn’t kept up. It remains stuck in abstraction and is often portrayed as ambient and impersonal, through red thermometers, empty roads, or people splashing water over their heads.

1/4 #Netzero targets are now central to global climate ambition. However these targets vary in scope and timelines, reflecting differences in historical responsibility, development needs, domestic capabilities, political realities, and economic structures.

1/2 @aruneshkarkun.bsky.social is a Research Lead in the Environmental Governance & Policy team. His work focuses on researching air quality governance, policies on electric mobility and climate change. He also works on understanding emergent environmental governance issues like geo-engineering,

1/2 In our March 2025 report on the implementation of heat action plans in nine Indian cities, we found that long-term heat mitigation measures, where present, are often ill-targeted and suffer from poor follow-through due to weak inter-departmental coordination.

1/5 NEW: #Net-zero targets are now central to global climate ambition. However these targets vary in scope and timelines, reflecting differences in historical responsibility, development needs, domestic capabilities, political realities, and economic structures.

1/2 The Union Cabinet’s recent approval of the ₹1 lakh crore Research, Development, and Innovation (RDI) Scheme marks a potentially transformative moment for India’s technology and industrial policy. But to enhance the effectiveness of the scheme -

1/2 “The RDI Scheme is an opportunity to build the foundation for a globally competitive, low-carbon economy. However, its success will depend on strategic clarity, capable institutions, and a clear link between innovation and deployment” -

1/4 “Heat action plans are basically guidance documents which are made at different levels of the government - state, district and city. A good HAP will have some key components including, identifying the type of heat that a particular place has experienced, the relative humidity there -

1/2 “An inadequate understanding of heat’s complex, pervasive, and evolving nature shapes how the Indian bureaucracy currently responds to it: as a static, seasonal, and contained risk. As a result, heat actions are skewed towards short term reactionary measures, rather than long-term solutions” -

1/2 NEW BLOG: Heatwaves are now one of India’s deadliest natural hazards, yet their true impact is frequently masked by bureaucratic oversight and a fundamental misunderstanding of the threat.

1/2 “A lot of actions which are currently happening are very reactionary top-down guidelines which basically means that you have a very hyperlocal problem but you have a guideline coming from the top which tries to solve for everything and everyone, which does not fix the problem” -

1/2 #OurTeamSpeaks: Shubhranshu Suman is a Research Associate in the Energy Transitions team at SFC. His research focuses on advancing inclusive and equitable energy transitions. His interests also include the evolving fields of climate finance and GHG emissions accounting.

1/2 “Part of the problem is that heat action plans aren’t legally binding. Heat waves aren’t recognised as state-specific disasters in most parts of India. Right now, only about eight states have formally declared heat waves as disasters.

“Most actions under NCAP have been targeted at dust management with measures such as road sweeping and water sprinkling. It’s not nearly enough to address the true burden of air pollution" - @bhargavkrishna.bsky.social was quoted in Outlook Business. www.outlookbusiness.com/planet/clima...

1/3 “Climate change, along with land-use change, acts as an overarching factor that threatens traditional brackish water paddy-based rotational farming systems, such as Pokali, Kaipad, and Khazan, along the west coast of India.

1/3 “Most of the HAPs put forth by multiple Indian cities lack long-term strategies to tackle the growing threat of extreme heat in the country, according to a study published in March this year by the Sustainable Futures Collaborative (SFC).

1/4 “India's cities, like many cities in the developing and developed world, tend to pull or concentrate heat because of the cement, how close buildings are, how traffic moves, how sunlight hits the city and the angles at which it hits it. A lot of people's houses have tin roofs and

1/4 “The global food and land use system costs us around $12 trillion, compared to the market value of the global food system of $10 trillion. This manifests as hidden costs of poverty, ill health, and environmental degradation. That means -

1/3 REPLUG: “The risks of the future are likely to be so severe, frequent and interconnected that they will require proactively identifying and tackling risk, girding the system for a state of permanent tumult, and relying on all-of-government coordination.

1/5 SFC collaborated with Purpose to host a closed-door workshop that brought together urban planners, researchers, designers, journalists, and community leaders to co-create community-driven, non-policy responses to extreme heat.

1/2 A recent study in Environment International examined 3.6M+ deaths across 10 Indian cities and found that #heat-related mortality was 1.5x higher during extreme PM2.5 #pollution. The authors call for efforts to reduce common sources of air pollution and,