-The Hindu For growth to go forward, it must be environmentally and socially concordant. The launch of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and agreements in Paris finally signalled the realisation that we can no longer achieve our economic ambitions by endangering the environment and society. But even as countries agreed on the need to nurture sustainability, it has come under fire from the mistaken notion that doing so will slow the pace...

-Hindustan Times The Chennai floods have thrown up some fundamental flaws in our system of urban planning. Across India, city after city has experienced floods, while some others live with the fear of impending disasters. In Mumbai, flooding was caused by wrong developments at the Bandra estuary and negligence along the Mithi river, and in Uttarakhand the disaster was caused by unplanned regional development and the unholy nexus between the land...

-Business Standard Evidence on increasing risk should be tipping scale for the government New Delhi: At the COP21 talks in Paris, Chennai had been brought up as an unfortunate exhibit of the perfect storm triggered by climate change and indiscriminate urban planning. While India is already driving the conversation about the global effort to climate-proofing, hopefully the impact of this latest flood will also force its leadership to sit up and take...

-HuffingtonPost.in A report issued by the World Bank suggests that India's economic progress could be severely hampered, with an additional 45 million pushed into poverty, due to the effects of climate change. While Prime Minister Modi makes his position clear vis-à-vis developed nations, the government does not appear to be taking enough cognisance of the devastating effects of climate change at home. Climate change is real and unless serious action is taken...

-The Telegraph Paris: Rich nations led by the US have ensured that a key UN-mediated loss-and-damage mechanism to counter the effects of global warming would lose its teeth in the climate-change agreement expected to emerge here next week. The draft agreement, released today, has the words "compensation" and "liability" deleted from the text, nixing the possibility of holding the developed nations accountable for climate change-triggered disasters and forcing them to pay damages. The...