Climate Change: Issues and Perspectives for South Asia

This book is designed for teachers, researchers, environmental professionals, tertiary level students and informed general readers of South Asia looking for a supplementary reading on what is happening to the Climate of this Monsoon region. Coming as a sequel to the earlier two books published in 2011 and 2015 respectively on Climate Change and Climate Variability Issues, both in Bangladesh context, this book looks at the climate change issues at South Asian scale. South Asia enjoys the same Monsoon climate, and climate change would affect us all, without respect to national political boundaries. With 19 articles collected from Bangladesh, India and Pakistan, arranged in four sections, address three issues. First, the knowledge issue, dealt with in section one. How familiar are we with the science of climate change? What are the developments in the UN Climate Change Conferences? Did IPCC work with scientific objectivity and transparency in dealing with the aspects of climate science? Second is the impact issue based on field evidence related to projected climate change impacts. Impact issues are covered in sections two and three. The third is the policy issues, placed in the last section. We looked at national policies and planning related to climate-change-adaptation and mainstreaming with the national development programs. How did the South Asian nations policy responses evolved through various protocols and agreements signed over the last decades regarding the Green House Gas emission, Climate Change adaptation and mitigation? The political ecology of the climate issues linked with the intertwined problems of poverty, sustainable development, environment and vulnerability challenge all the South Asian nations. While most of the development problems are definable and measureable making them amenable to planned solution, how far the climate change problems are amenable to planned solution without affecting the scheduled development requirements?