Policy Watch: Environment, Natural Resources and Sustainability – October 2025

This issue of the Policy Watch is on the theme, Environment, Natural Resources and Sustainability. The year 2025 witnessed yet another devastating monsoon with a very high number of extreme rainfall, flash floods and loss of lives and livelihoods across the Indian Himalayan Region and more focused in western Indian Himalayan Region.

This policy watch carries the first three articles which attempt to analyze climatic, scientific, infrastructural, economic and social factors responsible for disasters in the Himalayan region. Following three articles discuss climate change adaptation and resilience opportunities in India. Finally, we carry paintings by 19 young women on climate change and gender.

The first article is by political thinker and ex Member of Parliament from Sikkim Mr. P.D. Rai. The article entitled ‘The Right to Life: Un-natural Disasters in the Central Himalaya’ interrogate how infrastructural expansion, socio-ecological degradation, regulatory failure, and technocratic ‘solutions’ have created compounded vulnerabilities and disaster risk in states like Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, transforming natural hazards into “un-natural” catastrophes. He argues that the “un-natural” disasters plaguing the Central Himalayas are a stark indicator that development at the cost of ecology is unsustainable and ethically indefensible. The growing vulnerability, exacerbated by human interventions, directly challenges the right to life for millions of inhabitants.