“We have been living in these Buxa Duar hills for about 300-400 years,” Indra Shankar Thapa from northern West Bengal told members of our t...
“We have been living in these Buxa Duar hills for about 300-400 years,” Indra Shankar Thapa from northern West Bengal told members of our team as we researched India’s first People’s Climate Report. “We live together with the wild animals and have been doing so for ages. We have mutual love and respect for each other…We have families, little kids, elderly people in the community and we don’t know how and where we will leave this place. We are citizens of India and we too have the right to live here. So please let us live and grow here.”.
As the collective of activists and academics who comprise the People’s Climate Network focussed on flipping the current top-down climate narrative to bring stories of those impacted by climate change to the fore, Thapa reminded us of the twin struggles of development and climate change faced by India’s forest dwelling communities.
For several years now, climate scientists and international bodies such as the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have been sounding the alarm: the climate crisis is an existential threat to humanity and the biosphere but our “business as usual” attitude condemns us to unprecedented human suffering and a catastrophic loss of biodiversity.
While the Intergovernmental Panel...
