CLIMATE CHANGE AND HUMAN WELL-BEING Protecting Lives, Livelihoods, and Future Generations in a Warming World

Global temperatures are no longer a subject that belongs only to climatology. They reach into hospital wards, classrooms, paddy fields, cattle sheds, and household budgets, and they reach into some lives far harder than others. Climate Change and Human Well-being follows that reach through twelve chapters. It begins with the science — the drivers, the emissions record, the observed trends, and India’s particular exposures — and then turns to what those trends do to people: to health, through heat waves, vector- and water-borne disease, air pollution, and mental distress; to children, the aged, tribal communities, women, and the urban poor, whose vulnerabilities compound; to livelihoods in agriculture, fisheries, forestry, and livestock; and to the wider economy, through lost productivity, damaged infrastructure, and deepening inequality. The book does not stop at diagnosis. Its later chapters examine international agreements and India’s own policies, community-based adaptation, climate-smart agriculture, renewable energy, resilient health systems, and climate governance, and it grounds all of it in Indian case studies of heat waves, floods, drought, and adaptation that has worked. A closing chapter draws the findings into policy recommendations and an agenda for future research. Running through every chapter is a question of justice: those who have contributed least to greenhouse gas emissions carry the heaviest burdens. The book treats that not as an afterthought but as a claim on how climate policy should be made. It is written for students, researchers, policymakers, and practitioners in public health, development, and environmental studies — and for any reader who wants to understand what a warming world means for human lives.