Speaker: Sidhant Pai (StepChange)
Topic: Science-Based Decision-Making: Developing Informed Solutions for Climate and Air Quality Management in LMICs

Degraded air quality and accelerating climate change is projected to have serious implications on human health and quality of life in the coming decades. These impacts are expected to be particularly salient in low and middle-income countries, affecting under-served communities in these regions that will need to dynamically adapt to these systemic environmental risks. On a positive note, the past few years have seen a global shift in support for green governmental policies, sustainable corporate governance and environmentally-conscious individual action. This has resulted in meaningful tail-winds, with stakeholders across government, industry and civil society increasingly interested in incorporating a sustainability-centered lens into their decision-making. This shift in perspective comes against the backdrop of significant advancements in our scientific understanding of the drivers and mechanisms of air pollution and climate change, making it increasingly possible to make informed and well-validated decisions that can translate to real-world impact. However, in order for academic knowledge to appropriately inform these decisions, there is an active need for targeted research that tackles this translational domain and develops methods, frameworks, techniques and tools that are appropriate for non-academic stakeholders and that can address concrete information gaps. This presentation introduces the urgent need for this class of solutions, by leveraging concrete examples of the information gaps that exist in the climate and air quality domains in India, and discusses the high-level opportunities that are emerging to empower stakeholders that are interested in tackling these challenges.