Beyond sun and dung

Rajendra Pachauri heads TERI, The Energy and Resources Institute, based in New Delhi. An engineer of the railways in his early career, Pachauri went to the United States to earn a PhD in industrial engineering and another in economics, after which he returned to India in 1981 to work with TERI. In 1995, he joined the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as a lead author; in 2002, he was elected the chair of the IPCC. Its work and his leadership (along with that of former US Vice-President Al Gore) were recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. Pachauri is currently the head of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute, part of Yale University in the US. He spoke with Himal Southasian contributing editor Vijay Prashad in mid-September.

The Nobel Prize that you won was awarded not only for the "greater knowledge" that the IPCC had produced on man-made climate change, but also and more significantly for the IPCC's attempt to "lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change". How would you characterise these foundations?
Quite clearly, what the impacts of climate change would be if we don't take any action. In other words, if we keep greenhouse-gas emissions unmitigated, then temperature increase, changes in the climate of various kinds and the impacts are going to get far more severe. So that lays the foundations of why action is necessary. But we've also brought out very clearly that the costs and attractiveness of taking action to reduce emissions is really very, very different from what people had believed. In other words, it's much cheaper to mitigate emissions of greenhouse gases than had been thought of earlier, and there are also enormous co-benefits. You have reduced air pollution at the local level, and as a benefit you'll have higher levels of energy security, much more employment, stable agricultural production. So all this makes mitigation an extremely attractive and compelling set of measures, and I think that lays the foundations for taking action. We've also been very proactive in spreading the message, unlike previous IPCC reports. This time around I've been extremely particular that we should spread the message and carry out extensive outreach of the results of the report.