“In the South, you can't talk just about global warming”

Arindam Roy is a fervent activist when it comes to educating people about climate change. He’s involved in an array of awareness-building initiatives to share the science behind this phenomenon with the general public. In 2019, he created a website to disseminate climate-change information in Bengali, a language spoken by 250 million people. The website is updated regularly, including with the most recent reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). “I saw that these reports hadn’t been translated into Bengali, but it’s precisely those regions where Bengali is spoken – that is, Bangladesh and the eastern part of India where I was born – that are the most vulnerable to climate change. And these are regions where people don’t speak English,” says Roy.

He also organizes interactive workshops on adapting to climate change every Saturday morning. “I’ve given over 50 workshops so far. It’s a really enriching experience. I’ve learned a lot from listening to participants describe their experience, whether they are students, farmers, fishermen or NGO employees,” he says.

Roy believes strongly that climate-change messages should be tailored to the challenges faced by specific groups of people, with examples that make sense for their daily lives. “The workshops have shown me first-hand that talking just about global warming isn’t an effective way to engage people on the issue of climate change,” he says. “For people who live near the tropics and often experience summer temperatures of 45–50°C, telling them that the average global temperature could rise by 2°C won’t necessarily ring any alarm bells.” Roy recently wrote an opinion piece that appears in Thomson Reuters Foundation News.

Saving lives and livelihoods

When Roy discusses climate change, he frames it in terms of extreme weather events like cyclones and heavy rains that can affect people’s livelihoods. “These kinds of events will only become more frequent and more severe,” he says. “For instance, in 1970 tropical cyclone Bhola swept through Bangladesh and killed half a million people. But in 2019 and 2020, there were four tropical cyclones in the region, and some of them were more severe than Bhola. However the death toll was much lower – largely thanks to modern weather forecasting technology. Today we can predict severe cyclones and warn people, evacuating them if necessary, two weeks ahead of time. The problem is, saving lives isn’t the same as saving livelihoods.” That could be done by, for example, encouraging farmers in areas where droughts are increasingly likely to switch their sugar-cane crops for plants that need less water.

When asked about where his interest in communicating on climate change comes from, Roy points to the years he spent traveling in such vulnerable regions. “I spent five years at the Darjeeling high-altitude station in the eastern Himalayas for my PhD, and for my work I traveled through different regions in India to take samples. After that, I spent two years working for an NGO on climate-change adaptation in India, Bangladesh and Bhutan. My role was to assess climate vulnerability of the local communities. Based on this feedback from communities we suggested and implemented mitigation measures. I really enjoyed the opportunity to discuss climate change directly with local groups and pass on scientific knowledge,” he says.

Improving air quality

Today Roy still serves as a link between science and the community. For the postdoc research he’s conducting at the EPFL lab headed by Prof. Athanasios Nenes, in a project lead by Dr. Satoshi Takahama, he’s looking at air quality control in India through the Clean Air Project in India (CAP India). This is a Swiss initiative spearheaded jointly by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and India’s Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) with the goal of developing methods for air quality monitoring network over Indian cities, which are different in terms of population and pollution distribution, land use and sources as compared to the Global North. “I really like the strategic aspects of this project, and I may even decide to continue on this path for my career,” says Roy. “Of course, I’ll always be active in climate-change communications.”