Chandni Singh

• PhD
• Senior Researcher at Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS)

The Paris Agreement put adaptation prominently on the global climate action agenda. Despite a surge in research and praxis-based knowledge on adaptation, a critical policy roadblock is synthesizing and assessing this burgeoning evidence. We develop an approach to assess the multidimensional feasibility of adaptation options in a robust and transpar...

Cities are at the forefront of climate action as never before: they concentrate risk but also provide opportunities to innovate. Situated at the crossroads of extensive urbanization, unequal development, and high climate vulnerability, Indian cities face an urgent imperative to adapt to current and projected climate change impacts. While a global a...

Loss and Damage studies have tended to focus on rapid-onset events with lesser attention to slow-onset events such as drought. Even when discussed, narratives around droughts emphasize implications on rural populations and there remain empirical and conceptual gaps on drought impacts in urban areas. We focus on losses and damages associated with ur...

Gender mediates climate vulnerability and adaptation action. Consequently, climate change adaptation policy has seen a push towards ‘mainstreaming’ gender and prioritizing ‘gender-responsive’ climate action. However, it is unclear to what extent this mainstreaming advances or obscures gender considerations and whether current climate policies refle...

The Paris Agreement articulates a global goal on adaptation, which aims to ensure an ‘adequate adaptation response’ to the ‘global temperature goal’, and requires countries to report progress through periodic global stocktakes. However, there remain conceptual and methodological challenges in defining an adaptation goal and mixed evidence on what e...

Adaptation to climate change is often conceptualized as a dichotomy, with responses being either planned (formal and structured) or autonomous (organic and self-organized, often known as “everyday adaptation”). Recent literature on adaptation responses has highlighted the existence and importance of the interplay between autonomous and planned adap...

Adaptation science has grown exponentially in the past two decades and has progressed conceptually. However, these advances remain siloed from adaptation practice. In this commentary, I make three arguments: (1) adaptation theory has grown but is often unfit-for-practical-purpose; (2) disciplines and methodologies to study adaptation remain conserv...

Cities are exposed to and concentrate heat. Indian cities are particularly at risk with terrifying projections of extreme heat, especially for vulnerable populations. Recognising this growing heat risk, Indian cities have been frontrunners in heat action planning, experimenting with a range of actions, typically through city-level ‘Heat Action Plan...

Since its inception in 2020, the implementation chapter of the Adaptation Gap Report has provided an overview of implemented adaptation action worldwide, using various data sources of global and intercontinental coverage. Every year, the chapter updates the evolution of adaptation projects over time, and their annual grant value under the multilate...

The Adaptation Gap Report (AGR) series contributes to addressing these questions by annually assessing progress on adaptation and informing key processes, notably under the UNFCCC. In line with this, the AGR 2024 continues to assess information on planning, implementation and finance (chapters 2, 3 and 4, respectively), to explore whether countries...

This Policy Brief contributes to the goal of operationalizing loss and damage solutions and guiding global policies on the issues by identifying potential areas where science can readily support loss and damage solutions. This brief seeks to answer the following questions: 1. What is the current state of knowledge and the status of recognition of l...

For this special issue of the International Migration Review, we develop and provide a comprehensive organizing framework, the Migration Intersections Grid (MIG), to inform and guide migration research in and through the remainder of the twenty-first century. We motivate our work by conducting a high-level scoping review of summaries and syntheses...

Adaptation evidence and knowledge are diverse and unequally represented in global adaptation discourse. The Adaptation Futures 2023 conference sought to bring this diversity together to advance more inclusive and impactful adaptation science, and confronted both the benefits and the trade-offs that this effort entails.

There is unequivocal evidence that anthropogenic climate change is supercharging temperature and precipitation regimes globally. One of the clearest signals of this is seen in current and projected increases in extreme heat, understood as changes in temperature maximums, longer duration heatwaves, and higher night‐time temperatures. Extreme heat ha...

The academic literature on internal migration in India has been limited to studies which either capture the well-being of migrants at home or destination. With rural–urban (R–U) boundaries blurring and peri-urban areas gaining economic importance, it is imperative to move away from such binaries towards a continuum approach. Using mixed methods, th...

The escalating impacts of climate change on the movement and immobility of people, coupled with false but influential narratives of mobility, highlight an urgent need for nuanced and synthetic research around climate mobility. Synthesis of evidence and gaps across the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Sixth Assessment Report highligh...

As climate impacts intensify and threaten the habitability of more and more places where people live and work, governments and regional organizations increasingly see the need to consider planned relocation as a policy option. Planned relocation processes in the context of climate change are challenging and poorly understood, with only limited guid...

An assessment of the global progress in climate change adaptation is urgently needed. Despite a rising awareness that adaptation should involve diverse societal actors and a shared sense of responsibility, little is known about the types of actors, such as state and non-state, and their roles in different types of adaptation responses as well as in...

Purpose This conversation presents reflections on heatwaves, vulnerability and adaptation in South Asia. Design/methodology/approach This is based on the Nordic Asia Podcast on Temperatures on the Rise: Adapting to Heat Extremes in South Asia. Findings Main themes discussed in this conversation include vulnerability and adaptation, livelihoods an...

An assessment of the global progress in climate change adaptation is urgently needed. Despite a rising awareness that adaptation should involve diverse societal actors and a shared sense of responsibility, little is known about the types of actors involved and their roles—particularly between state and non-state actors and different regions. Based...

Ongoing urbanisation offers opportunities to reimagine how cities can restore and strengthen human-nature relationships while contributing to urban sustainability. Focusing on activities around growing food as a key space to examine solutions, the ‘Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture as Green Infrastructure’ (UP-AGrI) project explored the impacts of g...

Urban and peri-urban agriculture as green infrastructure (UP-AGrI), a three-year research project, examines the implications of urban agriculture on human well-being and urban sustainability. The project draws on research in Tanzania and India. The three broad project objectives are: • To examine the impacts of urban and peri-urban agriculture (UP...

‘Representations’ of recovery refer to the creation, circulation, reinforcement and subversion of ideas about what should be done in the months and years after a hazard has struck. The research reported in this paper outlines how contrasting and, in some cases, openly contested narratives can emerge in society around the nature and causes of the ev...

Dryland regions are highly dynamic environments in which multiple pressures intersect, threatening livelihood security. Mobility is an integral feature in these environments and represents a key risk management strategy for people to respond to frequent livelihood shocks and stresses. Global environmental change scholarship has tended to articulate...

This article provides a stocktake of the adaptation literature between 2013 and 2019 to better understand how adaptation responses affect risk under the particularly challenging conditions of compound climate events. Across 39 countries, 45 response types to compound hazards display anticipatory (9%), reactive (33%) and maladaptive (41%) characteri...

Past influenza pandemics including the Spanish flu and H1N1 have disproportionately affected Indigenous Peoples. We conducted a systematic scoping review to provide an overview of the state of understanding of the experience of Indigenous peoples during the first 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic, in doing so we capture the state of knowledge avai...

What the Latest Science on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability means for Cities and Urban Areas, offers a concise and accessible urban-focused distillation of the IPCC Working Group II Report. The scale, reach, and complexity of contemporary urbanisation can compound the risks from climate change for cities. Cities and urban areas have a critica...

The Summary for Urban Policymakers (SUP) series distils the IPCC reports into targeted summaries to inform action at the city and regional scale. This third volume in the series, What the Latest Science on Climate Change Mitigation Means for Cities and Urban Areas offers a concise and accessible distillation of the IPCC Working Group III Report for...

Non-technical summary We summarize what we assess as the past year's most important findings within climate change research: limits to adaptation, vulnerability hotspots, new threats coming from the climate–health nexus, climate (im)mobility and security, sustainable practices for land use and finance, losses and damages, inclusive societal climate...

In this Personal View, we explain the ways that climatic risks affect the transmission, perception, response, and lived experience of COVID-19. First, temperature, wind, and humidity influence the transmission of COVID-19 in ways not fully understood, although non-climatic factors appear more important than climatic factors in explaining disease tr...

This commentary from the Journal Editorial Board sets out the research agenda for the journal and invites contributions. We want to elicit and synthesize research- and practice-based knowledge toward the goal of resilient, equitable cities in a world with less than 1.5°C of warming, focusing on the transformational change needed to achieve this goa...

Arguing that ‘the moment of the now’ calls for fresh, creative thinking in the search for solutions, this White Paper both explores the state of research at the intersection between culture, heritage and climate change, and makes a case for a set of approaches, perspectives and conversations that we need to have—or that we need to have in new ways....

This Cross-Chapter Box highlights the intersecting issues of gender, climate change adaptation, climate justice and transformative pathways. A gender perspective does not centre only on women or men but examines structures, processes and relationships of power between and among groups of men and women and how gender, particularly in its non-binary...

This article provides a stocktake the adaptation literature between 2013 and 2019 to better understand how responses affect risk under the particularly challenging conditions of compound climate impacts. Across 39 countries, 45 response types to compound hazards display anticipatory (9%), reactive (33%) and maladaptive characteristics (41%), as wel...

Climate change and migration are intersecting realities for millions of people living in cities across the world. This report examines the role of local leadership, policy exchange, and city networks in responding to climate-mediated migration, as well as explores the critical need for a strong understanding of cultural values of people and places...

Climate change impacts are being felt across sectors in all regions of the world, and adaptation projects are being implemented to reduce climate risks and existing vulnerabilities. Climate adaptation actions also have significant synergies and tradeoffs with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), including SDG 5 on gender equality. Questions ar...

Urban populations in South Asia are regularly exposed to poor air quality, especially elevated concentrations of fine particulate matter (PM 2.5 ). However, the potential differential burden for the urban poor has received little attention. Here, we evaluate the links between occupation, patterns of exposure to PM2.5, and the impacts at an individu...

Despite considerable interest in urban and peri-urban agriculture (UPA) in recent decades, its contributions to urban sustainability and human wellbeing remain contested. This systematic literature review examines the geographical landscape of the peer-reviewed literature on UPA and assesses its reported outcomes on sustainability and wellbeing. Fo...

The feasibility assessment (FA) presents a systematic framework to assess adaptation and mitigation options organised by system transitions. This Cross-Chapter Box assessed the feasibility of 23 adaptation options across six dimensions: economic, technological, institutional, socio-cultural, environmental-ecological, and geophysical to identify fac...

Governments, businesses, and civil society organizations have diverse policy tools to incentivize adaptation. Policy tools can shape the type and extent of adaptation, and therefore, function either as barriers or enablers for reducing risk and vulnerability. Using data from a systematic review of academic literature on global adaptation responses...

The paper highlights some of the key concerns across the sectors of school, higher and teacher education. A few potential research themes that can help problematise the issues raised have been identified. An emphasis is laid on the need to build on practice-based repositories of knowledge, curricular framing and pedagogic strategies. Examining the...

Assessing global progress on human adaptation to climate change is an urgent priority. Although the literature on adaptation to climate change is rapidly expanding, little is known about the actual extent of implementation. We systematically screened >48,000 articles using machine learning methods and a global network of 126 researchers. Our synthe...

Constraints and limits to adaptation are critical to understanding the extent to which human and natural systems can successfully adapt to climate change. We conduct a systematic review of 1,682 academic studies on human adaptation responses to identify patterns in constraints and limits to adaptation for different regions, sectors, hazards, adapta...

Mobility is a key livelihood and risk management strategy, including in the context of climate change. The COVID-19 pandemic has reinforced long standing concerns that migrant populations remain largely overlooked in economic development, adaptation to climate change, and spatial planning. We synthesize evidence across multiple studies that confirm...

The 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami claimed nearly eight thousand lives across Tamil Nadu and affected more than eight lakh1 people indirectly through loss of houses, personal belongings, and livelihoods. The event, commonly described as unprecedented, exposed the state’s inadequate preparedness and its limited institutional and financial capacity to pre...

Characterized by inequalities along gender, income, caste, and ethnic differences, urban areas are especially vulnerable to climate risks. Recognizing this, cities are adapting through infrastructural, ecosystem-based, institutional, and behavioural interventions at multiple scales. However, the extent to which these interventions enable or constra...

Extreme heat events impact people and ecosystems across the globe, and they are becoming more frequent and intense in a warming climate. Responses to heat span sectors and geographic boundaries. Prior research has documented technologies or options that can be deployed to manage extreme heat and examples of how individuals, communities, governments...

This chapter highlights changing practices of everyday water access and use in Kolar, Karnataka, charting the shift from a reliance on traditional water management institutions (neerganti) and infrastructure (kere), to the privatization and atomization of water resources (borewells and buying drinking water). On the one hand, these shifts have unde...

We contend that the representational aspects of recovery play an important but under-researched role in shaping long-term outcomes for disaster-affected populations. Ideas constructed around events, people and processes, and conveyed through discussion, texts and images, are seldom neutral and can be exclusionary in their effect. This review draws...

We present the first systematic, global stocktake of the academic literature on human adaptation. We screen 48,316 documents and identify 1,682 articles that present empirical research documenting human efforts to reduce risk from climate change and associated hazards. Coding and synthesizing this literature highlights that the overall extent of ad...

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we use...

India has the largest area of rainfed dryland agriculture globally, with a variety of distinct types of farming systems producing most of its coarse cereals, food legumes, minor millets, and large amounts of livestock. All these are vital for national and regional food and nutritional security. Yet, the rainfed drylands have been relatively neglect...

Water availability mediates rural and urban development through impacts on sectors such as agriculture and industry. Recognising that climatic risks attenuate this water availability, various adaptation options have been implemented in the water sector. To inform adaptation prioritisation, it is critical to assess the growing literature on adaptati...

Though there is increasing recognition of the cultural dimensions that shape climate change adaptation, our experience from working with actors engaged in adaptation policy and practice suggests that the role of culture still tends to be conceived in overly narrow and fixed terms. This is exemplified in portrayals of conservative cultural norms as...

Context : It is now widely accepted that the climate is changing, and that societal responses will need to be rapid and comprehensive to prevent the most severe impacts. A key milestone in global climate governance is to assess progress on adaptation. To-date, however, there has been negligible robust, systematic synthesis of progress on adaptation...

Context : It is now widely accepted that the climate is changing, and that societal response will need to be rapid and comprehensive to prevent the most severe impacts. A key milestone in global climate governance is to assess progress on adaptation. To-date, however, there has been negligible robust, systematic synthesis of progress on adaptation...

Formalised knowledge systems, including universities and research institutes, are important for contemporary societies. They are, however, also arguably failing humanity when their impact is measured against the level of progress being made in stimulating the societal changes needed to address challenges like climate change. In this research we use...

Recent evidence shows that climate change is leading to irreversible and existential impacts on vulnerable communities and countries across the globe. Among other effects, this has given rise to public debate and engagement around notions of climate crisis and emergency. The Loss and Damage (L&D) policy debate has emphasized these aspects over the...

Aim: Renewable energy (RE) systems can be effective tools for rural communities for meeting goals for development and climate change mitigation and adaptation. RE systems provide small amounts of electricity fostering community development through improved energy access, livelihood opportunities, and improved quality of life. Communities in rural G...

Purpose of Review South Asia is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, owing to the high dependency on climate-sensitive livelihoods and recurrent extreme events. Consequently, an increasing number of households are adopting labour migration as a livelihood strategy to diversify incomes, spread risks, and meet aspirations. Under the Co...

There is growing concern about sustainable and equitable adaptation in climate change hotspots, commonly understood as locations that concentrate high climatic variability, societal vulnerability and negative impacts on livelihood systems. Emphasizing gender within these debates highlights how demographic, socioeconomic and agro-ecological contexts...

Vertical integration, which creates strategic linkages between national and sub-national levels, is being promoted as important for climate change adaptation. Decentralisation, which transfers authority and responsibility to lower levels of organisation, serves a similar purpose and has been in place for a number of decades. Based on four case stud...

People in developing countries face multiple risks, and their response decisions sit at the complex and often opaque interface of climatic stressors, constrained resource access, and changing livelihoods, social structures, and personal aspirations. Many risk management studies use a well-established toolkit of methodologies—household surveys, focu...

This chapter interrogates the notion of justice (or the lack of it) in India’s domestic policies and political priorities for climate change in the context of development interventions or adaptation strategies in regions with highly vulnerable communities. Drawing on three sites in Southern India, we distil how vulnerability is created, exacerbated...

Semi-arid regions across Africa and Asia are characterized by rapidly changing biophysical regimes, structural vulnerabilities, and increasing livelihood precarity. Gender, class, and caste/ethnic identities and relationships, and the specific social, economic and political power, roles and responsibilities they entail, shape the choices and decisi...

Migration is a key livelihood strategy to diversify incomes, reduce risks associated with rainfed agriculture (and the effects of climate change), and meet personal aspirations. Drawing on life history interviews with migrant and non‐migrant families, we explore the role of migration and commuting in addressing livelihood vulnerability along a rura...

Caouette, D and Kapoor, D., editors, 2016. Beyond Colonialism, Development and Globalization: Social Movements and Critical Perspectives. London: Zed Books. 292 pp. 28.95$, ISBN: 978-1-78360-584-2 pb

Studies of climate change at specific intervals of future warming have primarily been addressed through top-down approaches using climate projections and modelled impacts. In contrast, bottom-up approaches focus on the recent past and present vulnerability. Here, we examine climate signals at different increments of warming and consider the need to...

In drylands across the global South, rural livelihoods are challenged by existing development deficits, and are now increasingly vulnerable to climate variability and change. People, governments, and a range of non-state actors are responding to these climatic and non-climatic risks through planned and autonomous response strategies. While several...

Rapid environmental change, increasing climate variability, land fragmentation, and underlying institutional lacunae have shaped rural livelihoods in India. Increasingly, rural-urban migration has been a significant livelihood strategy to manage risks, meet aspirations , and move out of increasingly unprofitable agriculture. I argue that this movem...

Different framings of effectiveness will influence the entire adaptation process, from identifying the vulnerabilities that adaptation aims to address, to determining who benefits and who is left behind, which adaptation actions are chosen and funded, and how they are implemented. Justice, governance, community-based adaptation, and sustainability...

This Summary for Urban Policymakers is synthesised from SR1.5, the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and relevant supporting research. It builds on thirty years of science from the IPCC and climate diplomacy. The Paris Agreement, signed in 2015 within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate...

Water scarcity is one of the most critical issues facing agriculture today. To understand how people manage the risk of water scarcity and growing pressures of increased climate variability, exploring perceptions of risk and how these perceptions feed into response behaviour and willingness to adapt is critical. This paper revisits existing framewo...

Full- text available through the IPCC website: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/

This chapter discusses how the global economy and socio-technical and socio-ecological systems can transition to 1.5°C-consistent pathways and adapt to warming of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. In the context of systemic transitions, the chapter assesses adaptation and mitigation options, including carbon dioxide removal (CDR), and potential so...

This ‘how to’ guide has been developed to guide researchers, step-by-step, through the process of using the life history approach to conduct interviews. The idea for the development of this handbook arose following a series of life history interviews that were conducted in India, Ghana, Kenya and Namibia under the Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid R...

People in drylands face multiple climatic and non-climatic risks and subsequently engage in various response strategies to manage these risks. Research on risk management has typically focussed on a static, location-specific understanding of risk and response. However, empirical evidence suggests that risks and vulnerability vary across space and t...

Exponents of transformation in the context of climate change strongly articulate the challenges associated with switching from current, potentially maladaptive development trajectories, onto future pathways that are climate responsive. Although scholarship on maladaptation highlights the dangers of path dependency, the concept is under-applied for...

Climate change research has often been critiqued for focussing on abstract impacts far into the future that are not perceived and understood in the context of daily life. This case proposes the use of life histories as a methodological tool to study how people perceive and negotiate multiple risks to their lives and livelihoods (one of which may be...