Anand Patwardhan
Executive director, Technology Information
Forecasting and Assessment Council, Delhi
Anand Patwardhan’s work takes off from where a climate scientist's usually finishes. He assesses the vulnerability of people and systems to temperature and extreme weather. He then goes a step further and suggests the best ways to adapt to this change.
Patwardhan, an electrical engineer from IIT Bombay, got his PhD in engineering and public policy from Carnegie Mellon University, US. His specialisation is the modelling of risk and uncertainty and appropriate solutions for them. He was coordinating lead author to the IPCC as member of Working Group II which looked at Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability.
‘‘The studies on climate change indicate that these changes normally progress in a linear fashion. This means that strategies to adapt against these changes are designed on this basis only. But, at times or places, these climate changes may not necessarily follow those observed trends. And these are going to be key vulnerabilities,’’ he says.
Currently, the executive director of the Technology Information Forecasting and Assessment Council (TIFAC), his main work falls in the area of low carbon technology.
—Ravish Tiwari

Joyashree Roy
Head of the Department of Economics, Jadavpur University
In 1988 when Joyashree Roy, now head of the department of economics at Jadavpur University, submitted her thesis ‘Energy Demand in India for the Manufacturing Sector’ for her PhD, little did she know that it would one day make her join the worldwide crusade against global warming.
Her contribution is shedding new light on the fact that the energy intensity of some sectors of Indian industry is actually coming down. In other words, they use less energy for every per capita unit of growth. She studied six energy-intensive sectors and concluded that deployment of low-cost technology actually goes a long way. ‘‘There is a need to mainstream climate concerns into our policies,’’ she says. One of the two co-ordinating lead authors on the chapter on industry in the IPCC, Roy started her teaching career in 1982 and later joined Jadavpur University in 1991. ‘‘I went to Berkeley, California, in 1997 for my post-doctoral research and it was there that I carried forward the work done in the context of Indian industries,’’ she says.
At Berkeley, Roy who created a mathematical model to study the energy demand of industry and its connection with climate change, extended it to four other countries — Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and South Korea. ‘‘I go to Berkeley every summer to work there because of the excellent facilities they provide,’’ says Roy, who has three books to her credit. Roy also set up the Global Change Programme in her department at Jadavpur, which works with several Central Government ministries on various projects like green accounting.
So, what got her interested in climate change? ‘‘I was born and brought up in Shillong, a hill town so I grew up with nature. Maybe that worked in my mind. However I can say it was the choice of my thesis that brought me into this field, which is now actually a minefield,’’ says Roy.
—Sabyasachi Bandopadhya

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