Climate Change and Sustainable Futures in Northeast India

The Northeast India with eight states with remarkable biodiversity and diverse indigenous groups is experiencing increasing pressure of climatic change threatening ecological integrity as well as human life. This chapter reflects the complex effects of the climate change in the region and provides the avenues of achieving sustainable futures by analysing qualitatively the secondary data on the topic through governmental, intergovernmental and scholarly sources. The evaluation shows that there have been great changes in the precipitation patterns, increasing temperatures, extreme weather occurrences increasing more, and forest degradation accelerates in the region. The indigenous communities are affected by these changes disproportionately and their lives rely on climate sensitive areas like agriculture, forestry and water resources. The chapter critically assesses adaptive and mitigation measures that have been implemented so far, both formal policy interventions and traditional ecological knowledge systems and also provides case studies of Assam, Meghalaya and Arunachal Pradesh. The results highlight the necessity to have the combined climate action, which integrates scientific methods and indigenous insights, empowers institutionalities, and focuses on equity in climate governance.