A GLOBAL INDIAN TIMES INTERVIEW

September 27, 2024 

A second edition of Vinod Thomas’s Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change was published this month.

In the first edition, published a year ago, Thomas advocated implementing preventive measures, and not just steps in coping, in order to build resilience. Recovery from a climate-related disaster is not just about returning to how things were but building back better. He added that the teaching of business and economics needs to be revised to factor in the failure of businesses and governments to tackle global warming.

Thomas, 75-years-old, is a Distinguished Fellow in Development Management at the Asian Institute of Management, Manila. His current areas of work are climate change, sustainable development, disaster risk management and resilience building.

Earlier he was Senior Vice President, Independent Evaluation, at the World Bank Group, Washington D.C., and Director General, Independent Evaluation, Asian Development Bank.

Thomas is the author of 17 books, including The Quality of Growth; Climate Change and Natural Disasters; Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change and Economic Evaluation of Sustainable Development (with Namrata Chindarkar). He earned an MA and PhD in economics from the University of Chicago and a BA from St. Stephen’s College, Delhi.

In a conversation with Global Indian Times, Thomas discusses the background to his second edition of Risk and Resilience.

Global Indian Times: What major changes have you seen since you first published the book a year ago?

Vinod Thomas: The second edition was motivated by the recognition of rapid changes surrounding the climate emergency, and of the woeful inadequacy of recent actions.

Climate scientists are seeing the breakneck speed of recent climate disasters – massive flooding in Europe and Pakistan, spate of hurricanes in the United States and typhoons in China, record-breaking heat wave in India - as an indication that their worst-case scenarios are playing out. Some are concerned that they might have underestimated the speed and scale of the crisis. It is important to present this realization especially as there is another storyline falsely spread by the fossil fuel lobby that the scientists’ disaster scenarios are overstated. 2023 saw all-time records in weather extremes and an avalanche of new studies brings greater clarity about the nature of the crisis.

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*Romar Correa retired as the Reserve Bank of India Professor of Monetary Economics, Bombay University.