100: Climate disclosure imperatives for India: Prarthana Borah, India Director, CDP

ShownotesMost of the narrative around climate change, net zero, SDGs is framed from a global north perspective. Most of the studies (90% or more) on climate change are by academics and institutions based in the global north - primarily North America, Europe and Australia. Ironically the countries that have contributed most to global warming. Not only is there a lack of diversity in the current discourse but crucially there is a missing perspective from some of the poorest regions of the world, that have the biggest impact of global warming. At The Elephant in the Room, I am attempting to give platform to some of the voices that can help broaden the perspective. In this episode I spoke with Prarthana Borah, India Director for CDP and an expert on climate change, air pollution conservation, environmental education. When we were discussing the episode, my one line brief was to keep our conversation relatable - we were not going to use jargon, rather use language that most people can understand. The aim of course was to learn, and enable others to understand the language around climate change. In the episode we spoke about Prarthana’s incredible career in environment, conservation,  clean air, CDP and its work in India, the CDP Annual Disclosure Report 2021, climate change, climate disclosure imperatives (India context), challenges, BRSR, greenwashing, ‘beyond compliance’, best practice. We also spoke about…….As we discussed in this episode climate disclosure is not an and/or question. It is about business risk and resilience, it is about having a long term view and business sustainability….The top 1000 in India have to mandatorily report but what about the 100s of thousands of companies who are not being nudged by legislation in India… what is going to be the impact of not being ready for climate disclosure on NDCs?? Memorable passages from the podcast👉🏾 So firstly thank you to The Purpose Room for having me here and I'm really excited, this happens to be my first podcast. So my name is Prarthana Prarthana Borah. I am the India Director of CDP. For those of you who don't know, CDP is a global not-for-profit primarily working in disclosures. We are headquartered in the UK, but we work on a subsidiary model. So we work in almost 60 countries with offices in North America, South America, India, and a large presence in the Asia Pacific region.👉🏾 Personally, I would like to call myself an environmental educator, and I've been in the space for almost 30 years now. Started with conservation, nature education, moved on to sectoral areas of work. Started with first climate and then air pollution, and then back to climate again. Now in the last couple of years working specially with the business community to what I would say drive climate action, understanding of environmental issues and promoting sustainable business models with the help of disclosure. 👉🏾 So I think every organisation working in the environmental space, or especially in climate, would have to have a large ambition for the global south. And if we talk about the global south that two countries which have the highest emissions and also are capable of making the largest positive environmental impact are India and China. So I think like every other organisation working in this space, CDP has I must say, It does have an ambition for India and the very fact that we have a growing country office, and a growing ambition from the point of view of looking at more and more industry to convince them to adopt our disclosure process, as well as start thinking about the transition to net zero.