The Boring Climate Podcast

Can carbon utilisation scale in India? The science is advancing. The technologies are improving. But the harder questions remain.  At Boring Deeper, GPS Renewables' first Boring Climate Conference, researchers, industry leaders, and investors -- many of whom were part of drafting the CCUS R&D roadmap: R&D Roadmap to Enable India's Net Zero Targets through Carbon Capture, Utilizatio...

#BoringDeeper We recently took #theboringclimatepodcast offline, to hold Boring Deeper, our first-ever dedicated conference on carbon capture, utilisation and storage (#ccus) In this session, Dr Ashish Lele (chair of India's high-level taskforce that developed the CCUS roadmap) and Dr Anjan Ray (one of our country's foremost experts on our net-zero transition), speak to GPS Renewables CEO...

India's trees are flowering earlier than they used to. Geetha Ramaswami and Suhirtha Muhil M have spent 15 years documenting exactly this through SeasonWatch, a citizen science initiative they helped build that has now logged nearly 900,000 observations of tree behavior across India. Geetha is an ecologist and one of the principal researchers behind SeasonWatch. Suhirtha led the development of...

The Sundarbans is one of the most biodiverse — and most climate-vulnerable — places on Earth. A vast mangrove delta straddling India and Bangladesh, it is home to 4.5 million people, the Bengal tiger, and an ecosystem that has absorbed centuries of storms, floods, and now, a rapidly rising sea. In the past decade alone, the region has been struck by five major cyclones. It has lost over 210 square...

Bill McKibben wrote the book on climate change — literally. In 1989, The End of Nature told the world what was coming. Thirty-six years later, his latest book Here Comes the Sun makes the case that the energy transition is already here — and moving faster than most people realise. In this episode, we talk to one of the most influential environmentalists in history about the solar revolution that&#...

The Himalayan glaciers are retreating, and the water, energy, and geopolitical futures of over a billion people hang in the balance. We begin Season 3 with Dr. Anil V. Kulkarni, one of the world's leading glaciologists and a pioneer in Himalayan cryosphere research, to understand what's really happening at the roof of the world. Dr. Kulkarni's career reads like a story of firsts. He wa...

Some of the most powerful storms on Earth form where science has looked the least. Despite being home to nearly half the global population, tropical weather remains one of the most poorly understood parts of the climate system. In our Season 2 finale of The Boring Climate Podcast, 2025, MacArthur Fellow Ángel F. Adames Corraliza explains how tropical storms form, and gets into why better understan...

Heat is the "invisible" disaster – it’s all around us, kills as many, perhaps more people, in India than other extreme weather events, yet doesn't capture public attention like floods or cyclones. Aditya Valiathan Pillai, doctoral researcher at King’s College London and a Visiting Fellow at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative, New Delhi, joins us on The Boring Climate Podcast to he...

Our climate and ecological crises are often seen as problems of the future. In this episode of The Boring Climate Podcast, Prof Mahesh Rangarajan, Professor of History & Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, joins us to talk about why history might offer critical lessons to address the planetary crises of the present.

When we talk about rising sea levels, we usually think of melting glaciers. But there’s another, quieter crisis unfolding underground. Over the past two decades, NASA satellites have tracked massive groundwater depletion- a shift now contributing more to sea-level rise than melting ice sheets. In this episode of the Boring Climate Podcast, Dr Hrishikesh Chandanpurkar, Earth System Scientist at Ari...

Why study frogs and toads? And why are they featured on a climate podcast? That's because frogs are "indicator species" - their behaviour, songs and traits can tell us a lot about our planet - but are we listening? Our guest in this episode, Seshadri K.S. , takes us on an immersive audio-visual tour of the Western Ghats, sharing anecdotes, actual footage and song recordings from his...

Why do one-size-fits-all climate solutions often fail? Are EVs part of the solution or part of the problem? And, could the solutions we chase to combat climate change end up creating new problems for the people and environments we hope to save? In episode 4, we sit down with Dr Chirag Dhara, a quantum physicist turned climate scientist, whose work challenges us to look beyond easy solutions and em...

Invasive plants with an "A" type personality, Padayaippa, the wild elephant who likes to play football and an ancient carbon capture technique all feature in this fascinating episode as Dr Tarsh Thekaekara, Director, The Real Elephant Collective and a trustee of The Shola Trust takes us on a journey that asks us to look at how close we are to nature, and what we can do to co-exist with it better.

Aerosols are tiny but powerful particles, shaping air quality, human health, and the climate in ways that are often invisible yet profound. Depending on their makeup, aerosols can reflect sunlight and cool the planet or absorb heat and warm the atmosphere, making them one of the most complex and consequential pieces of today’s climate puzzle. Dr. Richard Peltier, Professor at the University of Mas...

What fish we choose to eat and when could have more of an impact on the health of our seas than you can imagine. How are our seas, fish and fisher communities coping with our changing climate? In this episode of The Boring Climate Podcast, Dr Divya Karnad, Associate Professor at Ashoka University and co-founder of InSeason Fish joins us for a conversation that could make you look at our seas diffe...

Forget faraway glaciers – the climate crisis is unfolding in our cities. In India's booming urban landscapes, the relationship between people and nature is at a critical juncture. For our season finale, we zoom in on this vital connection and the urgent need to build climate resilience right here in our cities. Joining us is Dr. Harini Nagendra, Director at the School of Climate Change and Sus...

Did you know that the Bangalore Water Supply and Sewerage Board (BWSSB) is using treated wastewater from the city's sewage treatment plants to recharge groundwater in the drought-affected districts of Kolar, Chikkaballapur, Ramnagara etc - the world's second largest program of its kind? Which goes to show that with good planning, Bangalore and other major metropolises can continue to be wa...

Dr Uma Ramakrishnan's lab at the National Centre for Biological Studies in Bengaluru is pioneering innovative methods to study the population genetics of tigers. We walk with her along the tigers' jungle trails to look at how their poop and genes can help us understand their past, present and future in a changing natural world and how nature is the best solution to mitigate the detrimental...

How do wild animals adapt their behaviour and patterns to global climate change and increasing human footprint? In this episode, travel to the deserts of Kutch and the reserves of Zambia with NatGeo explorer and engineer-turned-ecoloigist Dr Kadambari Devarajan as she talks about using technology to study large datasets on wild animals, creating open source resources for other scientists, and the...

In Ep 4 of #TheBoringClimatePodcast, veteran climate scientist Prof NH Ravindranath joins us to meticulously unpack the incredible potential of India's forests in making us less vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. We delve into the essential models scientists are using to understand and predict the specific impacts of climate change on our precious forest ecosystems. We also try to un...

As the world’s largest producer of millets, India has the unique advantage of harnessing this climate-smart plant to insure us against food insecurity in the face of increasing droughts, salinity and deteriorating soil qualities. Joining us today to help make sense of why millets are so robust is Dr M Muthamilarasan, whose work focuses on understanding the genetic traits that make millets climate...

Rising CO2 levels is one of the primary causes of global warming. CO2 in the atmosphere stems from combustion of fossil fuels in our everyday lives - the electricity we use, the cars we drive, all of our industrial activities. What if we could capture and transform this CO2 into a valuable resource? Joining us in this episode is Prof. Vivek Polshettiwar, winner of one of India's highest scienc...

The Indian monsoon impacts everything - from agriculture to our GDP. So, understanding and predicting this enigmatic but robust weather system is crucial. In this episode, Dr Madhavan Nair Rajeevan, a distinguished climate scientist whose career spans nearly four decades -- and the man behind the Rajeevan dataset that till date helps the IMD better predict the monsoon -- helps us decode the comple...