Seize the initiative on climate change, Mr Modi

'This is the Indian government's duty not just to its own people but to its own notion of developing-world leadership', says the author

The sixth report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, is substantively darker than its fifth report, which was produced in 2014. The 2014 report led to the Paris accords on climate change, which were the first such actual agreement for decades — but were known even then to be fundamentally weak as compared to what was needed. The sixth report makes it clear that the consensus that climate change is caused by human activity is universal among climate scientists; that some irreversible and exponentially accumulative processes associated with climate change have already begun; and that action must