Uday Chatterjee - Ecological Footprints of Climate Change: Adaptive Approaches and Sustainability

Springer Climate is an interdisciplinary book series dedicated to climate research. This includes climatology, climate change impacts, climate change management, climate change policy, regional climate studies, climate monitoring and modeling, palaeoclimatology etc. The series publishes high quality research for scientists, researchers, students and policy makers. An author/editor questionnaire, instructions for authors and a book proposal form can be obtained from the Publishing Editor. Now indexed in Scopus !

This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG

The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

A photo of Anil K. Gupta. Climate plays a vital role in regulating agriculture productivity and practices, food habits and drinking water needs of our Earth and thus socio-economy of developing nations such as India. Global warming driven-climate change impacts both fauna and flora and thus ecological footprints across the regions. The book entitled Ecological footprints of climate change: Adaptive Approaches and Sustainability edited by Uday Chatterjee, Angela Oyilieze Akanwa, Suresh Kumar, Sudhir Kumar Singh and Abira Dutta Roy to be published by Springer is timely and extremely relevant in the present scenario. The chapters written for this book are outstanding examples of advance works applied to the relevant field.

With fast depleting natural resources due to expanding human requirements and intense economic activities, there is a need to adopt people friendly development models which will help in sustaining human civilization on this mother earth. Overutilization of land resources and rampant urbanization as well as industrialization in developing economies contribute to severe land degradation and contamination of groundwater table worldwide. Such environmental severity impacts both food production and drinking water aquifers.

This volume is a collection and compilation of 30 chapters outlined under six major parts viz.

Part I: Introduction; Part II: Climate change and contemporary issues, challenges and sustainability; Part III: Agriculture and Forestry and Climate Change; Part IV: Food Security and Livelihoods; Part V: Infrastructure and Resilient Cities and Settlements; and Part VI: Global Health and Sustainable and Adaptive Approaches and Sustainability. The topics identified in these parts are diverse and of vital importance for climate resilience and sustainable development.

I would like to congratulate the editors for their noble initiative in bringing out this precious volume of contemporary relevance. This book forms a valuable addition to the existing knowledge and is aimed for university students and researchers in climate change, agriculture, forestry, livelihoods and sustainable development. I hope it will be widely acclaimed by geographers, environmental scientists, climate workers and policy planners as well as decision-makers engaged in dealing with climate change impacts. A signature of Anil K. Gupta

The concept of ecological footprint is employed to determine the extent of population pressure on natural resources and the estimated quantity expedient for human satisfaction. It covers the endless demands placed on nature and estimated quantity of renewable resources consumed and the regenerative bio-capacity of the earth. The concept of ecological footprint is globally employed in the process of analysing sustainability assessments. Globally, ecological footprint assessments reflect the vast pressure of human population on the earth in comparison with the earths renewability potentials. Climate change is a wicked problem sponsored by wanton anthropogenic exploitation of natural resources. Its impacts have been etched deep into the national and global ecosystems leaving intractable ecological footprints. Mankind has been under ecological overshoot since the 1970s, with annual resource requirements surpassing Earths biocapacity . Assessing the ecological footprint ( EF ) is basically an expedient to measure and estimate the human demands and impacts on our global environment. According to the 2022 release of the National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts, humankind would require resources equivalent to 1.75 planets similar to that of the Earth in order to meet their growing demands and absorb human produced garbage.