India, Sept. 12 -- Devendra Jhajharia understands climate change. Double Paralympic gold medallist and president of the Paralympic Committee of India (PCI), Jhajharia comes from Churu, Rajasthan. "When I was growing up, we craved for water," he said, "but now there are floods. Our roads were not built to withstand floods, nothing was built to withstand this." Jhajharia was at IMT Ghaziabad last week at the second edition of the Climate 11 Summit around sport and sustainability. Jhajharia and PCI vice-president SP Sangwan signed Climate 11's Delhi Declaration, becoming the first sports federation to officially commit to including climate action as part of its governance, organisation and advocacy functions. After the signing, the para javelin pioneer said he'd heard many arguments about science versus nature. "Science is a part of nature, but no way is science bigger or more important than nature. Nothing is larger than nature and we have to do all we can to protect the environment." As he spoke, the heavy unseasonal deluge in Ghaziabad around him only added to the unprecedented rains that wreaked havoc across north India. The PCI will be staging its biggest - and Jhajharia says India's biggest-ever - sports event (able or para) in the World Para Athletics Championships from September 26 to October 5 in New Delhi. With athletes from 107 countries expected to participate, that is far more than the number at the 2010 Commonwealth Games. Sustainability in sport, said PCI's awareness and impact ambassador Arhan Bagati, needs to become "a ritual and a routine around sport, like say stretching before an event is - to inculcate the habit of being green." The Delhi Declaration on Environmental Sustainability in Indian Sport, signed by PCI is the first official Indian sporting involvement around climate change. That is above and beyond the many green days run by clubs and league, or IPL's dot-ball tree-planting when it was sponsored by Tata. The declaration states that its signatories understand that there is an "existential threat to the future of sport, jeopardising athlete health, disrupting events." The signatories - who included Asian Football Confederation executive board member Shaji Prabhakaran - pledged to adopt sustainability practices and create time-bound plans required for climate-conscious events. Like zero waste to landfill targets, reducing sports' carbon footprints and eliminating single-use plastics during events. The declaration promises athlete advocacy as well as formalising 'green skills' training programmes for administrators, venue managers and event staff. This may appear all too ambitious and optimistic given the track record of the majority of Indian sports administrators. But climate consciousness is also today a central tenet in Olympic governance - and we know how much our sports governance needs to be in the International Olympic Committee (IOC)'s good books with India's dreams around the 2036 Olympics. The IOC, a key stakeholder in the UN Sports for Climate Action Framework, instituted Climate Action Awards two years ago to reward federations and individuals working around sport and sustainability. The International Hockey Federation won the international federation award this year for developing a 'dry turf' technology that has reduced water consumption by 60% from London 2012 to Paris 2024. Paris 2024 saw the inauguration of the first carbon-zero artificial hockey turf and the sport's 'give back to the forest' tree-planting programme. The award to FIH wouldn't have gone unnoticed as India remains a major player in global hockey. In cricket -the other sport where India enjoys global clout - however neither ICC nor BCCI are part of the UN framework. Cricket's participation in the matter comes from five bodies - ECB, Melbourne Cricket Club, Surrey and Warwickshire CCC. In July, a joint report released by the British Association for Sustainability in Sport (BASIS), Climate Central, Frontrunners and climate action NGO The Next Test studied the impact of climate change on cricket worldwide. Its India research studied 65 of the 74 IPL matches and found that 27 of them took place under 'extreme caution' conditions under a measure referred to as the Heat Index. Extreme caution refers to playing conditions where heat exhaustion becomes a serious threat. Nine more IPL matches reached the Heat Index 'danger' zone - with sunstroke, muscle cramp, heat exhaustion and the prospect of prolonged exposure leading to heatstroke. As the centre of India's sporting universe, cricket in particular is going to deal with the most severe consequences of the extreme weather phenomenon, air pollution and arising out of it, the disruption of schedules. It is a crisis which cannot be tackled by ignoring it or throwing money at it. It however remains an opportunity, according to football historian and sporting climate activist David Goldblatt - a speaker at the Climate11 summit - where India could take the lead as the voice of the global south. Goldblatt, author of classics like The World is Round - the Global History of Football and Game of our Lives: the English Premier League and the Making of Modern Britain, in 2020 wrote the most comprehensive document of the impact of climate change on sport titled Playing Against the Clock. Climate 11 is the first platform in India to work seriously on sport and climate change. Shamim Meraj, its founder, and co-founder of 1Ladakh FC and the Climate Cup held last week in Leh, said, "this is the first step in talking about the major intervention that sport can make in the climate crisis. We hope that big sports organisations in our country understand the gravity of the situation."...