Authors: Dr. C. Sujatha
Abstract: Climate action has become the organizing imperative of global sustainable development policy, yet the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém closed with a familiar verdict: meaningful progress on implementation mechanisms, but persistent gaps between global ambition and locally grounded delivery. This paper argues that agrarian civilizations with deep textual ecological traditions — Tamil Nadu foremost among them — hold an underused resource for closing that gap. Drawing on the Sangam-era grammar Tholkappiyam, the ethical corpus of the Thirukkural, and the Ettuthogai–Pattupattu anthologies, alongside modern Tamil agrarian literature and Tamil Nadu's contemporary climate and agriculture policy, the paper develops a three-tier comparative framework linking ancient ecological classification, present-day state practice, and the global climate governance architecture that emerged from COP30 — including the Belém Adaptation Indicators, the Baku-to-Belém climate finance roadmap, and the Belém Declaration on Hunger, Poverty and Human-Centered Climate Action. The analysis shows that the Sangam-era Ainthinai (five-fold ecological classification), its associated water-harvesting ethic, organic-manuring practice, crop diversification, and farmer-centred social ethic anticipate, in vernacular and literary form, principles that global climate policy is only now formalising as adaptation indicators and finance priorities. The paper concludes that global climate action will be more effective, and more genuinely global, if it treats regional ecological literatures as a legitimate evidence base alongside scientific and policy data, and if climate finance architecture is redesigned to reach community-led, indigenous-knowledge-based adaptation directly.
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22301054
