By Balakmen Suting
I grew up pulling a pullover over my shoulders even in the middle of July. That was Shillong “the Scotland of the East” where the clouds never quite left the hills, the pine trees dripped with mist, and the air carried a chill that made blankets feel like old friends. That was barely a decade ago. I was a child then, and the cold was simply the world as I knew it.
Today, I reached for a fan.
That sentence would have sounded like fiction to my younger self. Fans in Shillong? We never needed them. The altitude nearly 1,500 meters above sea level kept the city cool, naturally, effortlessly, as it had for generations. But something fundamental has shifted in the hills of Meghalaya, and the shift is not subtle. It is visceral. It is the absence of a pullover in July. It is the presence of heat where heat has no business being.
“The cold is not just a memory. It is a warning written in rising temperatures across the hills we once called home.”
A decade of lived experience in Shillong.
When Personal Memory Becomes Climate Data
Science has a name for what I am describing: experiential climate changes the lived, embodied recognition that the world is no longer what it was. And the data from the northeast Indian highlands are unambiguous. Temperatures in the region have been climbing steadily, monsoon patterns are becoming erratic, and microclimates that sustained unique biodiversity for millennia are under stress.
But data can feel distant. What cannot feel distant is the memory of wearing a thick jacket to school in May, and comparing it to today, when children in those same classrooms fidget under the slow sweep of a ceiling fan. The numbers confirm what the body already knows.
Statistical contexts reveal a telling shift: where average summer highs lingered around ~17°C just a decade ago, recent summers have frequently recorded reported highs spiking to ~24°C and above.
Shillong is not an isolated case. It is a mirror. Across the world, from the glaciers of Ladakh to the coral reefs of the Pacific, from the Amazon basin to the Arctic tundra, ecosystems that evolved over millions of years are being disrupted in the span of human lifetimes. The Scotland of the East is warming. And if Shillong is warming, a city blessed with altitude, cloud cover, and forest then we must reckon with what that means for the rest of our fragile, breathing world.
Biodiversity Is Not Background
The warming of Shillong is not just a comfort problem. It is a miniature biodiversity emergency. The northeastern highlands of India are part of one of the planet’s most extraordinary biological hotspots. The forests of Meghalaya harbour orchids found nowhere else on Earth, amphibians adapted to its unique microclimate, insects, birds, and fungi woven into food webs of staggering complexity.
When temperatures rise even a few degrees, these intricate webs begin to unravel. Species that evolved to thrive in cool mist cannot simply relocate to a higher altitude that does not exist. Pollinators fall out of sync with the flowers they evolved alongside. The moss that covers Shillong’s famous living root bridges those extraordinary structures grown by the Khasi people over centuries depends on consistent humidity that is no longer guaranteed.
This is what biodiversity loss looks like from the inside. Not just the extinction of a distant species in a faraway place, but the quiet disappearance of the familiar, the cool mornings, the particular birdsong, the ferns that lined the paths you walked as a child.
Acting Locally for Global Impact
May 22, the world marks the International Day for Biological Diversity, under the theme “Acting locally for global impact.” The theme could not be more apt. Because what has happened to Shillong’s weather is the cumulative result of countless local decisions about energy, about land, about consumption, about forests made across every corner of the planet. And the reversal of that damage must be equally distributed: local action, in every community, every city, every school, every home.
To realize this global framework locally, citizens can engage across three foundational pillars:
- Look & Learn: Explore biodiversity in your own neighbourhood. Understand the Kunming-Montreal Framework and your country’s commitments.
- Connect & Act: Join community walks, citizen science, and local conservation projects. Find others working for nature near you.
- Share: Tell your story. Use #BiodiversityDay to let the world know what nature means to you, and what you are doing to protect it.
Global frameworks matter. The 23 targets of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, agreed upon by nations as the world’s blueprint to halt and reverse biodiversity loss, set an ambitious course. But frameworks only live through people. Through a child in Shillong noticing the heat. Through a community planting native trees. Through a city pledging to restore its wetlands. Through every ordinary person who refuses to look away.
The Only Thing We Own
We debate what we own, our homes, our savings, our borders, our futures. But in truth, there is only one thing that belongs to every single one of us without exception, without negotiation, without purchase: this planet. The soil beneath our feet, the air we breathe, the water that falls on Shillong’s rooftops and runs down into rivers that become seas.
We did not earn the Earth. We inherited it. And like any inheritance left carelessly, it can be squandered in a generation.
I think of the pullover I no longer need. I think of the children growing up in Shillong where fans are ordinary. I wonder what they will think is ordinary, thirty years from now, if we do not act. I wonder what they will have been told that the Scotland of the East used to feel like, the way I now tell stories of cold July mornings as if they were legends.
Let those stories not become myths. Let us be the generation that turned the temperature not just on a thermometer, but in the collective will of humanity.
The planet is not lost yet. But it is asking. Loudly, warmly, urgently it is asking us to listen.
(The views expressed in the article are that of the author. He can be reached at sutingbalakmen@gmail.com)
