Each year, libraries, publishers, and researchers organize events as part of Open Access Week to share information about the benefits of Open Access within the broader academic community and, “to inspire wider participation in helping making Open Access a new norm in scholarship and research,” the organizers explain. This year, the Open Access Advisory Committee and SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), who organize the annual event, have chosen “Open for Climate Justice” as the week’s theme—a theme especially relevant for South Asia.  
 
Acknowledging that South Asia is one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change, SAOA will throughout the week highlight items from its collection that will help environmental historians and climate scientists understand how humans have interacted with - and had an impact on - climate and the environment. Historians of South Asia like Debjani Bhattacharyya, Sarah Carson, and Prasannan Parthasarathi among others have already started the conversation that links the expansion of global trade and imperial extraction to long-term environmental, ecological, and agricultural change in South Asia. 
 
SAOA’s collection of free, open access reports from the Madras Presidency, which provide detailed information about forestry, irrigation, and trade in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century, will expand access to the primary sources that scholars and researchers across disciplines can draw from to understand the history of climate change.