This project – a documentary – is an attempt to capture, on the one hand, the fragility and vulnerability of riverine environments, and, on the other, the stories of everyday life and ingenuity of the rural population in Majuli and its surrounding islands in Assam Brahmaputra valley. Furthermore, it will document sustainable rural practices, which are particularly significant in the context of climate change and the destabilization of the local ecological base.
The project aims to understand what kind of elected political representatives can influence environmental outcomes in India. In particular, it aims to assess whether an elected politician’s identity (i.e. gender) and quality (i.e. whether they are “educated” or have a “criminal background”) can have any effect on forest cover gain or loss. The focus is on forest endowments as forests are an important carbon sink and therefore forest cover loss can accelerate global warming, exacerbating the adverse impacts of climate change.
The project aims to study the role of norms in influencing household crop residue burning behaviour, the role and limitations of awareness schemes in incentivising behaviour change, and modelling price mechanisms to incentivise behavioural change.
The project aims to create a cost-effective and scalable one-stop system to monitor and assess air quality. It will provide users real-time local information, helping them make informed decisions regarding their exposure and will also allow the public to make their concerns known to decision makers.
In this era, where climate change impacts are already obvious, this project will synthesise ecological, economic and citizen sourced information to describe and quantify marine ecological changes from climate change and the corresponding human responses on the east and west coasts of India.