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 develop new products and methods to study forest fires, lantana infestation, and forest understory and test positive feedback mechanisms between forest fires, climate change, and forest composition.
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.
The project aims to develop methods to determine the age of trees using DNA methylation on teak trees. If the method works, it can be applied to other species as well and can test the impact of climate and other variables on tree growth dynamics. This can also be used in forensics, certification, and enforcement for illegal logging.
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.
The project aims to use a long-term integrated approach combining both molecular and ecological methods across a habitat gradient, to understand the potential of zoonotic spillovers. Further, it will establish a successful monitoring regime for potential zoonotic diseases, and generate critical information on the ecological and evolutionary consequences of climate change on biodiversity.