Centres
The two centres for research – the Suri Sehgal Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation, and the Centre for Environment and Development house two programmes each, under which are nested projects and/ or working groups:
Suri Sehgal Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation
Centre for Environment and Development
The Centres deploy a holistic perspective that requires different disciplines to work together to resolve key research questions. This is reflected in programme taxonomy and scope, team compositions, issues addressed and research questions asked. For instance, while the Ecosystems and Global Change programme addresses the bio-physical processes that affect ecosystems, Ecosystem Services and Human Wellbeing programme approaches ecosystems from an entirely utilitarian perspective. Similarly, while Land, Water and Livelihoods programme utilizes a socio-economic and political context, it also researches physical factors that affect land and water resources. The result is interdisciplinary research practise and overlap across Centres, programmes, projects and working groups.
There are two cross-cutting themes: ‘Global change’ in Ecosystems and Global Change includes climate change (besides deforestation and urbanization), but by itself, climate change is also a theme that is factored across all four programme verticals. Along with climate change, governance is also seen as a dynamic with disproportionately large effects on grassroot applications. So climate change and governance are themes that cut across all programmes.
Suri Sehgal Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation
Ecosystems and global change
Team: Ravikanth G., Priyadarsanan D.R., Robert Chandran, Aravind N.A., Soubadra Devy, T. Ganesh, R. Ganesan, Ankila Hiremath, Harini Nagendra, Nitin Rai, Jagdish K. (programme convenor)
Context
The recent focus on ecosystem services has lent urgency to improving our understanding of natural, semi-natural and human-managed ecosystems and the biodiversity and ecological processes they sustain. While ecosystem processes and biodiversity have always been the subject of scientific research and of conservation and ‘protection’, seen from the utilitarian perspective of ecosystem services, they stand the risk of being scrutinised only in relation to benefits that humans can derive from them. However distinct ecosystems do not necessarily map onto corresponding ecosystem services, and in fact, managing landscapes for sustaining select services could lead to the neglect and loss of many ecosystems, species and ecological communities.
So the first issue is that there are many known and unknown species and ecological communities that are still awaiting taxonomic scrutiny and whose functions and roles in ecosystems through co-evolved plant-animal interactions are largely unknown.
A second issue is emerging new threats to ecosystem functioning and biodiversity from climate change, invasive species, and disease.
Third, we are only beginning to understand the dynamics of social-ecological systems that view human use and interventions, for instance fire, as part of complex ecological dynamics over time and space rather than as imposed constraints and conditions on static ecosystems.
Finally, we are still largely ignorant about the synergies and feedbacks between bio-physical processes such as climate variability and human activities in shaping the dynamics and response of ecosystems and biodiversity over time and space.
The programme on Ecosystems and Global Change aims to engage with these knowledge gaps.
Programme goal
To fill knowledge gaps to enable civil society and government to better manage ecosystems under global change.
Ecosystem services and human wellbeing
Team: Soubadra Devy, T Ganesh, Priyadarsanan DR, Jagdsih Krishnaswamy and Seema Purushothaman (Programme convenor)
Context
Humans have always depended on nature for a range of ‘services’. Forests, mangroves, grasslands, wetlands, coastlands regulate climate, floods, drought, land degeneration, water quality and disease prevention; they support soil formation, pollination and nutrient recycling; they provide food, water, timber, fibre and genetic resources; and they sustain the human need for spiritual and cultural engagement. These ecosystem ‘services’ are not always quantified or economically and politically valued, though some landscapes across the world have been so severely degraded by human activity that some of these services have been irreversibly affected.
We have defined ‘ecosystem services’ from the perspectives developed recently within the The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity as ‘the direct and indirect contributions of ecosystems to human well-being’ (TEEB 2009). The concept of ecosystem services was successfully introduced into the global policy arena by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and has been welcomed by both the conservation and development communities as a potential bridge between biodiversity and sustainable development discourses.
Programme goal
To introduce ecosystem services into ongoing and new societal and policy discussions.
Centre for Environment and Development
Land, water and livelihoods
Team: Shrinivas Badiger, Mohan Seetharam, Bejoy K Thomas, Siddhartha Krishnan (programme convenor)
Context
Developmental efforts have given rise to rapid increases in cultivated area and industrial production, generating immense pressure on land and water resources and intensifying conflicts:
- Water and land resources are important for livelihood support activities in agriculture, industry and domestic needs
- There is a strong link between land-water resources and development, and ecosystem processes, and vice versa
- Land and water resources are becoming scarce and stakes increasingly contentious due to intense competition for land for agriculture, industry and urban expansion; variable monsoon and water availability; the cultural and political contexts of decision-making with respect to land and water use
- Pro-poor, agricultural and rural development policies, and investments have been central to land and water resources
- Urban water supply and sanitation issues are increasing recognized as key issues for development
- Degradation of land and water resource base, and increasing conflicts at local and regional scales due to decline in river flows, depletion of aquifers due to groundwater exploitation and agrarian crisis in semi-arid and arid areas
Programme goal
To understand the trajectory and drivers of change occurring in land and water resources stressed regions with respect to water availability, water quality, land degradation, food security and provision of environmental services for and by the agricultural systems; and identify appropriate practical/ policy strategies to achieve environmental sustainability and human wellbeing.
Forests and governance
Team: Nitin Rai, Siddappa Setty, Sharachchandra Lele (programme convenor)
Context
Forests and common lands sites of conflicting claims by local (grazing, firewood and non-timber forest produce, shifting agriculture, tourism), regional (watershed services, timber) and global (carbon sequestration, climate regulation, biodiversity) stakeholders, where their stakes have been either ‘naturally defined’, as in the case of upstream forests benefiting downstream farmers through their hydrological services, or ‘socially constructed’ as in the case of the pharmaceutical industry’s supposed stake in the biodiversity of tropical forests, or outright ‘politically imposed’ as in the case of nationalisation of timber by colonial powers.
With this conflict as background, the programme attempts to reconcile multiple stakeholders, ecological sustainability, economic change and environmental justice through a study of rights, institutions and governance mechanisms; ecologically sustainable use; and economic dependence and cultural significance.
Programme goal
The Forests and Governance programme will analyse existing forest governance in India, including policy on joint forest management (JFM), non-timber forest products (NTFPs), the forest land ‘encroachment’ question, net present value, and protected area policy, and collaborate with various groups to offer alternative approaches. The effort will be to bring back into the forest policy debate the changing socio-economic context of local communities, the importance of historically-situated and locally nuanced forest rights arrangements, and the need for institutional arrangements that link local and global stakeholders in a fair manner.