Early Career Researchers’ Webinar Series by IWMI in India

Speaker: Vartika Singh, IFPRI, New Delhi and Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India
Date: 17 April 2023
Time: 15:00 hours IST

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Summary:

Agricultural production in India is highly dependent on existing water resources. India stands out in the food-water nexus as the country that withdraws and consumes the largest volume of freshwater resources globally, mostly for the production of basic staple crops of rice and wheat that account for more than 80% of total agricultural water use. Rapidly receding water levels cause concern for future agricultural production and require urgent measures to manage water withdrawals for agriculture. In India, excessive production and consumption of cereal crops, overdependence of milk products and an increased consumption of ultra-processed foods has been a concern. Despite agricultural production growing six-fold in the last five decades, India continues to face high levels of malnutrition. In light of this information, we assess policy instruments to reduce pressures on water resources, while at the same time, limiting adverse impacts on water intensive cereal production systems, inclusive of land-use changes and economic welfare. We also assess the role of dietary changes on environmental impacts. With multiple policy tools, we analyze the implications on key environmental indicators including land, water, GHG emissions and biodiversity. Our results offer insights into the different mechanisms that these policies drive, and trade-offs on important agroeconomic indicators and offer the choice for climate change adaptation decision-making based on other factors such as implementation costs.

Speaker Biography:

Vartika Singh is Senior Research Analyst in the Environment, Production and Technology Division of IFPRI in New Delhi and Senior Research Officer at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, India. Vartika is currently pursuing her PhD from Humboldt University in Berlin, Germany and is guest researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. Her interests include CGE and PE modelling to assess integrated assessment of water, energy and climate policies. These activities form her PhD dissertation work as well as the Nexus-Gains Initiative by the CGIAR. She has previously worked on applied behavioral microeconomic experiments to address barriers in sustainable intensification of agriculture, as part of the Cereal Systems Initiative for South Asia project. She holds a Master’s degree in Development Studies from Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai, India and a Bachelor’s in Economics from Hindu College at Delhi University, India.

Speaker: Ashish Kumar Sedai, University of Texas at Arlington, USA
Date: 20 March 2023
Time: 09:00 hours IST

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Summary:

The disproportionate burden on women of water collection and distribution in the household in developing economies calls for a study on the relationship between piped water supply and gender differences in employment, women’s health, child health and education. I use spatiotemporal data from the largest gender disaggregated human development survey in India, 2005–2012, and carry out econometric analyses using individual fixed effects, village fixed effects and instrumental variable regressions to evaluate the effects. Results show that household access to piped water increases the likelihood of wage/salary employment by 11 percent, and annual earnings increase by 14 percent for women, comparatively higher than men, but only in rural areas. In urban areas, there is no effect of pipe water on women’s employment. With piped water, women’s self-reported health, child’s health and education outcomes improve. The study recommends evaluating the social demand curve for piped water supply, and the consideration of piped water supply as necessity, as part of a broader strategy to reduce gender differences.

Speaker Biography:

Ashish Kumar Sedai is an Assistant Professor of Economics at the Department of Economics, College of Business, University of Texas at Arlington. He completed a Ph.D. in Economics at Colorado State University (CSU) in 2022, master’s in economics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi, India and worked as an Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Delhi from 2012-2017. He currently is a Research Associate at the Centre for Applied Macroeconomic Analysis, Australian National University and is a contractor for development research at the Asian Development Bank Institute. He specializes in labor, health, gender, and development research and has received the prestigious Warren Samuel’s prize from the Association for Social Economics for his research on “Gendered effects of piped water in India”. Other notable works include the analysis of electrification in developing economies and its impact on household welfare and women empowerment, informal finance and women empowerment, political institutions and pollution, care shocks and time use. His research papers have been published in Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization, Energy Economics, World Development, The Energy Journal, Economics of Ageing, Journal of South Asian Development, and Economic and Political Weekly. He has also worked as a consultant, specializing in applied economic development research for the World Bank, United Nations and 2M Research.

Speaker: Shreya Banerjee, Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Singapore Management University
Date: 20 February 2023
Time: 15:00 -16:00 hours IST

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Summary:

Developing countries are most susceptible to climate hazards owing to infrastructure inequality and resource constraints where informality exasperates the situation even more. Kolkata, a major Indian city witnesses significant residential and commercial informality. Outdoor spaces are used widely for various purposes such as temporary shops, food stalls, meeting area etc in these informal neighbourhoods and streets are encroached to generate spaces for economic activities. In my doctoral research, I investigated the outdoor thermal condition in such informal mixed-use spaces in hot-humid city of Kolkata. We conducted thermal comfort field campaigns in three informal neighbourhoods in summer and winter- one pottery neighbourhood, one flower market and one retail market. We employed regression models to evaluate relative importance of various climatic and non-climatic variables in shaping the human thermal perception. We further employed Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) tools to assess the impact of temporary encroachments on the street level thermal performance. Our results show various physiological (acclimatization and metabolism), psychological (expectation of weather), and behavioural (beverage intake) factors impact the bodily heat exchange and thermo-regulatory process of the workers. Our study reports the respondent neutral thermal ranges (they feel neither discomfort, nor comfort) are higher compared to studies conducted in other parts of the world. We further report, presence and form of the encroachments impact the thermal performance of the streets. Inferences obtained from our study is useful in proposing various infrastructure strategies to mitigate heat in the informal urban contexts.

Speaker Biography:

Dr. Shreya Banerjee is a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Singapore Management University in the project Cooling Singapore 2.0. Her research focuses on human thermal exposure, heat mitigation and adaptation in outdoor spaces, climate action policies, and resilient settlements. Shreya pursued her PhD from IIT Kharagpur between 2017-2021, during which she was also a visiting scholar at Arizona State University. She was awarded the BHAVAN fellowship from IUSSTF jointly sponsored by DST, Government of India (GoI), and US Department of State in 2019. Shreya completed Master of City Planning from IIT Kharagpur and Bachelor of Architecture from IIEST Shibpur. She has published in journals such as “Science of the Total Environment”, “Urban Climate”, “Landscape and Urban Planning” and “International Journal of Biometeorology”. Shreya is in the invited expert panel of Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, GoI, and German Agency for International Cooperation (GIZ India) for the “Development of Design Standard for Thermally Comfortable Affordable Homes”. She is member of different professional bodies such as International Association of Urban Climate (IAUC), European Geosciences Union (EGU).

Speaker: Anjali Sharma, Assistant Professor, Azim Premji University, Bangalore. 
Date: 16 January 2023
Time: 15:00 -16:00 hours IST

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Summary:

Clean energy transitions are particularly challenging for developing countries, especially toward their development goals, such as poverty alleviation and employment generation. While a strand of academic literature finds that clean energy transition can create new jobs, Anjali, in her talk, will discuss the unequal distribution of job gains and losses from power sector decarbonization in the context of India, using an analytical framework to examine the changes in the magnitude as well as the location of jobs due to clean energy transitions.

She will also explore the case of decarbonizing the transport sector through electric vehicles (EVs) – the regional disparities in environmental and health gains of EVs, focusing per se on the emissions from the vehicle manufacturing sector, in contrast to the usually available results from vehicle operations. Estimates from Anjali’s research reveal that overall air pollution and related deaths can increase in scenarios with a higher share of EVs because of the increase in manufacturing-related emissions. These increases will likely be concentrated in limited locations, such as the auto manufacturing hubs.

Speaker Biography:
Anjali Sharma is an assistant professor at Azim Premji University, Bangalore. Her work aims to inform just and equitable policies for a low-carbon world. Her current research project examines whether and how electric vehicles can worsen health inequities across different social groups and geographies. For her doctoral dissertation, she modelled the employment impacts of power sector decarbonization in India and analyzed the distribution of job changes across regions and skill levels. Her research interests include climate change and development, just transitions, green jobs, and electric vehicles.

Speaker: Sameer Shah, Assistant Professor of Climate Adaptation, School of Environmental and Forest Sciences, University of Washington, United States of America. 
Date: 19 December 2022
Time: 9:30 -10:30 IST

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Summary:
From 2014 to 2019, the Government of Maharashtra’s decentralized water conservation and harvesting campaign, Jalyukt Shivar Abhiyan, is reported to have made 25,000 villages “free” from agricultural drought. Yet, the campaign has attracted intense criticism for water conservation’s “unscientific” nature, adverse ecological impacts, and skewed preference for employing mechanical contractors over village residents in waterworks development. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India, in 2020, found that despite 6.30 lakh completed water harvesting and conservation projects, the campaign had “little impact in achieving water neutrality and increasing groundwater level” in drought-affected villages. This talk will demonstrate two forms of maladaptation hindering equitable water security: (i) a socio-ecological maladaptation with key state-sponsored and subsidized infrastructures under the campaign actively deepening the inequities, unsustainability, and inefficiencies of water use in drought-hit villages, (ii) a relational maladaptation with agricultural drought reconfiguring the state-society relationships, wherein state officials occlude their responsibility in climate welfare by framing environmental features, such as the climate, geology, and topography, as reasons for the drought. By considering these diverse forms of maladaptation, this talk will explore the various pathways for fostering sustainable, equity-based water security in the context of climate change and variability. 

Speaker Biography:
Dr. Sameer Shah is an environmental, social scientist with expertise in the human dimensions of climate change vulnerability. His research aims to understand the socio-economic and political processes by which climate change unevenly impacts people, and their water, food, and energy resources. He is especially interested in analyzing the equity, justice, and sustainability outcomes of climate adaptation and disaster response at multiple scales. Dr. Shah is the John C. Garcia Assistant Professor of Climate Adaptation in the School of Environmental and Forest Sciences at the University of Washington. He has (co)authored seventeen peer-reviewed articles and was awarded the Governor General’s Gold Medal (UBC, 2015) and the Pagani Award for Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation (UBC IRES, 2021) for his research on climate adaptation, water insecurity, and livelihoods.

Speaker: Arianna Tozzi, PhD Researcher, University of Manchester
Date: 29 August 2022
Time: 16:00-17:00 IST

Summary
In this talk Arianna will engage with a critical reading of the British colonial archive in the Bombay Deccan to trace how policies to protect this region from droughts paved the way for today’s mentality favouring an irrigated model of agriculture while relegating rainfed areas to spaces of marginality. Enacting a ‘water world’ grounded on linear and predictable flows, she will describe how colonial policies for drought-protection rearranged existing human-water relations and divided the Deccan along an irrigated-as-protected and rainfed-as-unprotected logic. Yet, the expansion of this colonial hydro-politics was not a seamless process. Encountering a world that followed geographies of water ‘as precipitation’ created unexpected moments of friction, blurring the partition envisioned by engineering plans. The colonization of the rains thus speaks for that contested and negotiated project, whereby certain water worlds were made present, and real while others discarded, and made less real.

Given the preoccupation of the widening gap between irrigated and rainfed areas in the context of the agrarian crisis and climate uncertainties, the talk wants to stimulate a reflection on how existing water management practices may unwittingly reproduce practices of rainfall colonization, unable to value the diversity and dynamism of rainfed socio-ecologies. Arguing for the need for policies to confront their power to strengthen certain water worlds at the expense of others, the talk will reflect with the audience on what it would mean to enact decolonial water management practices grounded on the rainfall.

Speaker Biography
Arianna Tozzi is a PhD researcher in Human Geography at the University of Manchester. In her research she uses feminist and decolonial approaches to unpack the intersecting impact of climate change, development policies and the processes of rural agrarian transformation in rainfed areas of Maharashtra. Before starting her PhD, she lived in Pune (India) where she worked as a researcher affiliated with the University of Minnesota on projects studying the impacts of solar mini-grids for rural electrification from a gender and governance perspectives.

This talk is based on a paper she recently published with Geoforum, which can be downloaded at the following link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0016718522001464

Speaker: Dr. Balsher Singh Sidhu, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Resource, Environment, and Sustainability, UCB Vancouver
Date: 19 September 2022
Time: 9:30 -10:30 IST

Summary

Agricultural production is sensitive to both short-term weather variability and long-term climate change. Predicting crop yields as a function of climate is becoming increasingly important due to a rapidly changing environment. In this talk, Balsher will discuss and contrast the regional and crop-wise yield sensitivity to climate change in India, including the predicted yields for different crops till 2100. He will then explore the role that irrigation – under different availability scenarios – can play in reducing yield vulnerability in the context of increasing variability in precipitation and the rising probability of droughts.

High-quality data and advanced computational facilities have led to various sophisticated models for climate projections in recent years. The Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 6 (CMIP6) framework is one of those. Balsher has applied this framework for his yield projection exercise, where variables such as temperature, frequency and volume of precipitation, soil moisture, etc., are combined with the climate projections for four different shared socioeconomic pathways from 13 Global Climate Models (GCM) under the CMIP6 framework. This talk will bring some interesting insights into the climate-driven vulnerabilities of Indian agriculture and engage the audience to deliberate on some of the likely adaptation and mitigation strategies in this regard.

Speaker Biography

Dr. Balsher Singh Sidhu is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Institute for Resources, Environment, and Sustainability, UCB Vancouver. His research interests lie at the intersection of climate change, food systems, and sustainable resource use. He uses advanced statistical and machine learning methods to understand the relationship between climate change and agriculture. His doctoral research was funded by a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship, wherein he developed crop yield models for various crops in India to predict yields till 2100 under multiple emission scenarios. He is currently analyzing land use-based strategies for mitigating climate change.

Dr. Balsher was a contributing author to the Water chapter in the Sixth IPCC Assessment Report (Working Group II). He has also worked as a short-term consultant for the World Bank on the Atlas of Sustainable Development Goals 2020. Previously, he held undergraduate and master’s degrees in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and the University of Toronto, respectively. He can be reached at balsher.sidhu@ires.ubc.ca.

Speaker: Dr. Sandeep Pai, Senior Research Lead, Centre for Strategic and International Studies, Washington D.C., United States of America.
Date: 17 October 2022
Time: 9:30 -10:30 IST

Summary:
The world has already warmed to over 1°C above pre-industrial levels, mainly due to burning fossil fuels such as coal. This is causing ever-increasing rates of climate-related events such as floods, droughts, and wildfires. Any steps to keep global warming well below 2°C, a target enshrined in the Paris Agreement, would require a rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels—particularly coal. Although some member countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have already planned to phase out coal-based power, attaining the Paris Agreement goals would require concerted efforts of the large coal-dependent emerging economies, like India, to reduce their long-term dependency on coal. But such an energy transition presents an enormous challenge for India both in terms of deployment of large-scale clean energy sources and managing the socio-economic impacts of the transition on coal-dependent states and communities. In India, transitioning from coal power is likely to have an outsized effect on six coal-dependent states where coal production is heavily concentrated. Thus, a comprehensive policy and national action plan are required focusing on the technological deployment and securing the future livelihoods of millions of coal workers and their community members.

Speaker Biography:
Dr. Sandeep Pai is the senior research lead at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Washington D.C. His expertise spans energy transitions, coal sector dynamics, and just transitions. Previously, Sandeep worked as a journalist for many years with leading Indian newspapers such as the Hindustan Times and Daily News & Analysis. In 2016, he was felicitated with the Ramnath Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism, India’s most prestigious journalism award.  He holds a Ph.D. in resources, environment, and sustainability from the University of British Columbia and a joint MSc in environmental sciences and management from Lund University, Sweden, and Central European University, Hungary.

Speaker: Shuchi Vora,  Global Resilience Partnership
Date: 21 November 2022
Time: 16:00 -17:00 IST

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Summary:
Water is the face of climate change, and nowhere is it felt more than in the global food systems. However, practitioners and researchers across food and water often find it challenging to articulate the critical role of water in food systems and translate practice into research and policy effectively (and vice-versa) in the absence of frameworks and cases of knowledge brokering. This talk will use the Water-resilient Food Systems framing that has been recently published (Matthews et al., 2022) and highlight a case of knowledge brokering in Maharashtra, India. 

Speaker Biography:
Shuchi Vora is a knowledge broker who has worked as a practitioner at the interface of knowledge, policy, and practice. She currently works at the Global Resilience Partnership, where she leads a knowledge brokering and shared learning initiative called the Resilience Knowledge Coalition. She has worked on multistakeholder engagement for water in different forms at WWF and TNC prior to this role. She has master’s degrees from Oxford and TISS Mumbai, and an engineering bachelor’s from NIT Warangal.