Inaugural ‘Wasting the World’ conference looks at South Asia’s water resources through interdisciplinary lens
Manan Ahmed (left) and Kavita Sivaramakrishnan (right) speak at a gathering of more than 50 researchers and community members to discuss water issues in South Asia. (Image credit: Pria Mahadevan)
Friday, April 7, manan ahmed Step up to the microphone and address a group of researchers and community members seated in clear plastic chairs in Buell Hall, Columbia University. As an associate professor in Columbia’s history department, Ahmed has spent the past four years co-organizing an event designed to bring together interdisciplinary researchers and practitioners from the physical and social sciences. Earlier this month, the first “deserted world“The press conference finally started.
Ahmed may be an unlikely co-leader of the water and climate change conference. A historian and medieval researcher by training, he recalls being pushed back by colleagues as he tried to focus on climate issues. In his view, however, the link between climate and medieval history was obvious. In his opening remarks for the conference, Ahmed noted that the works of the medieval authors he studied often imagined our world would exist 500 years in the future.
“They literally wrote this, thinking that history is not over and my descendants will finish this,” Ahmed said. “I don’t have that luxury. I can’t write that 200 years from now — or 300 years from now, or 100 years from now — someone will have done my job. So that’s important to me, even if I’m not writing ‘climate’ .”
It is in this spirit that Ahmed and co-organizers Kavita SivaramakrishnanAssociate Professor of Social Medical Sciences Mailman School of Public Health At Columbia University, multipart meetings were first conceptualized. While future iterations will address air and land issues, Friday’s event focused specifically on water issues in the Indian subcontinent.
“When we think of water, we think of its presence, we think of its absence, but we also think of its interpretation, embodiment and way of life in all our societies, starting from the Himalayas to the sea,” Sivaramakrishnan said in his opening statement after Ahmed. “People living in South Asia have probably been waiting for water all the time. I think that’s the core stressor and scarce resource of this meeting.”
The meeting also attracted community members from across New York who had a personal connection to the Indian subcontinent. Shan Singh, a taxi driver whose family immigrated from Pakistan, arrived at the conference to hand out copies of a one-page paper he had written on the environmental and psychological impact of partition in India. For him, the meeting provided an opportunity to discuss the ways in which zoning affects not only water, but livelihoods and imaginations across borders.
“Unfortunately, water is a way for people to connect — just like funerals are sometimes how people connect,” Shan said. “Water has become so scarce that it’s become an issue of uniting people when we’re actually supposed to be united.”
The first part of the conference, titled “The Melting,” focused on glaciers in northern India. In the spirit of an interdisciplinary conference, anthropologist Karine Gagné’s reflections on her work in Ladakh, western India, were combined with urban designer Andrew Rumbach’s reflections on landslides and rural urbanization in Darjeeling, eastern India. In their separate presentations, both researchers pointed to the parallel challenges of localizing their work, whether due to the scarcity of meteorological data in certain rural mountainous areas, or the discrepancy between the official government classification of rural areas and the pace of development on the ground. mismatch between.
“One of the things that fascinates me is that we come from two different disciplines and two different sides, but we observe some of the same things,” Gagne shared in an interview glacier center after her panel. “The study of glaciers has been focused on these large, charismatic glaciers that feed downstream rivers, but little attention has been paid locally. In fact, people are very dependent on these small glaciers,” Gagne said. “It’s the same thing [with Rumbach’s work]. These small cities are out of focus because people tend to focus on these big cities. There are many similarities. “
Rumbach also points to similarities between their work on glacier-dependent communities. “We’re all working on the same issues and trying to find positive dynamics that make people safer, happier, less exposed to climate stress,” he told GlacierHub. However, he also stressed that, in many ways, , this meeting is the first step in unifying these lines of research. “It’s one thing to put people in the same room, which is great,” he said. “But also motivating them to actually collaborate in a deeper way and generate knowledge in an interdisciplinary way? I think that’s a very, very difficult thing to do.”
Karine Gagné (right) and Andrew Rumbach (left) answer audience questions after a panel discussion on melting glaciers in South Asia. (Image credit: Pria Mahadevan)
The one-day Worlds at Waste conference featured four panels; the session on glaciers was only the first. Other panels focused on floods, displacement and oceans. In an email to GlacierHub, Manan elaborated on the thinking behind the day’s four-part series, noting, “The idea is not to isolate along spaces or boundaries or disciplines, but to come together. In Glacier What happens doesn’t stay in the glacier; its effects extend all the way to the coastline.” He also writes that while a great deal of research has been done on displacement and flooding in academia, “there is little interest in glacier melting and/or in these remote areas Engagement with working climate scientists doesn’t have a very deep understanding. Our aim is for these communities to talk and listen to each other.”
for Xing Nguyen, this effect is obvious.”I don’t usually go to events where social scientists go, so this was very interesting for me,” he told GlacierHub. Natural scientist at Columbia Climate Institute Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory Nguyen uses tree rings to study past climates, and his research focuses on Southeast Asia. Nonetheless, he shared insights on how tree ring research can inform the subcontinent’s flood history and flood preparedness.
“It’s really interesting to hear about displacement from both an ecological and a human perspective,” he said. “For me, it’s a bridge to learn more about South Asia, so that’s really helpful.”
Adam SobelColumbia University Professor School of Engineering and Applied Science who presented his work on urban flooding reflected on what a conference like this does for climate science. “I think what climate science needs is more engagement with the human problems on which our science depends,” he said. “A lot of things about climate are inextricably linked to all other local, global, geopolitical, economic and cultural issues because everything exists on a planet with climate. Our science is easily separated from all of these. Therefore, holding an interdisciplinary The activity of the conversation is a good thing. It’s a cliché, but it’s not easy to do that.”
With the ‘water’ portion of the conference now complete, Ahmed and Sivaramakrishnan look forward to future land- and air-focused ‘Abandoned World’ conferences. The organizers plan to hold these follow-up conferences in the next academic year and hope to foster dialogue among researchers from different countries and disciplines. From these conversations, new visions may emerge to address the water crisis and climate change in the Indian subcontinent and throughout the world.
glacier center is a climate communication initiative led by Ben Orloff, an anthropologist at the Columbia Climate Institute. Many of GlacierHub’s authors are students or alumni of the Climate School.
