Over the past two decades, the Environment Support Group (ESG), part of the GoST project, has systematically worked with communities, administrators and the judiciary to build a deep understanding of how water and rain shape cities and their futures. As part of this process, ESG has advanced a major Public Interest Litigation to advance the need to reclaim Bengaluru’s lakes and water commons, which found deep and systematic support from the judiciary. However, the administration did not implement the court orders.

A major consequence has been that Bengaluru, a metropolis with a population exceeding 14 million, has been repeatedly flooded, every time it rains. In 2022 the rains have been extremely intense and over the month of September almost half the neighbourhoods of the city flooded, resulting in extensive loss of property and loss of homes, and threatening the status of the metropolis as the IT Capital of India.

The ESG has played an important role in contextualising why these floods are recurring with intensifying damage in a series of articles and news stories. This has influenced debate, with individuals and companies affected questioning the popular idea that the flooding is simply the consequence of too much rain in a short span. What is resulting is an unique process where ground-up democratic planning is being demanded as a structural way out of this mess.

For ESG, the learnings from the GoST project of the fundamental importance of developing imaginaries that are inclusive and resilient has worked stolidly in engaging with various decision-making bodies, and also encouraging local communities to work structurally for transformation rather than merely be satisfied by reactive schemes.

Related links:

How Caste and Class Divisions Caused Bengaluru’s Flooding, Leo F. Saldanha, The Wire, 15 September 2022

Fire, Foam and Now Floods, Bhargavi S. Rao, News Click, 12 September 2022

---

Header photo: pushkar v via Flickr.

Between January and July 2022, the Indian Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change proposed fundamental changes to key environmental laws of India. The proposal is to amend various provisions of the Environment Protection Act, 1986, Water (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1974, Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act, 1981 and Public Liability Insurance Act, 1991.

In addition, there are fundamental changes proposed in the Forest Rights Act, 2006, Indian Forest Act, 1927, Biological Diversity Act, 2002 and also other related environmental and forest protection laws, to convert their prevailing strong jurisprudence based on criminal law to civil law only.  This is seen by some as an outcome of the influence of the United States Environmental Protection Agency, which from the early 2000s has been promoting such a transition. This transition has continued under the Modi government, and received a strong impetus with the TSR Subramanian report. The current proposed amendments are an outcome of this process. A collection of the proposed Bills is accessible online here.

The Environment Support Group (ESG), a partner in the GoST project, in collaboration with the National Law School of India University, organized a national consultation on the proposed changes to India’s environmental jurisprudence involving legal luminaries, researchers, leading lawyers and activists. A discussion note highlighting some concerns relating to the proposed amendments was the basis of this Consultation.

See the ESG website for more information.

---

Header photo: Nandhu Kumar via Unsplash.

Journal articles, books and other publications

Butsch, C.; Chakraborty, S.; Gomes, S.L.; Kumar, S.; Hermans, L.M. Changing Hydrosocial Cycles in Periurban India. Land 2021, 10, 263. https://doi.org/10.3390/land10030263.

Chakraborty, Shreya. (2021). Periurban Water: Recognizing the Margins for Sustainable Urban Water Futures. In: Clean Water and Sanitation (pp.1-13). DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-70061-8_174-2.

Luft S and Butsch C. 2022. Planning for Livelihoods Under Hydrosocial Uncertainty in Periurban Pune. Front. Water 4:831464. doi: 10.3389/frwa.2022.831464

Gomes, S.L. (2022). Interventions to Strengthen Institutional Capacity for Peri-Urban Water Management in South Asia. In: Narain, V., Roth, D. (eds) Water Security, Conflict and Cooperation in Peri-Urban South Asia. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79035-6_8

Calvillo, N., Garde-Hansen, J., Lima-Silva, F., Trajber, R., & Albuquerque, J. P. de. (2022). From Extreme Weather Events to ‘Cascading Vulnerabilities’: Participatory Flood Research Methodologies in Brazil During COVID-19. Journal of Extreme Events. https://doi.org/10.1142/S2345737622410020

Marchezini, V., Porto de Albuquerque, J., Pitidis, V., Rudorff, C. D. M., Lima-Silva, F., Klonner, C., & Martins, M. H. da M. (2022). Flood risk governance in Brazil and the UK: facilitating knowledge exchange through research gaps and the potential of citizen-generated data. Disaster Prevention and Management: An International Journal, 31(6), 30–44. https://doi.org/10.1108/DPM-01-2022-0016

Pajarito-Grajales, D., Degrossi, L. C., Barros, D. D. R., Khan, M. R., Lima-Silva, F., Cunha, M. A., Trajber, R., & Porto de Albuquerque, J. (2022). Enabling Participatory Flood Monitoring Through Cloud Services. Proceedings of the 19th ISCRAM Conference – Tarbes, France May 2022, 1–11.

Sucharita Sen, Anshika John, Shreya Chakraborty, Manoj Jatav. 2019. Geographies of Drinking Water (In)securities in Peri-urban Hyderabad. Economic & Political Weekly, Vol. 54, Issue No. 39, 28 Sep.

Policy briefs

Check out four new policy briefs from the CON-VIVA project:

• Convivial Conservation: A novel approach to protecting biodiversity
• Decolonising & convivial conservation
• How Political Economy Shapes Human-Wildlife Interaction
• Coexistence & convivial conservation

Blogs and other publications from around the web

See the TAPESTRY project’s ‘New Catch in Town’ multimedia website and video and the ‘Catching plastic: Mumbai’s Koli community uses fishing-nets to tackle pollution’ blog.

The IPACST project has created a teaching kit on intellectual property and sustainability transition. The kit is available Open Access, and includes slides, reading lists, and selected case studies on IP and sustainability.

Videos

Watch the documentary series: Waterproofing Memories [Memórias à Prova D’Água] produced by the Waterproofing Data project [available in Portuguese with English subtitles].

Watch the series of films ‘People who transform‘, from the AGENTS project.

Environment Support Group (ESG), a partner in the GoST project, organized the ‘ESG Imaginaries to Make Cities Work’ webinar series. Watch the videos and read the associated reports here:

• Environment Support Group Imaginaries to make cities work: waste and governance
• Environment Support Group Imaginaries to make cities work: Challenges of securing urban commons
• Environment Support Group Imaginaries to make cities work: Mobility & Infrastructure
• Environment Support Group Imaginaries to make cities work: Making cities of the 21st century inclusive

Podcasts

The Transformations to Groundwater Sustainability (T2GS) project has shared a series of four podcasts:

• Episode #1: Narratives of Bricolage with Prof Frances Cleaver
• Episode #2: Implications of COVID-19 for small-scale agriculture in Algeria, India and Morocco
• Episode #3: Colonial Circularities of California’s Hydrologic Frontiers: A Beacon and a Warning
• Episode #4: Practices of Circularity and Recharge

In the press…

Eduardo Brondizio gave an interview to the local TV channel in Santarem, Brazil, where he talked about the AGENTS project, the relevance of local initiatives in the region, and promoted the public seminar organized by the project in the city. The interview (in Portuguese) is freely available here.

Bombay61’s initiative to catch plastic in fishing nets, and the report ‘New Catch In Town’, created with the TAPESTRY project, received over 30 pieces of coverage in the media, including:

The ‘forgotten’ water ecosystems of Mumbai, Down to Earth, 5 September 2022

There’s a new catch in town, and it’s not fish. The Hindu Businessline, 18 September 2022

How Climate Change And Pollution Of Creeks Are Threatening Mumbai’s Aboriginals – The Koli People, India Times, 30 August 2022

The ESG group, a partner in the GoST project, has worked with communities, administrators and the judiciary in building a deep understanding of how water and rain shape cities and their futures. At part of this, the group has recently published a number of

How Caste and Class Divisions Caused Bengaluru’s Flooding, Leo F. Saldanha, The Wire, 15 September 2022

Fire, Foam and Now Floods, Bhargavi S. Rao, News Click, 12 September 2022

Why did Bengaluru get badly flooded? (video) Express Dialogues, 16 September 2022

Climate change, environmental degradation and resource pressures have reached unprecedented levels worldwide. Achieving sustainability will depend on rapid and fundamental transformations in the ways we organize our societies and interact with the natural environment.

The International Science Council has today launched seven films resulting from the Transformations to Sustainability programme. The films present insights from the Transformations to Sustainability projects, looking at how social transformations to sustainability can be supported. They share how projects have worked with communities in diverse places around the world to understand the complex relations between social structures, the material world and environmental and social change.

Watch the summary film above, and explore the multi-media website which includes six further films from individual projects at https://stories.council.science/transformations-sustainability/.

Findings from the IPACST project demonstrate that intellectual property (IP), including both formal IP rights such as patents, trademarks, and copyrights as well as informal IP assets such as data, technical and industrial know-how, forms an integral part of a sustainability-oriented business.

However, businesses acknowledge a general lack of awareness and insufficient guidelines about using IP for facilitating sustainability transition. By combining expert knowledge from strategic IP management, business models, and sustainability fields, the IPACST team has created an open access teaching kit that academics, teachers, industry practitioners, and anyone interested in learning about IP and sustainability can use for free.

The teaching kit includes introductory slides, reading lists, and selected case studies on IP and sustainability. All the teaching kit materials are available for download from the IPACST website as an open access publication distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution By License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original authors and source are credited.

Access the IPACST teaching kit here.

The Innovation and IP Management (IIPM) Laboratory and the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law (CIPIL), University of Cambridge, successfully hosted the European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) 2022 conference on 14-16 September 2022 in Cambridge, with the IPACST project as one of the partners.

The conference was centered around the theme “Opening IP for a better world?” and featured three keynote speeches, three roundtables, nine themed sessions (including those organized by the World IP Organization (WIPO), European Patent Office (EPO), and Licensing Executive Society (LES)), and 149 paper presentations. A total of about 300 participants registered for the conference including 228 in-person participants.

Carlos Correa’s keynote address on international IP regimes, Nobel laureate Gregory Paul Winter’s keynote on IP from an inventor’s perspective, and Séverine Dusollier’s keynote on ethical and critical perspectives on IP openness brought together fascinating IP perspectives. In the roundtable that IPACST hosted on “IP for a Sustainable Future”, representatives from the European Commission, patent offices, and sustainable businesses enriched the discussion with their views and insights on the role of IP for sustainability.

The conference put a spotlight on ongoing research on IP for sustainable development and offered a platform for academics, industry specialists, and policy-makers to discuss how to advance IP research towards tackling sustainability challenges such as climate crisis and inequality. The EPIP organizers and the IPACST team thank all the sponsors, contributors and participants for making the conference a grand success.

The TAPESTRY project has been busy with a number of events in recent weeks

On 16 August a Batik-making workshop in Kultali, Sundarbans, brought together local people to make artwork. You can see some of the artworks here:

On 23 August TAPESTRY held a roundtable in Mumbai to discuss findings and next steps with community members and other local stakeholders, and in the same month Bombay61 and Mumbai’s Ministry of Magic held a four-day festival to celebrate local fishers’ relationships with the ecosystem, including an exhibition of co-produced images and maps, and local tours. Community validation workshops were held in the Indian and Bangladesh Sundarbans, as well as a stakeholder meeting at Caritas India, and a Roundtable at IUB in Dhaka.

On 8 and 9 September TAPESTRY held well-attended workshops and a roundtable in Kachchh, Gujarat, to share and discuss findings with teachers, local leaders and government officials. The events were well-attended and were covered in the local media, and photos from the research were also exhibited.

On 24 September a national roundtable took place, open to all, to discuss learning from all the TAPESTRY sites.

On 20 September 2022 the T2GS team in India organized a one-day dissemination workshop in Pune, India. About one hundred people took part in the workshop, including men and women farmers, water activists and academics.

The teams from SOPPECOM and ACWADAM shared the key findings of the study done in Ravangaon village, Maharashtra, India as part of the T2GS project.

The study in Ravangaon aimed to understand the challenges in governing groundwater with relation to irrigation by looking at the water management practices of farmers. The village has a number of water sources, including an irrigation tank from the 19th century, the main canal of a major irrigation project and a fifth-order stream which passes through the village. Yet over the last two decades, the village has seen a steep increase in the number of dug-wells and bore wells in the command areas of the canal and the tank.

The T2S project’s socio-hydrological analysis with a feminist lens helped unfold the complex story of the political economy of Ravangaon’s water and how it co-shapes the lives and livelihoods of the diverse socioeconomic groups that reside in the village.

While the experts commended the teams for doing a first-of-its-kind study by integrating the social and technical, the villagers reflected on their situation and – while agreeing with the analysis – discussed the challenges they faced to move towards ecologically sound practices in agriculture and water use.

The AGENTS project, in partnership with local non-governmental organization Sapopema, organized an audiovisual workshop for young people on the 3rd of August 2022 in Santarem, Brazil.

The workshop focused on building practical knowledge to capture and edit images with their phones. The goal was to train and empower young people to use audiovisual technologies in order to communicate the initiatives that are taking place in their communities.

During the workshop ten experimental videos were produced using techniques learned, and can be accessed here: