Mihir Bhatt, director of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI).

In this second instalment of a new interview series with Mittal Institute’s Climate Change Platform collaborators in South Asia, we spoke with Mihir Bhatt, the director of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute. An architect and city planner by training and practice, he’s a former fellow with the François-Xavier Bagnoud (FXB) Center for Health and Human Rights and Harvard Humanitarian Initiative at Harvard University and was deputy lead to joint evaluation of the humanitarian work of both UN and international nongovernmental agencies on tsunami relief and rehabilitation activities in coastal areas of South India, and Indonesia. He was a coordinating lead author of a chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Special Report, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” where heatwaves were a focus.

He’s also one of the in-region collaborators of Mittal Institute’s “Climate Adaptation in South Asia” project, an interdisciplinary research project that seeks to advance climate adaptation research and implementation at the household, community, state and federal levels in South Asia, particularly in the context of climate-driven migration. He brings a direct focus on the affected population within the project and the importance of synergy between multiple levels and sectors of public institutions in South Asia.

Mihir spoke to the Mittal Institute about the challenges faced by the affected poor and vulnerable populations in South Asia, the need to focus on local-level adaptation for disaster resilience, and how encouraging individual communities through “green” and “clean” employment can help restore nature, better and faster.

Mittal Institute: Mihir, what are the major climate change challenges people are facing right now in South Asia, especially the poor and vulnerable? 

Mihir Bhatt: Well, sadly, the challenges are no different from other fundamental development challenges, such as food, nutrition, clean and adequate water, clean air, and basic income for example. The paucity of rewarding employment and the struggle for shelter or housing are another set of challenges that the poor and vulnerable have to face and will increasingly face in South Asia due to the rapidly changing climate and its negative impact. In addition, due to climate change, the poor and vulnerable don’t get the food at the price that they want or in the season that they want. Farmers, for example, don’t get to eat the food that they produce; and the food that they produce, they are not able to consume because of market forces. So food is a primary challenge. In terms of water, water is not harvested for irrigation or drinking purposes in arid Pakistan or high-altitude Nepal, leading to floods and wastage, and the flood or heavy rainwater just washes away everything: assets to crops to human life in the plains of India and the delta of Bangladesh. So we need some way of harvesting and replenishing our fields and underground water which is another challenge. And now about half of the water we use for cities and agriculture in South Asia is mined from underground and within decades we will run out of groundwater from at least one-third of small towns in South Asia.

The situation is very urgent. Delhi has run out of clean air. Bangalore has run out of drinking water. Dhaka may run out of areas that are protected from sea-level rise. Multiple disasters at multiple locations and at multiple levels are approaching us in South Asia. And are we prepared? Most of our development planning is “planning the past.”

About half of the water we use for cities and agriculture in South Asia is mined from underground and within decades we will run out of groundwater from at least one-third of small towns in South Asia.

And another, so to speak ‘new’ risk is heatwaves. And that’s something that we worked on as IPCC-SREX’s report team. We as coordinating lead authors had the great honor of working with some of the best scientists in South Asia to point out that heatwaves are something that is coming, and sadly, it has come into everyone’s day-to-day life. The year 2023 was the hottest and the summer of 2024 is predicted to surpass all heat records.

Extreme events such as heatwaves, floods, and cyclones, are affecting almost all peoples’ lives, and in many ways, eating away at the development gains that the poor and workers have made in South Asia— their savings, assets their health. And what’s the most heart-wrenching is that this impairs their future. Our future. To not have something for a while is one thing, but to not have a future is hopelessly terrible.

Further, when I say they, it is not only they but I am included, all of us are included. Climate crisis is a crisis for all, and this we often do not remember in our daily life and work in South Asia.

Mittal Institute: What would you identify as the two biggest opportunity areas in South Asia that you see moving forward on climate change in the near future?

Mihir Bhatt: If we support the ongoing employment and income-generating opportunities of the poor and vulnerable populations, I think that in itself is a huge opportunity for moving forward on climate change. A large number of the poor and vulnerable population in South Asia has a very low carbon footprint, and the skills and employment that they are engaged in are either quite carbon neutral or have a very low carbon footprint. So, in addition to inventing new green and blue and clean technologies, skills and assets, if we just supported these millions of individuals, most of them women, migrants, tribals, minorities, and labour in what they are doing to make it more viable, marketable as well as profitable, both in terms of money for them to afford a decent way of life, but also in terms of restoration of nature, it would have a significant impact on addressing negative aspects of climate change. This is a big opportunity.

The second big area is employment opportunities at the sectoral level, through the planting of forests in forest areas, in agricultural areas along the boundaries, and in cities through urban forests – not only on the ground and along the roads but also on the rooftops and walls and water and more. Greening cities, expanding forests, and conservation agriculture doesn’t need a lot of new technology or any radical new initiatives. What is needed is upscaling and wide-scaling of what is already working on the ground. While the availability of water is a legitimate question, I believe once we start addressing a problem, we will find solutions. So, we will be able to find local hardy species of plants and trees that need less water. What is more, this is already being done in some measure, especially by three groups: women, migrants, and tribals in South Asia. So, we don’t need to find people and train them and then get them involved and interested in doing such large-scale green sectoral employment actions. We just need to provide the affected population, the population taking adaptive measures, the space and access to markets, funds, information, and the right organizational networks to unleash their ongoing and potential activities. I think these two things – protecting existing carbon-neutral jobs of the poor and promoting carbon-fixing new jobs – only South Asia can do, and they lead the way in terms of green employment in the world.

If we support the ongoing employment and income-generating opportunities of the poor and vulnerable populations, I think that in itself is a huge opportunity for moving forward on climate change.

Mittal Institute: There is so much local knowledge to capture. You were here in Cambridge at MIT, but now you’re working with communities, so what inspired you to work with the communities and tap into local knowledge?

Mihir Bhatt: Oh, it was more “Neti-Neti“. That is in Sanskrit which means “not that, not that.” When I finished my studies and started working here, I thought I wanted to do something which was not being done. And I wanted to do “not here,” hence in India. It was very popular in the 1980s to start work on environment, income generation, and gender. And I just thought, “No, not that.” In 1989, I observed that there was no focus on disasters: causes and remedies among the architects, city planners, and policy-makers. And that was a repeat drought year, the impact of which was tremendous on the development process, especially on the women, migrants, minorities, and tribals. But the impact of repeat drought wasn’t being looked into in a focused way. I saw that it was something that needed the attention of a planner. We started with a planning team of three to respond to plan recovery from the impact of repeat drought. We planned with cattle owners what was called a “fodder bank” for Kutch; a plan for harvesting rainwater in Aravalli hills with tribal farmers, and more. Soon we also had a community plan for recovery from sea level rise in three villages in Dhandhuka. More demand for planning came and we became an action-learning local organisation working with and for the affected population. And since then, we’ve always done things that hardly anyone else has so far done. As a result, we have been at the forefront of new areas and new initiatives in South Asia. In Sri Lanka with the Intermediate Technology Development Group (ITDG), we initiated a network for alternative perspectives on disaster, named Duryog Nivaran (DN); in India, we initiated basic humanitarian standards for relief and Sphere India came up; at the global level, we demanded focus on joint evaluations of disaster recovery and Tsunami Evaluation Coalition (TEC) came up as a turning point. In short lessons of recovery, response, and repair, remained with local people and joined them to plan with and for them.

Around the world, private insurers are leaving markets where they judge the risks have grown too high. This is happening in South Asia as well. Let me underline that as climate shocks increase in frequency, so do demands for adaptation finance, insurance and indemnification. This became clear to us after the Gujarat earthquake in 2002 and the tsunami in 2004.

Insurances today focus on modelling at the cost of what matters about human life. And that is short-sighted. Neoclassical resilience in the form of insurance must worry us all because the controlled markets cannot deliver resilience for all. And this inspired us to look into local knowledge on how loss and damage are financed by affected populations; what is the demand side of heatwave adaptation, and more. Our affected population in South Asia is so vibrant and forward-looking! Social insurance, shared insurance, dynamic insurance, mutual insurance, and many other ways our communities have found to protect each other. These methods and approaches are yet to be studied and upscaled.

As the climate crisis cascades, compounds, becomes far more complex, adaptations are not keeping pace in South Asia. We are adapting to the present or the past. So, by not preparing for the inevitable, the crisis will cost far more in the long run. We are missing an opportunity by not financing adaptation for the future, is what we find.

By not preparing for the inevitable, the crisis will cost far more in the long run.

And more is to be done. For example, what is it that the affected population itself has to say about loss and damage funds? What according to them is categorized as ‘loss’ and ‘damage’? And how would they like to use those funds, for what purpose, using what kind of mechanisms? So that’s something that we are working on with a whole range of organizations and networks such as the International Council of Voluntary Agencies and the Inter-Agency Steering Committee of the United Nations. The other area we just started working on is to respond to demand from urban planners and architects, city authorities, and district administration. How can cities be retrofitted? How can they be transformed into what the International Union for Conservation of Nature calls nature-positive cities? We want to work on planning cities that not only balance the consumption and production of natural resources but substantially add to natural resources that we have lost in the past, overused in the past, including forestry, water, food and more. That’s a very fascinating opportunity and we look forward to working on that with researchers and students from Mittal Institute who share our interests.

Read the first installment of the series with Sabina Faiz Rashid, a medical anthropologist by training from The Australian National University, Australia, and currently Professor and Chair of Health and Poverty at BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health in Dhaka, Bangladesh

☆ The views represented herein are those of the interview subjects and do not necessarily reflect the views of LMSAI, its staff, or its steering committee.