The Mittal Institute is pleased to announce its first recipients of the Faculty Climate Research Grants. These grants are designed to foster deeper scholarly engagement on climate change, catalyze the creation of new knowledge, and contribute to the development of sustainable solutions across South Asia. Projects focused on three main research categories: energy transition and energy policy; food systems, agriculture, and land use; and law and policy for climate transition and adaptation. Read more about the eight winning projects below:
Vincenzo Bollettino; Patrick Vinck
Documenting Women’s Leadership in Climate Resilience Building in Koshi Province, Nepal
Principal Investigators: Vincenzo Bollettino, Director, Program on Resilient Communities at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; Director, National NGO Program on Humanitarian Leadership and Patrick Vinck, Research Director, Harvard Humanitarian Initiative; Assistant Professor, Harvard Medical School and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health
This research focuses on the climate resilience challenges faced by women-led community organizations in the Koshi Province of Nepal, where rising temperatures, increased flooding, and drought disproportionately impact smallholder farmers and communities living in remote and impoverished areas. The study aims to document the work and needs of women’s groups engaged in grassroots climate adaptation efforts, identify and adapt best practices from existing capacity-building programs, and evaluate the influence of women’s networks on local planning and decision-making.
Primary data will be collected through key stakeholder interviews and focus group discussions with women-led community organizations operating in Koshi Province. Analysis of findings will be used to develop climate leadership training sessions for women community leaders, focusing on enhancing skills in climate awareness, adaptation strategies, and gender-inclusive project development. These efforts will culminate in visual storytelling and documentation to capture and disseminate learnings and outcomes, ultimately advancing inclusive climate change adaptation strategies and policies in the South Asia region.
Peter Huybers
Heat Stress in India: Why is Relative Humidity in Addition to Temperature on the Rise?
Principal Investigator: Peter Huybers, Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences; Chair, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences
Under a warming climate, as saturation vapor pressure increases globally, relative humidity (RH) is generally predicted to decrease. However, the opposite trend has emerged in India, where RH has significantly increased in several regions. Since 2001, RH has increased by 8% in Delhi and 10% in Hyderabad. Humidity exacerbates high temperatures and heat stress both when considering health risks and agricultural productivity. A potential driver for the unexpected increase in RH is the widespread use of intensive irrigation in agricultural areas, which boosts evapotranspiration and consequently surface-level humidity. This implies a link between soil moisture (SM) and RH that has recently been supported by theoretical considerations.
The proposed study will analyze the relationship between SM and RH to understand this dynamic better, and its consequences for both agriculture and human health. If a strong connection is confirmed, predictive models for RH based on SM data will be developed. Additionally, to account for the possibility of other contributing factors, this study will explore how RH trends as spatially and temporally represented within global climate simulations, particularly focusing on the influence of sea surface temperature (SSTs). By bridging local SM-RH dynamics with global climate patterns, the study aims to generate insights for building climate resilience, optimizing irrigation strategies, and mitigating health risks in densely populated, agriculturally dependent regions of India.
Asim Khwaja
A Systematic Review of Climate Change and Learning: Fostering Climate Resilient Education through Improved Policymaking
Principal Investigator: Asim Khwaja, Sumitomo-FASID Professor of International Finance and Development; Director, Center for International Development
The worsening effects of climate change are disrupting the education of the world’s most vulnerable learners, many of whom live in South Asia. However, there is a lack of strong causal evidence outlining the impact of climate change on accessible continuous learning, such as on foundational learning, or on the long-term impacts on children’s schooling and life outcomes. The recent COVID-19 pandemic underscored the vulnerability of education systems to disruptions, highlighting the need to preemptively understand the impact of climate induced events on learning. Understanding the degree and mechanisms of these impacts are vital for designing policies that can mitigate them.
To address this, we propose conducting a comprehensive literature review on climate and education – a heavily understudied interdisciplinary field – with the ultimate goal of informing new policies centering on climate adaptation efforts in education relevant to the region. This proposal is led by PI Asim I. Khwaja, in collaboration with co-PI Jishnu Das from Georgetown University and Save the Children International. In the long-run, we aim for this literature review to inform a comprehensive new set of research studies on climate and education in South Asia, led by PIs from CID and possibly in future continued collaboration with Save the Children.
Eliana La Ferrara; Aditi Bhowmick
Unveiling Gendered Climate Vulnerability in India: Blending Historical archives, Satellite and Census Data
Project Investigators: Eliana La Ferrara, Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Aditi Bhowmick, CID PhD Affiliate, Concentrations in Development Economics & Labor Economics
Climate change-induced disasters, such as droughts, floods, and heatwaves, jeopardize decades of progress towards gender equity in South Asia. For example, recent media reports have highlighted the phenomenon of “climate brides” – girls forced into marriage due to extreme weather events despite existing laws outlawing child marriage in the region. In turn, early marriage leads to increased risk of teenage pregnancies, maternal morbidity, domestic violence, and poor child health outcomes, perpetuating cycles of health inequality. Despite the interplay of climate shocks and gender and health inequities in India, systematic research is hindered by the lack of interoperable data. Our project aims to fill this gap by integrating historical ethnographic archives (1920-1960), modern census records, and satellite data capturing climate and economic shocks for India’s 600,000 villages and towns.
Our research will address the following questions: a) What is the causal relationship between climate change and adverse gender and health outcomes–in particular, child marriage–across rural India? b) Do community-specific historical social norms mediate this relationship? The project’s data infrastructure will be shared as a digital public good, akin to Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas for Sub-Saharan Africa, facilitating interdisciplinary research and policymaking. By incorporating community-level data on norms with geographic and economic data sources, such as census records and satellite measures, the project will empower researchers, data journalists, think tanks, and policymakers to better understand and address the challenges posed by climate change toward gender inequity in India.
Michael B. McElroy
Optimizing India’s Biofuel Capacity with Green Hydrogen Penetration: A Decarbonization and Emission Reduction Strategy
Principal Investigator: Michael B. McElroy, Gilbert Butler Professor of Environmental Studies, Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences and Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences; Chair, Harvard-China Project on Energy, Economy, and Environment
India is grappling with a multifaceted air pollution crisis, caused primarily by the burning of fossil fuels and seasonal agricultural wastes. This crisis not only degrades the physical environment but also severely impacts public health. Leveraging biomass for biofuel production presents a viable solution to mitigate pollution, enhance public health, and promote sustainable development. Additionally, the potential of integrating “green” hydrogen (i.e., that produced by water electrolysis using renewable power) into the biomass-to-biofuel process has not yet been sufficiently investigated. Given that India has access to some of the cheapest renewable power globally, the addition of green hydrogen could significantly reduce the production cost and enhance the biofuel production volume, thereby enabling India to decarbonize a larger share of its economy.
This project will conduct a state-level analysis across various regions in India to assess the potential of various types of crop residues, animal wastes, and municipal and industrial wastes for biofuel production. The analysis will differentiate between readily available biomass, such as rice husk and bagasse, and transportable biomass, which requires additional collection and transportation infrastructure. Various biomass conversion technologies, including gasification and pyrolysis coupled with Fischer-Tropsch synthesis, methanol synthesis, and hydrotreatment, will be evaluated to identify the most efficient and cost-effective solutions for biofuel production, with a particular focus on liquid fuels critical for decarbonizing “hard-to-abate” transportation modes (e.g., heavy-duty trucking and aviation). Additionally, the integration of green hydrogen into these processes will be explored, leveraging renewable energy resources, notably solar and wind. Using high-resolution meteorological data, the hourly production of green hydrogen will be simulated to assess its cost-effectiveness and potential to enhance biofuel production. The environmental benefits of reducing fossil fuel reliance and burning of agricultural residues will be evaluated, including the projected impacts on carbon emissions and air quality. In collaboration with colleagues in India who are working on local-scale agricultural waste gasification projects, this research will help empower local farmers by providing sustainable solutions to manage agricultural waste. By turning waste into valuable energy resources, these projects will contribute to rural development, offering farmers new income streams while reducing air pollution. This partnership will provide key insights for policymakers, support the development of sustainable energy frameworks, and create new opportunities in the biofuel and renewable energy sectors, contributing to poverty alleviation and economic development in India.
Eugene Richardson
Climate Change, Loss and Damage, and Habitability in Nepal
Principal Investigator: Eugene Richardson, M.D., Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine, Harvard Medical School; Assistant Professor of Medicine, Brigham and Women’s Hospital
This project investigates climate change vulnerability in Nepal with a focus on recent extreme weather events such as the September 2024 floods in and around Kathmandu. It addresses current limitations in Loss and Damage (L&D) mechanisms by examining both economic and non-economic losses, including the degradation of livelihoods, cultural heritage, and biodiversity. The project explores how local communities perceive climate risks, the limitations of prescribed adaptation strategies, and the role of socio-historical and geopolitical factors in shaping vulnerabilities.
The research, conducted through a collaboration between the Planetary Health Lab at Harvard Medical School and the Planetary Health Research Centre in Nepal, will employ a cross-scale, multi-stakeholder ethnographic approach. Data collected from semi-structured interviews with diverse stakeholders will enhance our understanding of how climate-induced human mobility and displacement intersect with local expectations of environmental justice. The findings will inform policy recommendations and support efforts to establish frameworks for filing L&D claims for affected populations in Nepal and contribute to the evidence base on habitability in South Asia.
Dustin Tingley
South Asia’s Role in Shaping a Future Global Climate Policy: The Case of Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms
Principal Investigator: Dustin Tingley, Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School of Public Policy and Harvard Government Department
South Asia is ‘ground zero’ in facing the impacts of climate change, and local business and political leaders are on the frontlines. Scientists show that subnational actors like states, cities, and businesses must act on climate goals to meet global decarbonization goals. Yet, there remains little systematic evidence of how local actors in South Asia perceive and want to shape global and cross-national climate goals and strategies. We aim to fill that gap by providing a rich data source on climate attitudes in the region for future research and policymaking. We will field the first large-scale systematic study of business leader’s perceptions of global climate policy in India and Bangladesh, alongside structured interviews with government officials and industry leaders. From this data, we will unpack how subnational actors could balance domestic and international pressures to understand the conditions and constraints under which South Asia can reshape global climate policy. Our proposal’s outcomes will culminate in the form of a novel survey and interview dataset, academic contributions, policy recommendations, a pipeline of South Asia-US collaboration on climate policy, and a virtual (potentially in-person) workshop on South Asia’s role in future global climate policy.
A major focus of our study will be on a current cross-border climate policy with huge implications for South Asia: the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). Implemented in 2023, the European Union (EU)’s CBAM taxes carbon intensive imports from countries without a sufficiently high domestic carbon policy, which includes India and Bangladesh. This project will survey domestic perceptions of CBAM in India and Bangladesh to understand the conditions under which CBAM might incentivize decarbonization and support for global climate policy. Such ground-up data will be crucial in understanding the divisions in how the EU has envisioned global climate policymaking via CBAM, and India’s concerns over the fairness of its current policy design. Prior research has explored how international climate commitments shape domestic public opinion, but little is understood about how international factors shape climate attitudes at the subnational level and in emerging economies like India and Bangladesh. This study aims to fill this gap by examining how CBAM as a cross-border regulatory policy could reshape firms’ perceptions of climate change in India and Bangladesh while exploring notions of climate justice within the ‘Global South’. Our study of South Asia’s domestic reactions to CBAM is also highly consequential to real-world policy given that CBAM is still being implemented in its transitional phase.
Richard K. Wolf
Music and Rain: Indigenous Climate Stories from South India (a film)
Principal Investigator: Richard K. Wolf, Professor of Music and South Asian Studies, Harvard University Department of Music
Music and Rain is an ethnographic film tracing the engagement of the Kota ādivāsi community of the Nilgiri Hills in South India with their changing environment over the past 90 years. The Kotas are a largely village-based, peasant society whose population of about 2,500 also includes white-collar workers living in major Indian cities. Drawn from Richard K. Wolf’s 34 years of research with the Kotas and supplemented by archival materials and interviews with scholars who worked with the Kotas in the 1930s, the film will provide longitudinal information about changes in Kota villages and environment, and Kota strategies for coping with these changes. This film project will complement existing Mittal Institute Climate Platform projects by providing qualitative and quantitative data about one small-scale community over time. It addresses two of the Climate Grant target areas, “Energy Transition” and “Food Systems, Agriculture and Land Use,” by describing the successes and failures of climate friendly initiatives, and Kota perceptions of the environment predating the global call to climate action.
Part of a five-part, solo-produced, documentary series, Music and Rain will feature local voices—Kotas speaking in their own language and in Tamil—communicating the climate message and energizing Nilgiri communities in their existing efforts to preserve the biodiversity and livability of their environment. As a piece of research expressed in the form of art, the film is meant to evoke in the richest possible terms the delicate balance one community strikes between their membership in a modern world of automobiles and televisions, and their commitment—ordered by the Kota gods through the mouth of diviners—to their responsibilities as custodians of the land. The humanities can play a critical role in the global fight to reduce the causes and impacts of climate change. Film has the potential to carry an emotional message to audiences, as well as convey the texture of everyday lifeways that the written word, and mere reportage, cannot. Critically, it also provides an avenue for reaching a wider audience than most written academic scholarship.