The Mittal Institute’s CommunityHATS project, funded by Harvard’s Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability, was conceptualized as a way to address a major gap in the data related to heat impacts. Often macro-level data on temperature fails to capture the impacts on the most vulnerable, including informal workers who labor in exterior spaces without protection from extreme temperatures. This summer, two members of the CommunityHATS team traveled to Ahmedabad City in Gujarat, India, to work with the Self Employed Women’s Association (SEWA) in deploying sensors to collect temperature data from poor working women and their environments. Their work occurred concurrently with one of the most extreme heatwaves India has ever faced.
In an op-ed in The Indian Express, members of the Mittal Institute’s climate team + partners working on climate change adaptation in South Asia write on heatwaves and the need for a detailed understanding of how different communities are impacted by and react to the heat.
The burden of climate mitigation needs to be borne by all countries globally and equitably, but South Asia urgently needs to focus on adapting to the impacts of climate change the region is already seeing. In 2023, with the goal of increasing focus on adaptation, The Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (the Mittal Institute) launched a climate platform.
With a focus on innovation and entrepreneurship, the Mittal Institute’s Seed for Change competition funds ideas that have the potential for widespread impact in India. View our list of finalists, including this year’s $30,000 grand prize winner who is deploying a network of solar irrigation kits that are shareable via digital platform; and the $5,000 runner-up, a comprehensive intervention program that provides career training and life skills to students in grades 9 and 10.
Prof. Francesca Dominici, the Clarence James Gamble Professor of Biostatistics, Population, and Data Science at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and Faculty Director of the Harvard Data Science Initiative, will join the “Understanding Climate Change in South Asia” panel at LMSAI’s Annual Cambridge Symposium: Science and Technology. As a data scientist, Prof. Dominici develops statistical methods and machine learning approaches to look for patterns that address complex public health issues, such as air pollution, noise, and climate change. We spoke to her about her research in the Q&A below.
Dr. Bharat Vatwani, one of the speakers at LMSAI’s Annual Cambridge Symposium: Science and Technology – the Future of South Asia, is a psychiatrist based in Mumbai who has dedicated much of his professional career to aiding the mentally ill. Together with his wife, Dr. Smitha, he founded Shraddha Rehabilitation Foundation in 1988, an NGO dedicated to treating mentally ill and unhoused individuals in India. He shared more about his life’s work in the Q&A below, and previewed what attendees can expect at his fireside chat.
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.
Nazmul Haque, a current Mason Fellow in ClassACT HR73’s Benazir Bhutto Leadership Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, has a long history of developing public-private partnerships in response to climate change in his home country of Bangladesh. His experience was a case study for a recent symposium, “Climate Change, Public-Private Partnerships, and Social Equity: Lessons from Bangladesh” – also co-sponsored by the Weatherhead Center and the Salata Institute – in which Harvard practitioners and professors gathered to examine and enlarge upon the examples offered by Nazmul’s career. We spoke with him about his commitment to sustainability, and what the symposium meant for him.
This spring break, Prof. Susan Crawford, John A. Reilly Clinical Professor of Law, set out to Bangladesh on a Mittal Institute-supported research experience.
Sabina Faiz Rashid is a medical anthropologist and currently Professor and Chair of Health and Poverty at BRAC James P Grant School of Public Health in Dhaka, Bangladesh. She is also the principal in-region investigator of Mittal Institute’s CLIMATE ADAPTATION IN SOUTH ASIA project, an interdisciplinary 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.