The Water Institute RBC Distinguished Lecture

Thursday, April 30, 2015 4:00 pm - 4:00 pm EDT (GMT -04:00)
Dr. Sunita Narain
Director General, Centre for Science and Environment
New Delhi, India

 

Challenges for Water Security in the Poor's World:
The agenda for research and policy to manage water scarcity, plenty, pollution and waste in an age of climate risk

Dr. Narain’s lecture, the “Challenges for Water Security in the Poor’s World”, will address the fact that large parts of the developing world are faced with huge and mounting water challenges. On the one hand, there is scarcity and competition for the resource between current agricultural users and new users in industry and urban areas. On the other hand, there is increasingly variability in rainfall, leading to floods and droughts because of now more visible climatic changes. Current technologies for water and waste management are unaffordable and therefore, unsustainable. What is the way ahead? What should research be advising policy and practice to build a new water future?

Biography

Dr. Sunita Narain has been with the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) since 1982. She is currently the director general of the Centre and the director of the Society for Environmental Communications and publisher of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth.

Dr. Narain is a writer and environmentalist, who uses knowledge for change. In 2005 she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Indian government. She has also received the World Water Prize for work on rainwater harvesting and for its policy influence in building paradigms for community based water management. In 2005, she also chaired the Tiger Task Force at the direction of the Prime Minister, to evolve an action plan for conservation in the country after the loss of tigers in Sariska. She advocated solutions to build a coexistence agenda with local communities so that benefits of conservation could be shared and the future secured. She was a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Climate Change as well as the National Ganga River Basin Authority, chaired by the Prime Minister, set up to implement strategies for cleaning the river.

Dr. Narain began her work in the early 1980s, as a co-researcher with Anil Agarwal, an eminent and committed environmentalist who gave the country its environmental concern and message. In 1985, she co-edited the State of India’s Environment report, which built an understanding in the country on why India is so important for the poor. With Anil Agarwal she learnt that environment and development are two sides of the same coin and that for the millions of poor, who live on the margins of subsistence, it a matter of survival. In 1989, learning from the successful initiatives of people to manage their environment, Anil Agarwal and she wrote Towards Green Villages advocating local participatory democracy as the key to sustainable development. She has continued to research and write about how environment must become the basis of livelihood security of people in the country. She has also linked issues of local democracy with global democracy, arguing that every human being has an entitlement to the global atmospheric common. In 2012, she has authored the 7th State of India’s Environment Reports, Excreta Matters, which presents a comprehensive analysis of urban India’s water and pollution challenges.
 

There will be a poster exhibition and reception after the lecture in the M3 Atrium.