008, Amrut Mody School of Management
Central Campus
Environments and geographies have shaped humanity – from specific cultures and societal formations to food habits and music – in different parts of the world. This intangible heritage has sustained the human civilisation for thousands of years till we embarked on the Anthropocene, which threatens to alter the sustainable, circular processes within the earth systems into an unsustainable, linear one. It underscores a critical need to reinvigorate and rejuvenate the intangible environmental heritage and uncover the knowledge nestled within to co-produce a new, sustainable environmental governance regime along with science and technology. It is not about just preserving and conserving the socioecological heritage but about informing the science and technology so that it can be more contextual and effective. Whether it is climate change and its science, species extinction and its drivers, ecosystem degradation and the concomitant socio-spatial disjunctions, demands developing socially and culturally contextual technological artefacts. Widespread research, knowledge curation and management are needed to revitalise the intangible environmental heritage and co-create a new environmental heritage that is specific to places, peoples, their cultures and built on socio-technological hybrids.
Aditya Ghosh is a human geographer who researches on human-nonhuman relations, especially local conservation knowledge and different forms of ecosystem degradation. He is an expert in residence, working with UN-DRR in Japan and its associate, Avoidable Death Network, in the UK. He has worked with universities across the world including Heidelberg, Sussex, Colorado-Boulder and Jindal Global as well as with institutions such as WWF-India, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Centre for Science and Environment, The Times of India and Hindustan Times in a career spanning 24 years. He is a recipient of prestigious global awards such as Chevening (UK-FCO) and DAAD (German academic exchange).
