Wednesday
14
October 2026
5:00 PM IST
Location
Room 019, Exhibition Hall
GICT Building
Central Campus
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Environmental Futures: How the Past Matters and Why?
The Nalanda
Mahesh Rangarajan
Researcher, Author, and Historian
Speaker
Minal Pathak
Associate Professor
Academic Director
The Climate Institute
Moderator
Speaker
Mahesh Rangarajan
Mahesh Rangarajan is Professor of History and Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, Haryana where he is also Chair of the Archives of Contemporary India at Ashoka. He has a BA in History from Hindu College, University of Delhi and MA and Doctorate from Baliiol and Nuffield colleges respectively both in Oxford University. He has also taught at Cornell, Jadavpur and Delhi universities and NCBS, Bengaluru. He has served as Director Nehru Memorial Museum and Library and has also been VC, Krea University. His books include Fencing the Forest (1996 revised edition in press, 2026), India's Wildlife History (2001) and Nature and Nation (2015). He has edited and co-edited a number of works the most recent being Nature without Borders, and Shifting Ground (2014), At Nature's Edge (2018), India's Forests (Penguin 2026) and Nature Contested (Orient Black Swan, 2026).
Moderator
Minal Pathak
Minal Pathak is Associate Professor and Academic Director at The Climate Institute, Ahmedabad University, India. She was a Senior Scientist with the Technical Support Unit of Working Group III of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 2017-23. She has contributed to two IPCC Special Reports – ‘Global Warming of 1.5°C’ and ‘Climate Change and Land’, co-edited IPCCs Sixth Assessment Report and contributed to IPCC’s Synthesis report 2023. She has also contributed to other global assessments such as the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2023. She leads the South Asia Hub of the Urban Climate Change Research Network in partnership with Columbia University’s Earth Institute. She was a Visiting Researcher at Imperial College London from 2018-23 and has previously held a Visiting Scholar position at MIT. Her research focuses on climate change mitigation actions for urban settlements, transport and buildings and their co-benefits and interlinkages with development. She is an Associate Editor on the Climate and Development journal.