University Calendar
Creating Evidence for Resilience: A case of monsoon floods affected communities in South Asia
Dr. Alark Saxena, School of Forestry, Northern Arizona University, presents this week's seminar. Come in person or watch on Zoom.
About Dr. Saxena
Alark Saxena is an Assistant Professor of Human Dimensions of Forestry in the School of Forestry at Northern Arizona University. A forester at heart and with interest in sustainability, Alark engages with the disciplines of social-ecology, complex systems science and systems modeling. His primary interests are in disaster risk reduction, climate resilience, sustainable forest management and poverty alleviation. Alark’s research is spread across South Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, Western and Central Europe. Prior to his current position, Alark served as the Program Director of Yale Himalaya Initiative.
About the Seminar
The concept of resilience has been rapidly accepted across multiple disciplines and applied work, but operationalizing resilience poses several methodological challenges. Taking the case of two monsoon flood affected transboundary communities situated in the Gangetic plains of South Asia, we provide a framework and methodology to create evidence and evaluate resilience. We present and test two propositions focusing on the variation in wellbeing and the coping capacity that need to be simultaneously satisfied for increased resilience. The two propositions and the methodology are robust to a wide range of shocks and social-ecological systems.