{"id":72,"date":"2020-03-09T11:55:15","date_gmt":"2020-03-09T11:55:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.dev.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/?p=72"},"modified":"2020-03-16T16:05:10","modified_gmt":"2020-03-16T16:05:10","slug":"rivers-for-the-future","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/rivers-for-the-future\/","title":{"rendered":"Rivers for the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Post written by Professor Chris Spray<\/em><\/p>\n

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Chris with Professor A. Biju Kumar, Head of the Dept. of Aquatic Biology and Fisheries, University of Kerala, India<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

One might wonder what the similarities are between Kerala and the Scottish Borders, and so quite why in February I found myself addressing an International Conference on\u00a0Rivers for the Future<\/em>\u00a0in the southern Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram.\u00a0This is not an area of India that we in the UNESCO Centre have worked in previously; our focus having been further north on the Ramganga, the Mahanadi and the Ganges\/Brahmaputra, though our late colleague,\u00a0 Mike Bonnell’s work on forest hydrology in the Western Gatts (the hills from which 41 of 44 of Kerala\u2019s rivers flow) was just across the state border in Tamil Nadu. The connection is a shared interest in river restoration and stakeholder engagement; our own work being centered on the Tweed (a UNESCO HELP Basin) in cooperation with the participative catchment NGO Tweed Forum\u00a0https:\/\/tweedforum.org\/<\/a><\/p>\n

The 3-day conference was\u00a0organised by my hosts the University of Kerala – in association with the Centre for Innovation in Science and Social Action; the environmental campaigning organisation\u00a0Ozhukanam Puzhakal; and WWF-India\u2019s Kerala office.\u00a0I\u00a0was invited there by the Dean of\u00a0the\u00a0Aquatic Biology & Fisheries Department, Professor Biju Kumar\u00a0as part of the University’s ‘Interaction with Eminent Scholars Scheme’ that enables them to bring folk across to interact with their academic and wider communities. As a result, I not only gave the Keynote presentation on\u00a0River Restoration<\/em>\u00a0at the main conference, but also did another presentation in the conference as part of a wider workshop with external organisations on\u00a0Stakeholder engagement<\/em>; and a third to postgraduates and staff of the Environmental Sciences Department on the\u00a0Role of an Environmental Protection Agency<\/em>.\u00a0I\u00a0also\u00a0spent time with staff and students in these two Departments\u00a0and the Geology department, as well as meeting with the University Vice-Chancellor,\u00a0Professor V.P. Mahadevan Pillai.<\/p>\n

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The Thattekkad bird reserve in Kerala<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Compared to my (limited) experiences of working elsewhere in India,\u00a0the three university departments at Kerala, along with the relevant State government research institutes and WWF-India have a (relative) wealth of data and information on their river systems and are keen and willing to share this and work with others on river restoration. Whilst their upper catchments have been heavily impacted by forest clearance and other land use changes, and their channels constrained by dams, irrigation and bankside developments, Kerala’s rivers themselves are\u00a0less daunting than say the Ramganga in scale, more closed in size to the Tweed, but the challenges across Indian rivers are similar – water quality, dams, sand-mining, over abstraction, pollution, climate change, etc. – and both the bio-physical and socio-economic\/cultural issues are familiar. Similarities with the Tweed revolve around the need for an overarching policy framework to address river restoration that links the degraded state of river ecosystems with the socio-economic livelihoods of the river communities that depend on it. In this respect, I was able to explore similarities in the potential for placing this debate within the frame of ecosystem services and work the UNESCO Centre have done with Tweed Forum on the Scottish Land Use Strategy \u00a0(https:\/\/tweedforum.org\/our-work\/projects\/land-use-strategy-pilot-scottish-borders\/<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0and on restoring the Eddleston Water catchment (https:\/\/tweedforum.org\/our-work\/projects\/the-eddleston-water-project\/<\/a>\u00a0). The key similarity that links Tweed and Kerala is probably the challenge of trying to align national policy directions on the one hand with, on the other hand local community needs and desires \u2013 and then developing the governance structures and resources to support implementation.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are also major physical and cultural differences between Kerala and Tweed, notably the temperature (both 32 degrees in February, but C in Kerala and F in Tweed!) and the food \u2013 Kerala\u2019s fish curries were awesome!<\/p>\n

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Pond Heron at the Thattekkad bird reserve in Kerala<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Post written by Professor Chris Spray One might wonder what the similarities are between Kerala and the Scottish Borders, and so quite why in February I found myself addressing an International Conference on\u00a0Rivers for the Future\u00a0in the southern Indian city of Thiruvananthapuram.\u00a0This is not an area of India that we in the UNESCO Centre have […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"blocksy_meta":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.dundee.ac.uk\/unesco-centre-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}