Blog

Our recent field visit with the TRANSCEND Project Team to potential growth areas in Mumbai unveiled stark realities of urban expansion overshadowing environmental and climate concerns. From the northern reaches beyond Thane to the mangroves near Chirle and the eastern saltpan areas, the relentless pressure on land reveals a city at a critical juncture between growth, environment, and society.
On the 6th & 7th of March 2024, the TRANSCEND team held another workshop at the Mumbai Metropolitan Regional Development Planning Authority (MMRDA). On the first day, we discussed the scenario narratives we developed for Mumbai’s socioeconomic development and the resulting challenges for adaptation under the respective scenarios, building on the draft narratives we co-developed in our first stakeholder workshop at MMRDA. In this blog, I will focus on the second workshop day, which dealt with the evaluation of adaptation options and for which we used a live survey with the online platform “Mentimeter”.
We had the great pleasure of hosting Dr. Sasha Kosanic from Liverpool John Moores University at LMU. Together with Sasha, we developed a strategy for including a specific focus on people with disabilities within TRANSCEND and operationalising the leverage points perspective for research on transformational and just adaptation to climate change.
On 25 November 2022 we held the TRANSCEND Scenario Workshop in Mumbai, co-organized by the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IIT-B) and Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS), and kindly hosted by Mumbai Metropolitan Development Authority (MMRDA).
Our first fieldwork block in Jakarta in November 2022 led the TRANSCEND team to various sites that are vulnerable to flooding and experienced changes to their coastal settlements. Together with our local research associate Ayu from our partner organisation, the National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), we took a tour of five different sites in the North of Jakarta that are of interest to our research.
The TRANSCEND team held an important meeting at the newly established Indonesian National Research and Innovation Agency (Badan Riset dan Inovasi Nasional, BRIN) – the partner for our research in Jakarta – and signed a letter of agreement to kick-start our joint research activities. After we had to postpone our work in Indonesia due to the COVID-19 pandemic several times, this is an important milestone. We are excited to work closely with BRIN over the next years and plan to go back to Jakarta in 2023 for the next concrete steps.
It was a pleasure to be invited to attend the final conference of the BMBF young research groups on global change in Bonn on 11th & 12th July 2022! Within the two-day conference, there were 12 exciting presentations of different young research groups from leading German research institutions presenting the essence of their innovative work in the last five years.
Doing fieldwork in a pandemic called for adaptation. First, to monitor Covid-19 waves, variants and vaccines, hygiene regulations and travel restrictions in order to even be able to do field work. Second, once it was possible, after 18 months of waiting, it had to be done under careful conditions – masked, disinfected, distanced and ideally outdoors or well-ventilated.
During a one-week summer school on the topic ‘Learning from Geoenvironmental Data: Tools for a Changing Planet’ offered by the Venice International University, our I explored methods on how to efficiently utilize data related to geospatial phenomena.
This first TRANSCEND team field trip to Mumbai was my first time visiting Mumbai and even India. I was very overwhelmed by all the impressions, and – of course – with my background in hydrology, I was particularly captivated by the complexity of flood processes in this heterogeneous megacity.
As part of our site visits in Mumbai, on 10th April the TRANSCEND team visited the Versova fishing village or the Versova ‘Koliwada’ which is a settlement of a fishing community called the ‘Kolis’.
We finally reached an important milestone in the TRANSCEND project by conducting the first kick-off workshop in our case study of Mumbai, together with our partners of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). The workshop was set up as a hybrid event at the beautiful IITB campus.
On April 7th, the TRANSCEND team visited several construction sites of the Mumbai Coastal Road Project. It was a quite impressing feeling to stand in front of such a massive building lot in the ocean and to personally see how it reconfigures the entire western coastline of the city.