Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability at Ashoka University extends a warm welcome to the 2021 Healing Earth Conference to facilitate conversations around the effects of the climate crisis and its wider impact on our world today. With distinguished keynote speakers, the conference aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and faculty to collectively explore the links, trade-offs, and tensions at the nexus of climate change, health, and ecosystems.

Featuring speakers from academia and non-governmental organisations, the 2021 Healing Earth Conference will explore a number of subjects that focus on the varied impacts of climate change on natural environments, public health and affected communities, emerging solutions, and adaptation practices and challenges. 

Dates: 19 and 20 February 2021 

Time:  6 PM to 9 PM 

You can register once using the link below and attend any of the sessions on both conference days

Earth’s finely tuned climate and biosphere are currently threatened with long-term irreversible changes from accelerating human activity. Confronting this ‘one planet’ challenge will demand better understanding of Earth’s critical tipping points in its key natural systems, such as the Amazon rainforest, the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the Indian monsoon. But it will also require better understanding of critical tipping points in our economic, political and social systems if societal breakdown is to be avoided. From continents to communities, we examine the likely impacts of the global climate and ecological emergency on where and how we live, and offer an Indian perspective on how cutting-edge climate science can be best translated into transformative climate action to secure a net-zero future.

Three of every four emerging diseases in humans are zoonotic in origin, spilling over from their natural animal hosts to infect us. Large-scale antimicrobial resistance, from the overuse of antibiotics in livestock and fish farming, is an imminent threat to global public health. The health of humans is thus inextricably linked to the health of animals and the world we share with them - the COVID-19 pandemic reminds us that we neglect this shared environment at our peril. One Health approaches attempt to integrate these connections between zoonotic diseases, the degradation of our environment, food safety and food security, vector-borne diseases and animal health. This is especially relevant to India, given that it contains a little more than a sixth of the world's population. We will examine the role of science and of communication in the context of One Health, with particular reference to India but within a global context.

Sir Jeremy Farrar

Sir Jeremy Farrar is the Director of Wellcome Trust. Before joining Wellcome Trust in 2013,  he was Director of the Oxford University Clinical Research Unit in Vietnam for 18 years. His research interests are infectious diseases and global health, with a focus on emerging infections. He has published more than 600 articles, mentored many dozens of students and fellows, and chaired a number advisory boards for governments and global organisations. In 2018 he was awarded the President Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Humanitarian of the Year Award. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences UK, the National Academies USA, the European Molecular Biology Organisation and a Fellow of The Royal Society. Jeremy was knighted in the Queen’s 2019 New Year Honours for services to global health.

David Quammen

David Quammen is an American author and journalist whose sixteen books include The Song of the Dodo (1996), The Reluctant Mr. Darwin (2006), and The Tangled Tree (2018).  His 2012 book, Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, described the dynamics of viral spillover from wildlife into humans and predicted a coming pandemic, possibly caused by a coronavirus. Quammen’s magazine work has appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Rolling Stone, and The New York Review of Books, among other magazines, and his Op-Eds in the New York Times and other newspapers. He’s a three-time winner of the National Magazine Award and has received several awards for his books. He shares a home in Bozeman, Montana, with his wife, Betsy Gaines Quammen, author of the book American Zion, plus two borzois, a cross-eyed cat, and a rescue python named Boots.

Abi T Vanak

Abi Tamim Vanak is a Fellow at the Centre for Biodiversity and Conservation at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology & the Environment and a Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Intermediate Fellow in Clinical and Public Health. His broad interests are in animal movement ecology, disease ecology, OneHealth, savanna ecosystems, invasive species (both plant and animal) and wildlife in human-dominated systems. Much of his work focuses on the outcome of interactions between species at the interface of humans, domestic animals and wildlife in semi-arid savannas and agro-ecosystems. His interest in OneHealth systems and disease ecology include the dynamics of rabies transmission in multi-host systems and in understanding the role of small and medium mammals as tick hosts in the transmission dynamics of Kyasanur forest disease. In 2012 he was awarded one of the first National Environment Sciences Fellowships from the Ministry of Environment and Forests.

Uma Ramakrishnan

Uma Ramakrishnan is a professor at the National Center for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bengaluru, India. Her passion for ecology and evolutionary biology led her to complete a PhD in population genetics from the University of California, San Diego. She joined the faculty at NCBS in 2005, where her laboratory uses genetic data to understand how changes in the ecosystem affect biodiversity. Her laboratory has pioneered methods to study the population genetics of tigers by studying their fecal samples.  For her scientific contribution in the field of conservation biology, she received the Parker/Gentry Award in 2016, and was awarded the Core Fulbright Visiting Fellowship in 2015. She was elected to the Indian National Science Academy in 2019.

Divya Karnad

Divya Karnad is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at Ashoka University, with a PhD in Geography from Rutgers University, USA. Prior to joining Ashoka University, she consulted with the Bay of Bengal Programme Inter-Governmental Organization and founded InSeason Fish, a sustainable seafood initiative. The focus of her work is marine conservation, fisheries management, the geography of seafood, climate and aquaculture and common property theory. She is the second Indian and the first woman to receive the 'Global Future of Nature Award' 2019 for her work on marine conservation.