Year in Review: Our Blogs Covered Field Notes, Explainers & More in 2022

Blogs are an important part of our communications arsenal, keeping our activities transparent, showcasing our partners’ work and explaining key issues for a wider audience. We look back at what we did in 2022.

Published in

Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation, ATREE

6 min readDec 12, 2022

To successfully position CSEI as an ecosystem builder, we need to make the invisible visible to our collaborators. What are the activities we undertake? What is our intent? What worked and what hasn’t? We need to show our results and be upfront about what we have struggled with and how we have learnt from our successes and failures.

Over the past two years, ‘showing our work’ evolved to become a core tenet of the organisation, resulting in not just articles published in the media but also a busy Medium account. This year, our researchers have written a total of 75 blog posts — from explainers and updates to reflections about events and detailed field notes.

In this part of our series of roundup posts, we take a closer look at our blog and celebrate the work we have done and the broad spectrum of writing and documentation our researchers are capable of.

Capturing field observations is critical to understand problems on the ground.

We focus on social and environmental issues related to degraded landscapes and depleting freshwater. Our visits to different field sites across the country — mainly Karnataka — have been vital to inform our understanding of these massive challenges. It also helps us put these issues against a larger context and grasp the nuances of how people and places are affected. Here are some of our stellar field notes:

CSEI-ATREE’s researchers frequently write about their field visits in our blog. The picture on the left was taken in Anantapur district, where our researchers are documenting multilayered agroforestry and other interventions farmers and local organisations are undertaking to cope with degraded land. Right: Researchers speaking to farmers at an arecanut farm in Bengaluru Rural district. Credit: Manjunatha G.

Publishing explainers that simplify dense concepts and clarify methods

Our team has expertise in a broad range of subjects and research methods, putting us in a position to explain technical information to a larger audience.

A lot of our work is centred around water:

Restoration of degraded agricultural land and forests is another dominant theme:

Through these explainers, we have also attempted to specify how we are working to understand a concept better and clarify our methods (there’s a lot of mapping involved).

We have also collated information on a topic:

Event reports document the different activities we are involved in

Communications at CSEI consciously veers away from a one-way approach. We don’t want to only ‘speak out’ about our work but also actively ‘listen to’ our stakeholders’ needs and concerns. This means events, particularly workshops that involve difficult deliberations, are an important priority. Here are a few blogs that sum up these events:

We also recorded our key learnings from programmes hosted by other organisations:

Clockwise from top left: Participants at the ‘Future of our Forests’ workshop organised to build consensus on lantana removal and ecosystem restoration; ATREE and CSEI researchers at the India pavilion at COP27 held in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt; Shreya Nath (centre), who leads the Cities and Towns team, attended a panel discussion on green buildings and sustainability; participants at a workshop we organised with Bangalore Apartments Federation and the EAWAG Swiss research institute on innovative ways to reuse wastewater.

Announcements and updates about changes in our approach keep us transparent

We are a young organisation, which means we are learning things as we do and may need to change directions as necessary. For example, we underwent a structural change at the turn of the financial year in April 2022, graduating from four initiatives based on four areas of work to a matrix structure that enables us to work together better and achieve collective impact. We understand that such transitions may be difficult to keep track of for those outside the organisation, which is where our blogs come in:

Regarding product and grant updates, there are two important areas that stand out and will continue being a core part of our functions. One is Jaltol, the digital tool for water budgeting we developed:

And second, the restoration work we are carrying out in Raichur, funded by Oracle:

Over the next year, we plan to engage more actively with our partner organisations and give more visibility to the work they’re doing by publishing guest posts on issues related to rural water security, making cities and peri-urban areas climate resilient and restoration of degraded landscapes.

Write to csei.collab@atree.org or kaavya.kumar@atree.org if you’re interested in contributing to our Medium page or website. We would love to hear from you.

Follow us on Twitter and LinkedIn to stay updated about our work.

Year in Review: Our Blogs Covered Field Notes, Explainers & More in 2022

Blogs are an important part of our communications arsenal, keeping our activities transparent, showcasing our partners’ work and explaining key issues for a wider audience. We look back at what we did in 2022.

Written by CSEI