Hindsight is 2020: Looking back on a challenging year

Dear reader,

Thank you for your support and engagement with CSEI. We wish you a sustainable and healthy 2021.

2020 has been a tumultuous, yet exciting year for us at CSEI. We have built a diverse team and set goals for ourselves to create impact. We recognise that 2020 has been a hard year for many and the social sector has been stretched and challenged in many ways. We too have had to adapt to the changes that the COVID-19 pandemic forced us to confront.

But the pandemic has helped us reflect and sharpen the message from our own work. How could a fragment of life so tiny bring the entire global economic system to its knees? In sector after sector — public health, mega — infrastructure projects, monoculture agriculture — we saw how in the context of complex interconnected systems, the pursuit of bigger, faster and more efficient can create inherently fragility. The pandemic also showed us how it was possible to communicate complex scientific ideas and induce new behavioural norms in an astonishingly short time frame.

Small-scale diverse solutions may improve resilience, but they are inefficient, and they require cooperation amongst many players in order to scale. So we asked ourselves three questions across each of CSEI’s initiatives:

  • How do we analyse systems to anticipate and avoid unintended consequences?
  • How do we design solutions that scale diversity, to benefit from synergies with rather than working against nature?
  • How do we communicate complex ideas to create a shared understanding within an ecosystem of actors?

We wanted to reflect on our goals, and share our learnings with you. We would love to hear your thoughts on this and explore how we can partner in 2021 to jointly amplify our impact.

Veena Srinivasan,

Director, Centre for Social and Environmental Innovation, ATREE

“I came to CSEI from a startup background and was really motivated to learn how to create sustainable social businesses that help the most vulnerable communities, as well as our environment. One of the biggest learnings for me this year was that there is no one size fits all solution to create livelihoods for marginalised forest-dwelling communities. We have the tendency to design solutions for “communities”. Yet every person has different skills, and aspirations.

Our initial calculations suggested that Lantana biomass is valuable enough to at least partly fund its own removal. Initially, we started with focusing on making a business out of lantana furniture, but we quickly realised that not everyone wants to become a skilled artisan.

Instead of creating a business and finding people to fit it like a traditional business would, we needed to flip the problem on its head, asking which businesses we would need to create to solve the twin problem of Lantana and livelihoods. We needed to match the varying skill levels and aspirations of the community to the profitability of alternative uses that Lantana could be put to. Then we could upskill people and raise financing appropriately.

This led us to focus on a wider range of products and using an industrial engineering approach to optimise the scale, location and supply chains for each.”

-Sandeep Hanchanale, Initiative lead: Invasive Species

“I am a sustainable architect by training. Before joining CSEI I was involved in the design and construction of passively cooled, low energy buildings for over a decade. But the pace at which I was able to effect change — one house at a time — was not scalable.

When I started the exploration of what would be the best place to intervene I began like many before me, with the most visible metrics of climate resilience; green cover and trees. I was keen to see how we could boost green cover in densely populated, concretized cities; perhaps through more rooftop gardens, living walls, and other innovations I had seen throughout my career.

However, when our team started mapping out the ecosystem, we saw a glaring gap in order to actually accomplish this goal; if the greening goals were to be achieved, without any thought about replacing freshwater with wastewater, we would solve one problem but create another. We realised the power of systems thinking and working with partners to see how we can work together to move the whole ecosystem to a better equilibrium.”

-Shreya Nath, Initiative Lead: Green Cities

“I was actively working with our community group to help protect our local lake before I joined CSEI this year. I was deeply passionate about saving our lakes, but I realised passion isn’t enough. We need accurate information on what to do to protect our lakes. We realised that people feel a connection to their local lake and with COVID-19 restricting travel, people are appreciating the need to make their surroundings liveable more than ever.

When we launched our lakes course with Bangalore University and Friends of Lakes this year, we expected 50–60 interested citizens to join. But over 200 people signed up from all over India, and over 100 completed the course with many more enquiries for more.

The ecosystem gap we identified is the need to synthesise information distributed amongst hundreds of disciplines in ways that can be understood and applied. We are currently trying to create more online content and courses to help empower and build the skills of these motivated people to make small changes in their own communities. “

-Madamanchi Aparna, Project Lead: Lakes

“I had worked at ATREE as a researcher before joining CSEI because I wanted to find solutions beyond researching to understand the problem. Our research had shown that borewell irrigation was depleting groundwater and the current high-input, high-risk food production system traps farmers into a cycle of debt. Merely switching to organic agriculture alone, however, would not address the crisis of groundwater unsustainability and farmer debt.

To understand how we might intervene, our team interviewed 30 farmers who have been experimenting with regenerative agriculture to understand how it could scale. Most of the farmers interviewed, reported that crop yields did decline for about 3–5 years during the transition from conventional to regenerative agriculture. Increasing demand in cities on local, seasonal, biodiverse foods through eco-labeling and information campaigns is part of the solution. However, there would be a need for external financing for millet cultivation and regenerative agriculture.”

-Apoorva R. Manager Science and Research

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