This post is written by Aishani & Rhea, associates at Veditum, from the team’s experience in Bengaluru in October 2024.
The Veditum team was in Bengaluru for the Student Conference on Conservation Science (SCCS) in October 2024, and we also hosted our fourth Data Sprint focusing on rivers of South India. The work trip consisted of exciting work showcases, events and workshops, fuelled by beautiful skies, delicious filter coffee, ice-cream breaks, and lots of learning!
SCCS – Student’s Conference on Conservation Science
Who’s Who at SCCS
At SCCS, we had a stall in the ‘Who’s Who’ segment, showcasing the breadth of our work across projects, through posters, handouts, our recent annual report, interactive activities, postcards, stickers, and some of the creative and insightful outputs created by our fellows from the Moving Upstream project.
We love postcards! Of course, our stall had a fun section with postcards featuring photographs from the six rivers we have walked along as part of the Moving Upstream project. We also made a mini-postbox for people to drop the postcards they wrote in, which we later stamped and posted!
Visitors heard about our work, asked curious questions, wrote postcards, and interacted with the displayed artefacts of our work.
Sharing space with us at Who’s Who were other organisations doing interesting conservation work with different approaches including research, working with endangered species, communities-centered conservation, collaborating with local authorities, developing knowledge and communication materials.
Workshops
Using open data & collaborations for environmental accountability
We wrapped up our final day at SCCS with a workshop on “Using open data & collaborations for environmental accountability”. Participants developed their own problem statements and stakeholder maps for a variety of threats, listed the data they would possibly need to build evidence for their respective problem statements, and looked up sources where they could find this data.
This opened up a lively discussion on how evidence sourcing and collation might be enabled (and made much easier and more accessible) if the data they looked for was available, readable and open-access, highlighting the value of open-data and collaboration in addressing large systemic problems.
Through the workshop, we offered a template to look at complex problems from a systems lens. While the participants worked on their chosen problem statement, we guided them on how to systematically create a framework to describe their problem statements.
These frameworks provided an overview, like a consolidated problem statement, that illustrates the breadth of the problem and identifies multiple levels of required possible interventions – a process similar to the one we use at India Sand Watch.
If you are interested in conducting a similar exercise on problem framing, and creating frameworks for intervention around environment & climate issues, reach out to us at sandwatch@veditum.org
Make your own PA update
Aishani and Rhea from the team also participated in a workshop by Pankaj Sekhsaria, Reshma Jathar and Rishika Pardikar on ‘Make your own PA update’. The organisers shared their experience and practices on collating, organising and structuring newsletters that provide news updates on India’s Protected Areas.
During the exercise part of the workshop, we teamed up and looked for news around sand mining in the protected area of National Chambal Sanctuary and collated and summarised those to create our own mini-PA update!
Walks and Talks
On two of the cool, misty mornings during SCCS, we woke up nice and early to attend a tree walk and go birding within the IISc campus.
On the tree walk with Sayee Girdhari, we learned about seed dispersal mechanisms of different plants, parasitic plants, flower fertilisation methods, and so much more from just observing the beautiful trees and plants around us.
The next morning, we went birding with Tarun Menon, who showed us a host of beautiful birds including ashy drongos, the blue capped rock thrush, and Tickell’s blue flycatcher. Tarun also shared fun facts about the birds we saw, and the habitats we explored during the walk.
Pranay Lal gave an engaging talk about India’s geological history that moved through scales of time and space in the smoothest manner. His talk flowed from moving dust storms for cloud formations to moving continents and then on to healthy soil microbial communities for conservation. While speaking about rivers, he also gave a shout out to Siddharth and Veditum’s work!
It was fun to meet fellows from all the Moving Upstream fellowship at the conference including Kabini and Astha from the Betwa walk, and Hassan from the Luni walk. Kabini helped us design stickers and print some of the displays for the Who’s Who stall. Hassan presented learnings from his Luni walk in a session titled – “What are the values a river holds? The socio-ecological and cultural tragedy of the Luni River”, and Astha offered a workshop on ‘Significance of Folklores in Conservation Studies’.
South India Data Sprint
We hosted our second in-person Data Sprint (4th in the series) in Bengaluru, themed around rivers of South India, on 26th October at the Samagata Foundation space. We had an enthusiastic participation from 26 participants who uploaded 135 reports on sand mining. Checkout India Sand Watch to view these reports!
During the sprint, we also had Tarun Nair from Wildlife Conservation Trust (WCT) speak about the threats of sand mining to river ecology, especially for endangered species like gharials, turtles, birds, and the conservation work WCT has been doing around the Chambal river.
Siddharth Achaya, an architect from Biome spoke about the construction practices and building material alternatives that Biome has been using as part of their sustainable architecture practice, including using quarry dust instead of sand, rammed earth construction and the use of compressed stabilised earth blocks (CSEB), and how that reduces the use of concrete and hence the demand of sand for construction.
These conversations form a larger narrative of the work happening around sand, sediments, and environment, similar to what we have been doing with our ongoing conversation series, Sediment Stories.
Checkout the report card from the South India Data Sprint at this link.
The Veditum team returned to their home cities after a 12 day long, power packed work trip, having learnt a lot, explored and experimented with ideas, and discussed possibilities further.
Rhea is an Associate with the Veditum India Foundation. She is a conservation ecologist, who works with river communities and wildlife – conducting research, contributing to policy work and outreach, and collecting stories of the many lives along the river. She can be reached at rhealopez@veditum.org
Aishani is an Associate at Veditum India Foundation. She is an architect and water researcher and has worked in the development sector for over 4 years. She was also one of the fellows of the Moving Upstream: Sindh fellowship project. She can be reached at aishani@veditum.org
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