Healing Earth Conference by Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability (3CS)

The Centre for Climate Change and Sustainability at Ashoka University warmly welcomes you to the 2021 Healing Earth Conference, intended 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.

Theme for Day 1 (19 Feb): One Planet

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.

Theme for Day 2 (20 Feb): One Health: Global and Indian Perspectives

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.