Terresterial Biodiversity
Post-Doctoral Fellowships
United Kingdom
Women’s Livelihoods in Vulnerable Coastlines
Climate change has a much more forceful impact on livelihoods, food security, health, and well-being for those relying on and living alongside natural resources for their subsistence and survival. Research has shown that women experience climate-related risks differently than men. Often this is not because they are more reliant on ‘natural resources’ but because it is women who are expected to do the labor involved in sustaining and maintaining the household. Therefore creating the means through which men are more insulated from the everyday hazards of unpredictable weather.
Building on seven years of research in the Bay of Bengal delta for her AXA fellowship, Dr. Megnaa Mehtta, a researcher from University College London, aims to conduct long-term ethnographic fieldwork in order to better understand differentiated vulnerability through gendered disaggregated data. She will investigate three specific indicators among Sundarbans residents: women’s migration motivations, seasonal occupations, and intra-household inequalities. Secondly, across three specific arenas on the Sundarbans, Dr. Mehtta will investigate the possibilities and limits of gendered forms of coastline knowledge. Her research seeks to differentiate the notion of a “coastline” by focusing on the forms of experiential knowledge that emerge through living in the proximity of different kinds of water bodies that compose a coastline. Through mixed methods, including qualitative, quantitative, and geospatial data, she will investigate Sundarbans coastal inhabitants’ relationship to these water bodies, their valuation, and the perceptions of ecological threats and vulnerabilities, disaggregated by gender.
While her study will be specific to the ecology of the Sundarbans, it hopes to reveal its relevance to coastal populations in other parts of the world facing similar contestations at the intersection of conservation, climate-related risks, and poverty enabling cross-regional comparisons across coastal livelihoods risks, and adaptive possibilities.
December 2022
Find out more about the AXA-UNESCO Fellowships on Coastal Resilience
Megnaa
MEHTTA
Institution
University College London
Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction (IRDR)
Country
United Kingdom
Nationality
Indian
Related articles
Terresterial Biodiversity
Post-Doctoral Fellowship
Australia
Mangrove Community Forestry for Resilient Coastal Livelihoods
The world’s coastal ecosystems have suffered significant biodiversity declines as a result of humans’ activities, which is being exacerbated by... Read more
Valerie
HAGGER
The University of Queensland
Terresterial Biodiversity
Climate Change
AXA Chair
France
Invasive species: raising awareness with scenarios for the future
Biological invasions refer to human-assisted introductions of species outside their natural range, followed by their establishment, spread and impact in... Read more
Franck
COURCHAMP