SANDEE researchers and advisors attended the Annual Conference of the European Association of Enviornmental and Resource Economics in Helsinki, Finland. SANDEE Advisor E. Somanathan and Subhrendu Pattanayk, and SANDEE researchers Chandan Sinha, Prajna Mishra and Saudamini Das presnted their paper during EAERE 2015.
EAERE 2015

SANDEE and SDPI co-organised a panel on “Environmental Compliance and the Textile Industry in South Asia” at the 7th Sustainable Development Conference, Islamabad, Pakistan (December 7-11, 2014). Presenters included, Kinkini Hemachandra, Waseem Gulzar, Muhammad Khan and a number of policy makers.
The textile and garment sector is an important labor intensive industrial sector in Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. The sector provides employment to millions but also contributes to both water and air pollution. Researchers from SANDEE discuss this issue in this short documentary produced by SDPI Television during 7th SDC Conference.
Click here to Watch
Conference Website

Heman Lohano and Bishnu Sharma presented research on livelihood and carbon ecosystem services.

Conference Website

Kanchana Wickramasinge of the Institute of Policy Stues of Sri Lanka presented her SANDEE research on sustainability and environmental considerations in the hotel sector in Sri Lanka in the workshop on Environmental Management Practices in Sri Lanka.

Rajesh Rai presented a paper on ‘Linking Upstream and Downstream in Sardhu Khola for possible PES Mechanisms’.

Khuda Bakhsh presented his research on ‘Assessing Agricultural Management Practices and Externalities of Bt Cotton Plantations in Pakistani Punjab’.

Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta received the European Lifetime Achievement Award in Environmental Economics in recognition of his contribution to the development of environmental and resource economics. SANDEE Advisor Eswaran Somanathan of the Indian Statistical Institute in Delhi gave a keynote speech at the conference and presented research on the evolution of learning titled ‘Social Learning and Choice Theory’. Sakib Mahmud won the Best Poster Award for 2014 for ‘Coasean bargaining under insecure property rights and capital investment’. He, along with colleagues Prasenjit Banerjee and Jason Shogren, presented a poster on insecure property rights. The work was part of Sakib’s Ph.D. dissertation research related to the Sundarbans and funded by SANDEE. SANDEEites Wasantha Rathnayake, Suresh Kumar, Heman Lohano, Krishna Pant, Rajesh Rai, Chandan Singha and Saravana Kumar also presented at the Congress.
5th World Congress

Khuda Bakhsh presented his work on Bt cotton in Pakistan.

The Sukkur Institute of Business Administration (Sukkur IBA) is a well reputed educational institution in Sukkur, Pakistan. The institute is a public sector degree-awarding institute approved by Higher Education Commission and chartered by the Government of Sindh, in the top rated “W” Category. Sukkur IBA has been ranked as the 3rd best business school in Pakistan by HEC. The mission of Sukkur IBA is “to contribute and serve community by imparting knowledge through innovative teaching and applied research at the global levels of excellence. We aim to establish and sustain a competitive meritorious environment by strengthening faculty and using state of the art technology to produce graduates with analytical, leadership skills and entrepreneurial spirit, who possess global outlook and are conscious of ethical values”.
Panel Session

Brinda Vishawanathan and Heman Lohano presented their research on climate change and migration at this workshop.

Over 200 scientists and practitioners from 25 countries participated in the conference. SANDEE associates presented three papers in two separate symposia. Tackling Black Carbon Pollution from Agricultural Fires: the Case of Punjab, Ridhima Gupta Periurban Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services for Water Supply in Kathmandu City, Krishna Prasad Pant Recreation in Pollution: Hussainsagar Lake in Hyderabad, Prajna Paramita Mishra.
Please follow this link to find the power point slides from different presenters at the workshop.

Brinda Viswanathan presented her study on ‘Weather Variability, Agriculture and Rural Migration: Evidence from India’, showing the three way linkage between weather, agriculture and migration in India.

The South Asian Summit is annual conference that brings together the research, policy and practice communities working on development issues in our region. Priya Shyamsundar gave a plenary presentation on ‘Knowledge Without Borders’. SANDEE was also invited to organize a panel on climate change. Researchers Prakash Karn, Heman Lohano, Ifthikar Hussain, Joyashree Roy and Saudamini Das presented their climate change related SANDEE research at this panel.

Krishna pant presented a paper “Payment Experiment for Modification of Farm Practices: A Case of Rice Residue Burning in Nepal”, based on his SANDEE work. The conference was attended by early 700 agriculture economists from all over the world. Rizwana Hasan

A seminar was organized by the Department of Urban and Regional Planning of BUET on July 1 2012 to disseminate findings from Afsana Haque’s SANDEE project on agricultural impacts related to flooding and sea level rise. The findings of the study were also presented in a round table conference on climate change organized jointly by the URP Students’ Association of BUET and the Department of Urban and Regional Planning on July 08, 2012. Panelist in the conference included Directors of different institutions such as the Climate Change unit of the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Institute of Water Modeling, climate change study division of CEGIS and the WBB Trust. The discussants felt that the study would pave the way for further research on the impacts of sea level rise induced by climate change on the agricultural sector.

Khuda Baksh’s paper “Bt Cotton Productivity in Pakistan: Use of Reduced-Form Panel Methods” was included in a Seminar on Political Economy of the Bio-economy: Biotechnology and Bio-fuel.

The International Society for Ecological Economics’ conference, ‘Contributions and Challenges for a Green Economy’, preceded the Rio+20 Earth Summit. SANDEE researches Udith Jayasinghe-Mudalige and Saudamini Das presented results from their projects on managing solid waste and adaptation to heat waves at the conference. The spirit of the Congress was in-line with the much larger Rio+20 Summit and focused on how to move forward towards a more sustainable world and the institutions that would be required for this. The ISEE conference was attended by researchers from over 70 countries. Lord Nicholas Stern and Nitin Desai were prominent amongst presenters. Ecological economists focus more on the limits of the biosphere and its implications for the current and future inhabitants of the planet. Per Udith Jayasinghe, some interesting highlights were “the panel on the Gross National Happiness Index, chaired by the Prime Minister of Bhutan, and the plenary on Environmentalism of the Poor”.

Waqar Akram presented his research on “Endogeneity, Hausman test and Bt Cotton Productivity” in the 11th Islamic Countries Conference on Statistical Sciences, held on December 19-22, 2011, Lahore-Pakistan.

Naeem Akram participated in the Fourteenth Sustainable Development Conference, 13-15 December 2011. He was a part of a panel titled “Climate Change Concerns and their Possible Impact on South Asian Countries”.

Khuda Baksh presented his work on BT cotton at several separate seminars in Pakistan, including at the Arid Agricultural University, Rawalpindi, November 1; COMSATS Institute of Information Technology, Lahore, October 27; and the Department of Economics, Baha-ud-Din Zakariya University Multan, December 2nd, 2011. Each presentation was preceded by a general presentation on SANDEE’s activities. Thus, these seminars also served as opportunities to provide information on SANDEE to interested Pakistani participants.

Prasenjit Sarkhel organized three dissemination seminars on ‘Embankments, Fisheries and Farmers”, in Lalbaba College DRS on 13th August 2011, in Calcutta University on 10th Sept. 2011, and in Kalyani University on 20th Sept. 2011. Prasenjit discussed his research findings on private contributions to embankment maintenance in these three different university settings in West Bengal. Each presentation was followed by a panel discussion, which helped Prasenjit further revise his manuscript.

Udith Jayasinghe presented a paper on ‘Voluntary Action of a Firm on Environment Management: An Empirical Assessment on Sri Lankan Food Processing Firms – Response to the Private and Regulatory Incentives’ at the 55th Annual National Conference of Australian Agriculture and Resource Economics Society from 8 – 11 February 2011.

Khuda Bakhsh presented his research work on Bt Cotton at a conference which was organized by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad from 21-23 December 2010.

Khuda Bakhsh presented his research work on Bt Cotton at a conference which was organized by Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI), Islamabad from 21-23 December 2010.

Nayantara conducted a discussion on SANDEE funded project “Alternative Fuel Sources to curing of Tobacco”, at meeting organized by Centre for Multi Disciplinary Development Research (CMDR) in collaboration with Central Tobacco Research Institute (CTRI) at Hunsur, Mysore district, April 17, 2010.

Rucha Ghate gave a presentation on her SANDEE work entitled ‘Non-commercial attitude of indigenous communities’, at GIDR, Ahmedabad on 9th February, 2010 at a seminar on ‘Development of tribal communities in Gujarat and Maharashtra’.