Three Cairns Scholars
Ananya Rao, India
Goal: Work with India’s Indigenous communities and smallholder farmers to reclaim natural resource rights.
Ananya Rao ’25 MESc saw the impact of climate change on Indigenous communities in India while working in the country’s forested Tribal regions and agrarian hinterlands. She was struck by the inadequacy of top-down solutions designed to mitigate these impacts —such as providing subsidized chemical fertilizers to improve crop yields when those fertilizers ultimately exacerbated the problems they were intended to address. These early experiences shaped her desire to work with frontline communities to leverage their knowledge in adapting to the ecological crises they face.
“After college, I began working at an environmental action research organization, on the implementation of community forest resource rights and ecological restoration of degraded agrarian lands,” she says. “During this time, I realized that to progress in this field I would require a stronger grasp of the natural sciences, particularly ecology and environmental science.”
This need drew her to YSE, where she is studying tropical forest ecology while keeping one foot in the practice of anthropology, “allowing me to engage with the politics and complexities of natural resource management, rural development projects, infrastructure expansion, and Indigenous movements across different geographies.”
After graduating from YSE, Rao plans to return to India and continue her work with Indigenous communities and smallholder farmers to shore up their livelihoods in the face of climate change while reclaiming natural resource rights. As part of this, she wants to highlight the value of Indigenous knowledge systems in confronting climate change.
“Given their under-representation in governmental and nongovernmental decision-making processes,” she says, “this knowledge remains sadly under-utilized.”
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