Harini Nagendra

Harini Nagendra

Harini Nagendra is a Professor of Sustainability at Azim Premji University, Bangalore, India. She is an ecologist with over 25 years of experience working in the global south. Her main focus of interest is to understand when and why humans act as positive agents of ecology and conservation in some instances, and negative agents in others. Towards this, she has worked in a variety of contexts in forests and cities of South Asia and globally. Her research is interdisciplinary, and relies on a number of methods including satellite remote sensing and GIS, field studies of biodiversity, archival research, institutional analysis, and community interviews. Prof. Nagendra has conducted research and taught at multiple institutions, and received numerous research awards including a 2017 Clarivate award for interdisciplinary research in India, a 2013 Elinor Ostrom Senior Scholar, and a 2006 Cozzarelli Prize from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA. Apart from over 150 scientific publications, she writes widely and communicates her research with the public through Indian newspapers, magazines and science blogs, and engages with international research, including being on the Steering Committee of the Programme for Ecosystem Change and Society and a Lead Author on the 5th IPCC Report - Working Group III as a Lead Author. Her recent book “Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present, and Future” (Oxford University Press India, 2016) examines the transformation of human-nature interactions in Bangalore from the 6th century CE to the present, addressing the implications of such change for the urban sustainability of fast-growing cities in the global South.