Aug 09 2026 to Aug 09 2026 11:30 a.m.

Where

Bangalore International Centre

7 4th Main Rd, Stage 2, Domlur 560071

Event Description

Can we protect, restore, and create ecosystems faster than we are building over them?

Harini Nagendra, ecologist and author, returns to BIC nearly two decades after her 2009 talk here, to ask the same question in a city transformed.

In 2009, Nagendra warned that climate change and urbanization together would overwhelm old, top-down models of conservation. Today,  protected-area-focused thinking is inadequate for the crisis facing Indian cities. In Bangalore specifically, the starkest change has been the devastation of peri-urban ecology, alongside deepening social inequality and a widening disconnect between people and nature in the city.

This talk is part of a series marking twenty years of BIC, in which speakers and artists from the institution’s early years return to revisit the topics they first addressed. Each session traces what has changed, what has endured, and what to make of the same topics two decades on.

Venue: Seminar Halls
Speaker

Harini Nagendra
Director, School of Climate Change & Sustainability, Azim Premji University
Harini Nagendra is Director of School of Climate Change & Sustainability at Azim Premji University. Her work focuses on urban ecology, forest conservation and climate change amongst other themes. She is a well-known public speaker and writer on issues of urban sustainability in India Her books include Nature in the City: Bengaluru in the Past, Present and Future; Cities and Canopies: Trees of Indian Cities; So Many Leaves, and Shades of Blue: Connecting the Drops in India’s Cities. She also writes the acclaimed Bangalore Detectives Club series, a set of historical mysteries set in 1920s Bangalore.

Sukanya Basu
Sustainability Researcher & Assistant Professor, Azim Premji University
Dr. Sukanya Basu is a sustainability researcher and Assistant Professor at Azim Premji University. Her work explores food systems as a lens to understand health, equity, and ecological change in India. She holds a PhD in Agricultural Sciences from the University of Göttingen, Germany. Later she joined the University of Cambridge, UK as a postdoctoral fellow. She has held a fellowship at the Stockholm Resilience Centre, Sweden and is a recipient of the Dorothea Schlözer Fellowship. Currently serves as an Associate Editor for the journal of British Ecological Society.