At India Climate Conference, Harvard’s South Asia ties take center stage

When asked in 2010 to lead what would become the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute, Tarun Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, proposed two guiding rules. One: He wanted the organization to be open to all fields of inquiry. And two: He wanted “feet on the street” across South Asia.

This week’s climate adaptation conference, “India 2047: Building a Climate-Resilient Future,” co-hosted by the Mittal Institute and the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability alongside the Indian government, is a sign of Khanna’s push for a strong, multidisciplinary connection between the University and the region, as more than 160 scholars and experts from Harvard and across the world gather to address adaptation to climate change in India.  

The conference is part of the institute’s ongoing climate change initiative focused on South Asia. Since 2023, when the Mittal Institute led its first climate-related workshop in New Delhi, it has been investing in more climate-change adaptation research. Among other projects, its Community Heat Adaptation and Treatment Strategies project, funded initially by the Salata Institute, has studied the health effects of extreme heat on workers using sensors that the subjects wear throughout the day. The study will create one of the largest data sets relating to heat and health anywhere in the world.

The leaders of that research — epidemiologist Caroline Buckee and associate professor in emergency medicine Satchit Balsari — will attend the India conference and participate in workshops over several days in New Delhi, as well as a multiday “climate immersion experience” for senior faculty and analysts in Ahmedabad, the site of some of the Mittal Institute’s initial measurement work on heat stress. Among other topics, the group will address links between extreme heat and poverty, food security, rural incomes, and environmental degradation.

This multipronged approach — with collaborators from Harvard and with the Indian government’s Ministry of Environment, Forest, and Climate Change and its public policy think tank NITI Aayog — is typical of the Mittal Institute’s appetite for diverse collaborators and areas of research.

Among many projects in recent years, the institute has facilitated joint bioscience and biotechnology research between Boston and Bangalore through its Building Bharat-Boston Biosciences program; supported studies analyzing pigments in historical Indian art; and brought together researchers from the U.S., England, Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan to study the consequences of the 1947 partition of British India. From the beginning, Khanna said, the institute has tried to equally support intellectual endeavors across the sciences, social sciences, and humanities.

It has also stayed true to Khanna’s desire for “feet on the street.” The institute has built up a physical presence across South Asia, with offices in New Delhi and Lahore and representation in other countries — each of which raises project money from the countries in which they’re located. “For us to be operating with any degree of credibility, any degree of welcome in a foreign country, people better start thinking of you as embracing their societies as opposed to being an outsider,” said Khanna.

The relationships will be on display at the conference, where Harvard faculty such as Sturgis Hooper Professor of Geology Daniel Schrag, Vice Provost for Climate and Sustainability James Stock, and Professor of Earth and Planetary Sciences Peter Huybers will work with colleagues across Harvard’s Schools of business, medicine, and public health and with several agencies of the Indian government. “We have enormous goodwill,” Khanna said. “Especially at a time when higher ed is treated with skepticism, it’s a pristine asset.”

As the event unfolds, one of the largest organized by Harvard outside of the U.S., Khanna believes it’s just the beginning for the Mittal Institute — with many years of collaboration and innovation to come.