Meet Sukaina Bharwani, Senior Research Fellow

As a centre, we work on adaptation to climate change. But personally, I do more work on linking the social and environmental aspects of decision-making. My background is in anthropology and computer science, and so I’ve done a bunch of stuff linking qualitative and quantitative research. I’m really interested in how and why people make the decisions they make, and how that links to action on the ground.

Historically, we did quite a lot of work on social simulation and agent-based modelling here at SEI Oxford. We were developing participatory games — so, interactive games — to try to understand the decision contexts people faced. We wanted to know more about how they were making decisions under climate uncertainty and under other stresses. We’ve done some work, for example, in the Central African Congo basin with forest communities to understand how they make decisions under drought conditions, and how they sustain their livelihoods. To do that, we applied a participatory game that takes into account the drivers of decision-making that are affecting them.

I have always been interested in development. I got into anthropology really because I was interested in development. After completing my PhD, I really did not want to stay in academia. I was quite naïve and didn’t know that applied research institutes like SEI even existed! I was trying to figure out what to do after my PhD. I was on a mailing list on social simulation work and saw an advertisement on it for a position at SEI Oxford. The job advertised felt very serendipitous. It was basically my boss advertising for someone to do exactly what I’d done in my PhD, but in Africa, and using the same modelling tools.

The work that we’re doing at the moment in southern Africa looks at the water stress on peri-urban areas. It relates directly to SDG13, to take action to combat climate and its impacts. We’re looking at water security issues and seeing how the cities of Lusaka in Zambia and Windhoek in Namibia are dealing with flooding, drought and disease.

Our work with Future Resilience for African CiTies And Lands (FRACTAL) is looking at cities, so SDG 11 (sustainable cities and communities), but also SDG6 (clean water and sanitation), and SDG3 (good health and well-being).

We really need to do everything we can to accelerate the learning that we need to do to adapt to climate change. One way we try to do that is through the weADAPT platform. The platform is basically a global knowledge-sharing platform on adaptation where anybody – NGOs, research institutes, or anyone who’s running a project on adaptation – can share the results of that project to support and accelerate learning, facilitate dialogues among the climate change adaptation community, and avoid redundancy. It is important to share and learn from success and failure. There are not many supporting mechanisms in the work that we do to allow people to share their failures, which are experiences that teach us so much. Donors don’t want to hear what has gone wrong, and therefore, that’s not what researchers and practitioners want to share. People seldom want to discuss failure, but this kind of discussion would really help to accelerate learning.

The Power of Vulnerability by Brené Brown. I do a lot of personal development work and one of the podcasts I listened to a few years ago inspired me to go down a rabbit hole of Brown’s work.

We wrote a report recently on the learnings and key takeaways from the recently concluded Climate Services Initiative. This brought climate scientists and decision makers in Southern Africa together to co-produce new knowledge. The reason it worked so well, or the cases in which it did work well, is when the climate scientists were really humble in their approach—when they were inquisitive and asking questions and not assuming they had the answers. The “humble science” approach is really what made a lot of it work and speaks to what Brown talks about in her work and the power and “relatedness” to others, that comes with being vulnerable.