Navarun Varma is a PhD Student at TERI University and his research topic is vulnerability and climate adaptation. He is interested to explore how appropriate adaptation strategies can be designed for vulnerable communities in order to help them to cope with adverse climate change impacts. He believes it is worthwhile to investigate the key leveraging points to structure micro level responses towards changes caused by drivers like climate change in the macro scale. His attempt is to examine the existing institutional capacity at different levels of governance to respond to climate change risks. Further it would be interesting to analyze how local responses can feed into regional and national level responses in a bottom up tiered framework. He has chosen Ganga-Brahmaputra basin as his study area, where an era of upstream-downstream hydropolitics exists even after being declared as highly sensitive to climate change risks.
At FFU he is working with Prof. Miranda Schreurs to determine the role of institutions in formalizing effective adaptive responses for communities varyingly vulnerable to climate risks.