Dr Aditi Mukherji, Principal Scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute and coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's water chapter, discusses her career spanning groundwater management, climate adaptation and the urgent challenge of the 1.5-degree threshold. From her groundbreaking work challenging conventional wisdom about groundwater in eastern India — which led to policy changes benefiting 200,000 farmers — to rehabilitating dying springs in the Himalayas, Mukherji reveals how climate change is transforming every component of the water cycle. She explains why adaptation measures are losing effectiveness as temperatures rise, what the IPCC's water assessment tells us about climate impacts on agriculture, and how pastoral communities in the Global South require different approaches to livestock and climate policy.
Dr Aditi Mukherji, Principal Scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute and coordinating lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's water chapter, discusses her career spanning groundwater management, climate adaptation and the urgent challenge of the 1.5-degree threshold. From her groundbreaking work challenging conventional wisdom about groundwater in eastern India — which led to policy changes benefiting 200,000 farmers — to rehabilitating dying springs in the Himalayas, Mukherji reveals how climate change is transforming every component of the water cycle. She explains why adaptation measures are losing effectiveness as temperatures rise, what the IPCC's water assessment tells us about climate impacts on agriculture, and how pastoral communities in the Global South require different approaches to livestock and climate policy.
The conversation begins with Mukherji's entry into water and climate research, shaped by her childhood experiences in the climate-vulnerable Sundarbans region of India and her family's involvement in agriculture. After completing her master's degree, she joined the International Water Management Institute's IWMI-Tata program, which set her on a path to Cambridge University as a Gates Cambridge scholar.
Mukherji's early research challenged prevailing assumptions about groundwater scarcity in eastern India. Working in West Bengal, a region receiving three to four times more rainfall than water-scarce areas like Punjab, she discovered that the fundamental problem wasn't water scarcity but restrictive policies. Farmers needed permission from distant government departments to connect to the electricity grid for irrigation, leading to bureaucratic delays and corruption. Her research demonstrated that with metered electricity pricing and proper incentives, farmers could sustainably use groundwater while transitioning away from diesel pumps. This work culminated in a change to groundwater law following a state government transition, resulting in electricity connections for approximately 200,000 farmers.
Her subsequent work in the Himalayas addressed a different water crisis: the drying of mountain springs that serve as the sole water source for upland communities. Despite the Himalayas being the water towers of Asia, settlements in the middle elevations — too far from glaciers and too high above river valleys — faced acute scarcity. Mukherji's research revealed that springs were drying primarily due to infrastructure development rather than climate change directly. Road construction and hydropower dam building disrupted the underground flow paths between recharge and discharge points. Using a combination of hydrogeological science, isotope tracing and indigenous knowledge, her team identified recharge areas and implemented rehabilitation programs. This work has influenced major government spring rehabilitation initiatives across India, though she notes that without better planning of infrastructure projects, solutions remain piecemeal.
As coordinating lead author of the IPCC's water chapter, Mukherji synthesises five critical findings. First, every component of the water cycle — rainfall, permafrost, glaciers, groundwater — has been transformed by anthropogenic climate change, with largely negative impacts. Second, because water is used across all economic sectors, climate impacts are felt everywhere, particularly in agriculture, the largest consumptive water user. Third, these impacts disproportionately affect vulnerable populations, especially in the Global South where agriculture has become "the parking lot for the poor". Fourth, while water-related adaptation is happening extensively worldwide, its effectiveness varies significantly due to limitations in finance and technology. Fifth, water must be recognised in mitigation discussions, as greenhouse gas reduction strategies — such as bioenergy crops — have substantial water implications.
The conversation turns to the declining effectiveness of adaptation as temperatures rise. Mukherji emphasises that 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is not merely aspirational but represents a critical threshold, particularly for Pacific island nations where it means the difference between staying afloat and sinking. She provides a stark example from India's 2022 heat wave, which struck in early March when wheat was flowering — far earlier than historical patterns. Temperatures of 47-48 degrees during this critical growth stage overwhelmed even heat-tolerant seed varieties and irrigated systems. Breeders struggle to develop varieties that can withstand such extreme heat during flowering, illustrating the physical limits of adaptation.
Reflecting on Australia's potential contributions, Mukherji highlights three areas: expanded research collaboration leveraging Australia's extensive scientific networks (universities, CSIRO, ACIAR); increased funding support for less-resourced regions; and sharing knowledge about low-emission agricultural pathways to help developing countries avoid mistakes made during earlier Green Revolution eras. She notes Australia's own experience managing water scarcity, while acknowledging imperfections, offers valuable lessons.
Mukherji concludes by explaining her recent transition to the International Livestock Research Institute, where she leads the Livestock and Climate Solutions hub. She argues that livestock discourse must differ between the Global North and Global South. For pastoral populations in Africa, livestock is not just livelihood but culture and a crucial protein source. Her role focuses on ensuring Global South pastoral communities' voices are recognised in climate discussions, avoiding a one-size-fits-all narrative about livestock emissions while addressing the severe droughts these communities face — droughts bearing distinct climate change fingerprints.
Aditi Mukherji: For some of the most vulnerable areas and communities, 1.5 tends to be the red line. Thinking of some of the Pacific communities, 1.5 is the difference between, you know, staying literally afloat and sinking ... In 2022, India had this series of heat waves that started as early as early March, which is unthinkable … the heat-tolerant seeds are just not equipped to withstand those kinds of heats … We were talking of 47, 48 degrees heat.
Acknowledgement: We wish to acknowledge the Indigenous people of Australia, the wider Asia-Pacific region and other parts of the world, and express our respect for their traditional knowledge and practices, which stem from a deep connection to the lands and waters they have inhabited for millennia.
Robin Davies: Welcome to Devpolicy Talks, the podcast of the Development Policy Centre. We're part of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University, on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra.
I'm Robin Davies.
This is our twelfth season, and we're bringing you a mix of interviews, event recordings and in-depth features on topics central to our research — Australia's overseas aid, development in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, and other regional and global development issues.
Robin Davies: In this episode, I speak with Dr Adri Mukherji, Principal Scientist at the International Livestock Research Institute. She's a leading voice in climate change adaptation research.
Mukherji's career has taken her from challenging conventional wisdom about groundwater scarcity in eastern India to rehabilitating dying springs in the Himalayas. Her early work led to policy changes benefiting 200,000 farmers. In the Himalayas, she examined how infrastructure development was disrupting ancient water systems.
As a Gates Cambridge scholar, she conducted groundbreaking research. This work demonstrated how policy barriers — rather than water scarcity itself — prevented sustainable agricultural development in high-rainfall regions of India.
More recently, Mukherji served as coordinating lead author of the water chapter in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Sixth Assessment Report. In that role, she synthesised global evidence showing that climate change has transformed every component of the water cycle. The impacts fall disproportionately on vulnerable populations in the Global South.
Her work reveals uncomfortable truths about the declining effectiveness of adaptation measures as temperatures rise. It also highlights the critical importance of the 1.5-degree threshold. For Pacific island nations in particular, this threshold could represent the difference between survival and inundation.
In our conversation, we explore several key themes. These include her journey from the climate-vulnerable Sundarbans region to the forefront of international climate science. We discuss the complex interplay between infrastructure development and water security in the Himalayas. We examine what the IPCC's assessment reveals about climate impacts on agriculture. And we consider why pastoral communities in Africa require different approaches to livestock and climate policy.
We also discuss Australia's potential role in supporting climate adaptation globally. This draws on its own experience managing water scarcity in challenging environments.
Before we begin, I should note a significant development since this interview was recorded. UN Secretary-General António Guterres has announced that the 1.5-degree global temperature increase threshold has been surpassed.
We are also now on the eve of COP30 in Brazil. There, the international community will grapple with the implications of crossing this critical threshold. These developments give added weight to Dr Mukherji's discussion here.
Aditi Mukherji: My name is Dr Aditi Mukherji. I work with the CGIAR [Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research] as a principal scientist with the International Livestock Research Institute, and my area of specialisation is climate change and climate change adaptation.
Robin Davies: I always like to ask at the beginning … how you entered into your current line of work. I understand that you had some personal experience with water scarcity, salinity, in India where you grew up. Could you tell me a bit about that experience and ultimately how that led you into your profession?
Aditi Mukherji: So I started working with the CGIAR way back in 2001, right after my master's. I grew up in a city in India, in several cities — in Calcutta, in Delhi — but my family house was in one of the most climate-vulnerable areas, called the Sundarbans. Those are the mangrove forests at the edge of the Bay of Bengal that cover both West Bengal and Bangladesh.
So early on, part of my childhood was spent in my ancestral village, and growing up I have seen so — my extended family was involved in agriculture. While I myself was brought up in a city, and I had pretty much the standard city-based education, not directly involved with agriculture on a day-to-day basis, it just so happened that after I finished my college and my master's, I was offered a job with the International Water Management Institute. They used to have a program called the IWMI-Tata program, funded by Tata, which is a big industrial house in India, but also now worldwide. And that's when I started working on irrigation.
And a lot of the early growing up experience that I had, albeit second-hand, of my family, of my extended family being involved in agriculture, in farming, and of the things that I had heard around climate vulnerability, around salinisation, around how hard it was to do farming in some of those really, really climate-vulnerable areas, I think that background was very useful to have as I started on my own career as a researcher within the CGIAR.
Robin Davies: And I believe after obtaining your initial qualifications in India, you obtained a Gates scholarship to Cambridge. How did that come about?
Aditi Mukherji: Yes, so after working around two, two and a half years with the IWMI-Tata program, I was offered an admission to Cambridge, where I got the Gates Cambridge scholarship, so that actually allowed me to continue the work I was doing at IWMI, which was looking at how do farmers use water optimally for irrigation, and more particularly, I was very interested in issues of groundwater. As you know, India is the world's largest user of groundwater. Actually, a quarter of the world's groundwater gets used in India, and we have the largest number of groundwater pumps. So this was a big issue.
And the part of India I was studying, my own home state, was a part that received relatively high rainfall, but had a number of restrictions on farmers on how they accessed irrigation. So that ultimately became the topic of my research, and that led to some quite nice policy changes that ended up benefiting more than 200,000 farmers. So that was the work that I had started and was able to continue at Cambridge with the generous support from the Gates Foundation, the Gates Cambridge scholarship.
Robin Davies: And I think what you found in your research is that the fundamental issue wasn't water scarcity — it was a range of policy settings, including in the energy sector. Could you talk a bit about what you found?
Aditi Mukherji: Yeah, that remains one of my favourite pieces of work. So generally when I started this work in early 2000, a lot of the discourse in India had been shaped by severe water scarcity in northern and western parts of India, where water scarcity is a real issue, because those regions get a lot less rainfall. They have a much more intensive agricultural system, much less recharge. So the thing with discourses is, once it takes hold, it captures the popular imagination of people.
So when I started working in eastern India, where the rainfall was three or four times more than, say, in Punjab, the mindset of people still was that there is already a scarcity of groundwater, which wasn't true because of higher rainfall, and also the kind of aquifer that that part of India had, which was alluvial aquifer, and it recharged quite well because of the high rainfall. So I think the assumption still was that groundwater is something that cannot be used sustainably.
In that circumstance, what I found was there were policy restrictions. For example, if farmers needed to connect to the electricity grid, they had to actually take permission from the groundwater department, which in theory sounds okay, but in practice was really a complex phenomenon because the groundwater department often was in the capital city of the state and farmers from all over the villages, all over the state, had to come and get a permit. It was very bureaucratic and it also in some cases led to rent-seeking and corruption.
So through the work that I did at IWMI-Tata and with partners, we were able to show that if farmers were charged a market price, a metered rate for their electricity connection and if they had the proper incentive — and because the rainfall and the recharge was sufficient — we were able to show that connecting them to the electricity grid would not necessarily lead to groundwater overexploitation. In fact, it would lead to better utilisation of groundwater. And so this work that went on for six, seven years — then something quite serendipitous happened in the sense there was a change in government, the state government of West Bengal, which had been there for almost 30, 35 years. A new government came in, and the new government wanted a change.
So at that point, the research that I had been doing for all these years became quite useful, and then we had conversations with the chief minister of the state and with her senior policymakers, and I presented the findings of the study, and that led to a change in the groundwater law, which then resulted in almost 200,000 farmers getting a new electricity connection. And while it mattered — it mattered because earlier they were using diesel, which was not only much more polluting but also much more expensive. So with the electricity connection, and gradually as our electricity grids become cleaner and cleaner, we have the opportunity of pumping groundwater in a sustainable way while we are charging farmers on a metered basis, so they have some economic incentive not to overpump. [And] we are also weaning them out of a much dirtier fossil fuel, which is diesel.
So that was a very satisfying piece of work early on in my career. And not many people were working in that field so it was also quite clearly attributable to the work we had done, which was also quite nice, because in some ways I was going against the flow of the conventional wisdom that groundwater irrigation is always bad. So that paid off.
Robin Davies: So we've talked about your research on a situation where water scarcity wasn't actually the problem, but of course in much of India and much of the world, it is increasingly a problem. Could you talk a bit about the work you've done on, for example, the problem of drying springs in the uplands of India and elsewhere, and what impact that is having on agriculture?
Aditi Mukherji: Right. So you're right. I mean, the situation we found in West Bengal and Bangladesh is quite unique because of its very particular geography. It receives really high rainfall of 1,500 millimetres to 2,000 millimetres of rainfall, maybe something that you would also find up in parts of Southeast Asia. Then you also have a very good delta, very big rivers that drain those places. So the situation about not having water scarcity is not the norm, as you rightly say.
The other work that I did in this context of water scarcity was in the Himalayas. So the Himalayas are, again, intuitively, if you look at it, the places which shouldn't have water scarcity, because those are literally the water towers of Asia. All 10 major rivers come from the Himalayas. So all the perennial rivers of Asia are fed by the Himalayas. But what happens is that much of the settlement, the mountain settlements, are not in the river valleys. They are up in the hills, and those are the places which face a lot of acute water scarcity. They are too far away from the glacier, and they are too high above the rivers, because the rivers there are quite narrow, you know. So those are not the places where you can settle.
So the settlements are in the middle of the mountains, and those are the places where we found acute water scarcity, because the springs, the mountain springs, which are the only source of water for the mountain people, were increasingly drying up. And we found that they were drying up — and this was the work that I was doing when I was in this mountain institute called ICIMOD, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development, in Nepal. And that is an intergovernmental organisation that works in eight countries of the Hindu Kush Himalayas.
So we found that the springs were drying up due primarily to two reasons. One was climate-change-related reasons — changes in the rainfall pattern. But even more importantly, it was drying up due to infrastructure, due to other demographic but more importantly infrastructure construction. So there was a lot of dam building, a lot of road-building activities happening in the Himalayas. And these are quite complex geologies.
So what would essentially happen, in simple terms, is you have on one side of the mountain the source where the water falls and recharges the spring, and the discharge point is the spring where the water comes out. But between the recharge point and the discharge point, suppose a road cuts through, which means that basically the flow path of that water gets disrupted. So increasingly, and the same was happening for hydropower — with the hydropower construction, a lot of blasting of the mountain, which meant that the geological structure within the mountains was disturbed, so which meant that the springs were increasingly drying up.
So there, our work was quite interesting in the sense that we looked at the hydrogeology, the geology of the mountains, which in the Himalayas is super complex, as you can imagine, and then we were able to actually also use some of the more isotope-tracing kind of science, but also much more local knowledge-based geology, like asking people where the traditional sources of recharge were. And it was quite interesting, because they really knew quite a lot about what the traditional places of recharge were.
So by using high-tech science, by using field geology, and by using local indigenous knowledge, we were able to effectively demarcate the areas of recharge, and we were able to do rehabilitation of those areas, and over time, able to kind of bring back some of those springs to life. And now many of the governments, including the government of India, have major rehabilitation programs around springs, so it's working largely.
But the reality remains that with the kind of massive infrastructure building that we are seeing in the Himalayas, unless those are planned properly, unless in the planning itself we take into account how that recharge is being disrupted, all that we can do would be still a bit of a piecemeal solution. And it's a matter of great concern, because we are now seeing huge landslides in the Himalayas. With climate change, it's becoming just more acute.
Robin Davies: And that is what I wanted to ask about. So you've talked about the impact of development, particularly infrastructure development, on groundwater availability. But of course there are also climate change impacts. Is it possible to separate those two things?
Aditi Mukherji: In some ways, it has been scientifically a bit complex so far, given also the complex geology of those mountain springs. But I think increasingly it should be possible, because now some of the latest studies are showing the contribution of the spring flow, which is the base flow to the rivers, how that has changed due to climate change. So it is becoming increasingly possible as the signal of climate change becomes stronger and stronger.
But overall, so far, particularly for the mountain springs, it is the infrastructure that remains a major cause, rather than climate change per se. Climate change, on the other hand, is a major cause for, say, melting of glaciers. And melting of glaciers also indirectly causes some kind of changes in the recharge to those springs. Sometimes they are directly related, sometimes not. Then climate change is also directly causing those landslides, and the landslides also impact springs.
So a lot of the impact of climate change on the springs so far are a bit more indirect, but I think the more intense the climate change becomes, the more direct would be those fingerprints on springs, particularly in terms of recharge. There would be changes in the rainfall regime. There would be more rainfall in a short period of time, which means that a lot more runoff than recharge. So it should be possible in the very near future to be much more clear about what exactly is the climate change fingerprint on spring recharge.
Robin Davies: And staying on this topic, I know you were coordinating lead author of the IPCC chapter on water. Can you give a brief overview of the messages of that chapter?
Aditi Mukherji: I like to give the message in terms of five key findings of that IPCC water chapter. The first is that now we have very high confidence that each and every component of the water cycle has been transformed by climate change. By that I mean there have been changes in rainfall which can be actually linked to anthropogenic climate change. Then there have been changes in the permafrost component, in the cryosphere component — the frozen material, basically the glaciers and the permafrost. Then there has been changes in the groundwater. Basically every component of the physical water cycle that you can think of has been affected by climate change, and in almost the majority of the region, that impact has been negative.
Then the second part of that is because the overall water cycle has been changed by climate change. What happens is, basically the warmer the atmosphere, the more the moisture, and how it's distributed is quite localised. So because of the extensive changes in the water cycle overall, the second main finding of our assessment was that because water is used in every sector of the economy, all those sectors have felt the impact of climate change, either directly or indirectly. And agriculture being the largest consumptive user of water, that is where we see most of the impacts, because that is also a sector which is most directly dependent on weather and climate.
So we looked in that assessment at the impacts of climate change through changes in water cycle on all the sectors — agriculture, industry, urban, health, etcetera. Then our third finding is that all of those impacts have been largely negative, with some very minor positive impacts in the temperate zones, where the growing season has extended. But those impacts will not remain positive for very long, because those would be very soon negated by things like more wildfire. So those positive impacts are not really good news. They may be good news in a very short term, but in the long term, as long as we keep pumping more CO₂ into the atmosphere, there is no really positive side of climate change. I think that would be important to emphasise, particularly in this particular climate where there is a lot of climate denial going on.
Then the third part of our finding was that the ones who are most affected happen to be the more vulnerable parts of the society. So agriculture is a case in point. Agriculture, traditionally, in the majority of the countries, particularly in the Global South, has somehow become the parking lot for the poor. That is where some of the most poorest and the vulnerable get their livelihood, and those are the ones who are most affected. So our assessment picked up the injustice part of it.
The fourth finding from our chapter is that there is a lot of adaptation happening. Water is a very important component when it comes to adaptation to climate change. So a lot of the adaptation and a lot of the adaptation measures we were finding in terms of, say, irrigation, in terms of rainwater harvesting, better urban water use, wastewater — those were happening quite extensively all throughout the world. But the effectiveness of those adaptation in reducing climate risks are not uniform. In some places they are effective, but more often than not they are not as effective as they could be, partly because of lack of finance, lack of technology, etcetera. So we did an assessment of water-related adaptation in the sectors.
And then our fifth finding was that while water is not taken as a big part of the mitigation discussion, most of the mitigation — when you try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions — water plays an important role. I mean, we only think of carbon in terms of greenhouse gas emission reduction, which is true, but a lot of those methods that reduce CO₂ have an implication on water. For example, in the agriculture sector, one of the ways people have tried to reduce is through bioenergy crops. But the moment you use bioenergy crop, that has got localised impacts on water and food systems. So we also pointed out the trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation.
So those were basically the five major things to sum up. The water cycle has changed substantially, and we can see the fingerprints of climate change in all components of the water cycle. And I think I forgot to mention a major part in which people experience climate change is through change in water cycle, be it droughts or floods. The second one was the sectoral impact, particularly pronounced in agriculture. The third one was the particularly pronounced impact on the vulnerable parts of the communities and societies. The fourth one was the important role of water in adaptation. And the final one was more around water also needs to be recognised as a player in the mitigation decisions that we take, because mitigation should not make local-level water scarcity worse off.
Robin Davies: Yeah, that last one is interesting, particularly in South and Southeast Asia, where hydropower becomes more and more important, and in a sense it's a climate-positive thing, but on the other hand, as you say, it can have very negative impacts on other sectors of the economy, particularly agriculture, depending on how it's implemented.
Aditi Mukherji: Yes, and particularly when you're doing this — this is related to our spring discussion, right? I mean, all the places where you can build hydropower are these mountainous areas, and the Himalayas as an active mountain zone is very fragile. So building those actually, then building those hydropower for energy security then endangers other aspects of lives and livelihoods. So I think those are the kind of trade-offs that we have to be much more careful to think about.
Robin Davies: And on adaptation, I know you've done some work on the declining effectiveness of adaptation measures as the global temperature increase moves up the ladder, as you get beyond 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Is there a tipping point there? What's your advice to governments on how they need to change their adaptation strategies as you get beyond 1.5 degrees?
Aditi Mukherji: I wouldn't say that there is just one exact tipping point, but I would say that we really need to hold on to that 1.5 degrees. And that was also something that the recent advisory from the International Court of Justice also said — that 1.5 was not just an aspirational thing. It is more legally binding, because for some of the most vulnerable areas and communities, 1.5 tends to be the red line. Thinking of some of the Pacific communities, 1.5 is the difference between, you know, staying literally afloat and sinking. So I would say not as a physical tipping point, but also as a social and economic tipping point, that holding on to 1.5 is super important.
Then I also wanted to give some specific examples around why. In that paper that we worked on, it was a part of the IPCC assessment, and then we also published it separately. We found that the majority of the adaptation options that we have now just would not be so effective in a warmer world. A very good example from an agricultural perspective is the climate-resilient seeds that our breeders are making, right? And the breeders are able to do a lot, but there are some physical limitations to what they can do.
A very good example is in 2022, India had this series of heat waves. And the heat waves usually in India come towards the second half of April, early May, but increasingly the heat waves have started happening much earlier in the season. So the 2022 heat wave is of particular importance because that started as early as early March, which is unthinkable. Early March is still when there's no way there should have been a heat wave at that point. And early March is also the time when the wheat starts flowering. So any amount of — the adaptation could be either irrigation or more climate-resilient, heat-tolerant seeds. But my understanding is that the heat-tolerant seeds are just not equipped to withstand those kinds of heat.
We were talking of 47, 48 degrees heat at a point when the plant is about to flower. So that is the problem. Most of our heat-tolerance seeds have been designed for the later maturity stage, right? So there are those physical limits, like physiological limits, to what some of those adaptation can do. So in spite of even farmers who traditionally have irrigation, say farmers in the northwest part of India who have assured irrigation, even they couldn't save their crops simply because the temperatures were too high. So, and as far as I understand talking to breeders, it's really difficult to breed something that would withstand that kind of high heat during the flowering stage of the crop.
So there are those kinds of physical limits. There are many more examples of such limits happening. So therefore it's absolutely important to really for all the countries to remain within the commitments of 1.5 degrees. And it's a target it seems we are increasingly losing. I mean, last year we exceeded 1.5 — it doesn't mean that we have lost it completely, but we are certainly on a path of exceeding it. It's a huge concern.
Robin Davies: Now we're speaking in Canberra. You're here for the annual conference of the Crawford Fund. What do you think Australia has to offer in relation to water management and climate adaptation, particularly in the context of water supply? What do you think Australia has to offer other countries around the world?
Aditi Mukherji: I think here, the science is — there's a huge network of the universities and CSIRO and ACIAR, there's a huge research capital that you have here in Australia. So a lot of those sharing — and Australia is one of the most water-scarce countries in the world. Some of the lessons of how you have managed your water, which I also reckon has not been as good as it could have been, but there are essential lessons.
So my first priority, my first recommendation — and I know we are doing that already, CGIAR works so closely with Australian CGIAR — there is so much of scientific exchange, I think more and more of these exchanges around science. And I would also bring in a bit around not only water, but also livestock, and crops. So the whole gamut of the lessons that Australia has for the rest of the world, and also kind of a two-way learning kind of thing, because Australian scientists and ACIAR [Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research] also work in other parts of the world. So scientific would be one.
Then certainly the funding support would be something that would be also quite fundamental in doing some of the work in some of those less-resourced areas. And I think when it comes to climate change itself, some of the work around reducing the greenhouse gas footprint within Australia, because that also would have a huge impact globally, but also to transfer that knowledge of how other countries whose agriculture are developing, how to do that without making the mistakes that perhaps some of the developed countries might have made, some of the mistakes that India and China might have made in the Green Revolution era.
So I think, like, moving on to the next frontier of how can you develop your agriculture sector without necessarily pumping a lot of greenhouse gas into the atmosphere. I would think of those three as the important things — research collaboration, funding, and low-emission agriculture pathways that cover not only water, but livestock, crop production, the whole gamut of agriculture.
Robin Davies: And my last question — you have, just within the last few weeks, transitioned from your previous role heading the climate platform of the CGIAR system to the International Livestock Research Institute. I think as principal climate scientist. And that might surprise people, given your very strong focus on water management through the years, but I guess it should not surprise people. Can you explain how your experience brings you to that role?
Aditi Mukherji: Yeah. So I think this role of mine would be very much around the climate hat that I have been wearing since my IPCC experience. So one of the things that I would be doing at ILRI would be to lead one of our flagship programs called the Livestock and Climate Solutions hub. And the idea is to say that while livestock is globally responsible for quite substantial greenhouse gas emissions, the discourse, the livestock discourse, needs to be quite different between the global north and the Global South.
Particularly for pastoral populations, say in Africa, livestock is not only a livelihood, but it's a way of life. It's a culture. And also looking at the already very low protein intake of the population in general. So livestock needs to have a different discourse — Global North versus South — which right now, again, there is a bit of uniformity in discourse.
So at ILRI we are trying to make sure that the voices of the livestock communities from the Global South, particularly the pastoral communities, are well recognised within the climate discourses, so that we do not do a one-narrative approach around livestock. And that's the role I'm very excited to play in the coming months. And water will of course also play an important role in that, because increasingly these communities are facing a lot of challenges, water being one of them.
So for example, drought — the pastoral communities in the arid and semi-arid parts of Africa have been facing huge amounts of droughts in the recent months, recent years, and a lot of it has a very distinct climate change fingerprint. So at ILRI we also work on how are these communities adapting to climate change. So I'm looking forward to bringing my expertise around climate policy as well as on water to bear on some of these questions.
Robin Davies: Okay, well, thank you very much for speaking with me today. It's been a pleasure to meet you.
Aditi Mukherji: Thank you. Thank you for this opportunity.
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