Dhanasree Jayaram

Assistant Professor at Department of Geopolitics and International Relations
Manipal Academy of Higher Education
India

Mar 9, 2021

Dhanasree Jayaram is a climate security scholar focused primarily on South Asia and based in Karnataka, India. She is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geopolitics and International Relations at the Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE), where she also co-coordinates the Center for Climate Studies. After receiving a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Madras, she earned her Master of Science and Doctor of Philosophy at MAHE. Her dissertation focused on how the Indian military contributes to environmental security and identified obstacles to the institutionalization of environmental issues in the military. Dhanasree is also a research fellow at the Earth Systems Governance project and a prolific writer in academic outlets and online forums such as Climate Diplomacy and The New Security Beat.

Dhanasree’s new book titled “Climate Diplomacy and Emerging Economies: India as a Case Study” (from Routledge’s Focus Series on Environment and Sustainability) explores the roles of India, China, South Africa, and Brazil in the international climate order. This research was supported by a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland. In an ongoing follow-up project, Dhanasree examines the security implications of climate change on regional environmental cooperation between eight countries in South Asia. She discovered that “none of the regional frameworks addresses climate-fragility risks or the security implications of climate change directly.” For example, India’s water-sharing treaties do not explicitly account for climate change even though water access is directly threatened by climate change. Advocating for more climate-resilient regional governance, Dhanasree emphasizes the ways that the negative human security impacts of climate change can cause conflicts such as border disputes, extremism, and violent protests in the region.

In tandem with her climate diplomacy scholarship, Dhanasree investigates obstacles to institutionalizing climate change in the Indian military and ways that the military can more systematically contribute to India’s response to climate change. While there is substantial scholarly literature on militaries’ negative environmental impacts and the potential of climate security discourse to be used for over-militarization, Dhanasree’s research highlights a range of potentially positive contributions that the military can make to climate change response. She points to cases where the Indian military has led afforestation programs, diverted defense lands to renewable energy generation, and conducted humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations. She underscores the need to expand and institutionalize climate change response in military practices by highlighting the security implications for the military itself. These threats include flooded military bases, damage to temperature-controlled equipment, more disaster management operations, and potential counter-insurgency operations. Despite the threats, Dhanasree finds that military officials are reluctant to explicitly link climate and security, especially in India’s highly militarized border regions where they perceive other threats as more immediate. She notes that she has found very little official data linking climate change to security in South Asia, though her recent work observes growing attention to climate change in the Indian security establishment.

For Dhanasree, environmental peacebuilding is crucial for building the trust and cooperation needed to avert climate-driven resource conflicts. She joined the Environmental Peacebuilding Association to learn more about climate-driven conflicts when she was working on a paper about how a water-sharing treaty between India and Pakistan could be used for peacebuilding. By foregrounding the urgency of regional cooperation and military engagement in climate resilience, Dhanasree offers environmental peacebuilding a South Asian perspective that can apply far beyond the region.