Urban Water Ecosystems in Africa and Asia: Challenges and Opportunities for Conservation and Restoration

Author Biography

Shamik Chakraborty (PhD) is an associate professor at the Graduate School of Advanced Sustainability Science, University of Toyama, Japan. Prior to this he has worked as a Lecturer at the Sustainability Co-creation Programme at Hosei University, Japan. He has also served as a JSPS-UNU postdoctoral fellow at the United Nations University, Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), and as a visiting research fellow at the Integrated Research System for Sustainability Science (IR3S) (presently, Institute for Future Initiatives) at the University of Tokyo. As a human geographer, he is interested in studying human-environment interactions from a social-ecological systems perspective. He has worked with the concepts of social-ecological systems, local ecological knowledge, and ecosystem services in different ecosystems in Japan, India, Bangladesh, Nepal, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Amit Chatterjee (PhD) has a combined experience of more than one and half decades in teaching, research and industry and is presently an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India. His research interest includes urban sustainability, land and environment. Dr. Amit has completed successfully a number of collaborative research and consultancy projects, including those on Urban Co-benefits (UNU-IAS, Japan), Urban Missions in India- targets, performance and linkages to UN-SDGs (GIZ), Politics of Care in Pandemic Time (UCL's Global Engagement Funds), Urban Biodiversity (UNU-IAS, Japan), Shelter for All under Design Innovation Centre (Govt. of India). Pankaj Kumar (PhD) is working as senior policy researcher in the field of water resources and climate change adaptation in the Institute for Global Environmental Strategies (IGES), Japan. Prior to this, he worked as JSPS/UNU-IAS postdoctoral fellow in United Nations University, Institute for Advanced Study of Sustainability (UNU-IAS), Tokyo; for more than three years. His research work focused on socio-hydrology, water security, hydrological simulation and scenario modelling, and water-health-food-energy nexus, a transdisciplinary work aimed to give policy relevant solutions to enhance community resilience to global change and a sustainable development of water environment and human well-being. In addition, he is actively engaged in capacity development on various numerical tools used for water resource management, intended for local government officials and relevant stakeholders in different Asian countries. He has work experience with different global assessments like IPCC, IPBES and GEO as Chapter scientist and lead authors respectively. He has several peer reviewed articles (>170) in high impact factor journals, one authored book, one edited book to his credit.