Manan Bhan

Hi, I am Manan! I am delighted that you have found your way here.

Currently, I am a Fellow in Residence at the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE) in Bengaluru, India. My action research work at ATREE is highly diverse as well as innovative, with sustainable land use, climate action and human wellbeing at its core.

Among my activities:

• I design and evaluate ecosystem restoration programmes (in forests, grasslands as well as croplands). For example, I am currently building a protocol to measure carbon sequestered in soils due to ecosystem restoration activities.

• I lead assessments of the environmental footprint of agricultural commodities (like tea and cotton). Here, I am currently building a research programme on the socio-ecological impacts of production in India.

• I develop highly decentralised climate adaptation action plans in cities (for example, to tackle heatwaves). For this, I have recently secured a grant from the Bengaluru Sustainability Forum to build a Ward-level heatwave action plan for the Yeshwanthpur ward in North Bengaluru.

In the summer of 2022, I completed my PhD (with Distinction) at the Institute of Social Ecology at the Universität für Bodenkultur (BOKU) in Vienna, which is a city consistently rated as one of the most liveable cities on the planet.

My PhD was titled 'Quantifying, mapping and assessing the impacts of land use on global biomass carbon stocks'. Please contact me for a pdf copy of the thesis if you are interested to read it.

My research was based on analysing the evolution of global vegetation biomass over the last 7 decades using a combination of Remote Sensing and GIS techniques, country-level inventory statistics and land use models.

My PhD research includes:

• Quantifying (changes in) carbon stocks across the 20th century using inventory-based and model-based estimates, which asks 'How much carbon was stored in vegetation in the mid-20th century and how much have we lost due to land use change?' (published in the Journal of Land Use Science in 2022)

• Analysing the spatial divergences in current estimates of tree cover and biomass carbon stocks across the tropical region, which asks, 'Do more trees mean more carbon?' (published in the journal Land in 2021)

• Understanding how land use change emissions are attributed to the consumption and trade of biomass commodities (like beef, soy and palm oil), which investigates 'How much deforestation emissions can one attribute to a unit of, say, Brazilian coffee consumed in Europe?' (published in the Journal of Environmental Management in 2021)

Please have a look at the section 'Scientific Outputs' on the page Writing Portfolio for a complete list of my publications. 

For research, training and implementation, I have been able to secure scholarships and research funding of almost €200,000 from a wide range of initiatives and organizations (long may that continue!). Please have a look at the page Scholarships & Awards for a brief description of each recognition. 

I am born and brought up in New Delhi, India, where I also completed my Bachelors' degree in Geology from the University of Delhi. I followed that with a Masters' in Environmental Change and Management from the University of Oxford, financially supported by the Weidenfeld Scholarship.  

I came back to New Delhi to help design forest conservation programmes and evaluate forest conservation policies in India. 

After that, I took up a position at Ashoka University, one of India's leading liberal arts universities, as a Teaching Fellow for Environmental Studies. This contributed to my teaching experiences which continued in my PhD, detailed here.  

For the knowledge transfer and implementation of my own research to meet climate action and sustainability objectives, I am currently conceptualising GreenRoute, with an aim to communicate the value of sustainable and responsive monitoring systems and consumption practices to drive climate action, thereby engaging with both individual and community-led initiatives.    

Apart from scientific writing, I used to maintain a blog detailing my life as a tourist-cum-resident in Vienna. I periodically write popular science articles in India and respond to international land use policy consultations. I occassionally write poems rooted in my own personal experiences but with links to the environment around me. They have been published in outlets including art.earth, The Alipore Post and Consilience. 

For individual links to each of these writings, please see the page Writing Portfolio. 

I have also experimented with travel writing, for example, a travelogue of a trek to the Indrahar Pass in the Dhauladhar Ranges of the Himalayas in Himachal Pradesh (India), published in Outlook Traveller Getaways, Adventure Holidays in India. 

I am a fan of long-distance trains and postcards, and approach each with equal fascination. Chai remains second nature, come summer, winter or rain.

Climate action and sustainability (as well as all other things) remains all about collaboration and communication. Happy to hear from you! I can be reached at bhan.manan@gmail.com or manan.bhan@atree.org or on social media platforms Twitter, ResearchGate and Instagram.