NASA Harvest Participates in Month Long 'Unconference' in Nepal
Christina Justice, NASA Harvest Food Security and Early Warning Co-Lead, participated in the Understanding Risk Climate Data Field Lab held in Kathmandu, Nepal from May 13th to June 7th. The UR Field Lab is a month-long participant led “unconference” that gathers together researchers, practitioners, activists, artists and storytellers from across multiple disciplines that come together all month to share knowledge and experience and together co-design and co-create new datasets, products, tools, dashboards, training materials, art work and articles all related to climate change data here in the Himalaya Hindu Kush (HKH) region. This event was co-organized by several universities in the US and in Nepal and the Himalayan University Consortium alongside the World Bank and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD).
During this month over 120 participants joined this event from over 19 countries representing a wide array of backgrounds and expertise with the majority of this year’s cohort coming directly from the HKH region. A major focus of the Field Lab is on building collaborations and building a strong network that will be sustained long term past the extent of the Field Lab itself. The problems and research questions facing the Himalayan region in relation to climate change are by their nature interdisciplinary and the Field Lab’s cross-disciplinary approach brings together stakeholders and partners to co-develop solutions.
The "unconference" format is unique to the Field Lab. What unconference means in the Field Lab setting is that the format moves away from a normal research conference set up where the schedule is predefined. There is a clear delineation between organizers and participants and finished results are presented. Instead in this unconference format, everyone is an organizer and the scheduling is participant-led. An overall thematic calendar is provided, but the events schedule is emergent providing an opportunity to collaborate on projects in real-time and bringing cross-discipline expertise together to build something new out of the time together and contribute to the broader community.
Importantly, this Field Lab is part of a larger Understanding Risk community which is composed of over 10,000 experts and practitioners in the field of disaster risk management, particularly in the creation, communication, and use of risk information. This is the second of such Understanding Risk Field Labs, the first was in Chiang Mai Thailand in 2019 with a focus on urban flooding. The Field Lab serves as a new model for how we could develop future engagements moving outside of our research silos and co-creating across disciplines.
During this month, Christina worked across several projects and working groups within the Field Lab. The outputs from this work included the investigation of urban agriculture in interstitial and informal settings within the urban area of Kathmandu, a mapping exercise of early warning systems in Nepal and more. As part of the urban agriculture work, a short movie was created to illustrate the issues facing local farmers. Christina and colleagues interviewed and filmed farmers on location during field visits and translated and edited what eventually became a 6 minute long short film Concrete and Crops.
To find out more about the Field Lab and the products, datasets, networks and artwork created during the month check out the UR Field Lab website https://urfieldlab.com/UR2024/.
