Skip to content
Edit this message in the Customizer (Theme Options)

Sierra Gladfelter

  • Home
  • Projects
  • Blog
  • Publications
  • Photos
  • Bio & CV
  • Contact

Searching for grounded solutions

Climate change is the greatest crisis of our times. While we are all implicated in this disaster, in the end it is how we understand and respond to one another’s vulnerability that matters. I am a geographer, writer, and researcher committed to working toward solutions to disasters and humanity’s changing relationship with local water resources that both confront the roots of people’s vulnerability and that complement, rather than displace, local knowledge and practices.
I have over seven years of experience working independently and collaboratively with interdisciplinary teams to study the impacts of global warming and climate-exacerbated disasters on vulnerable populations in the US and across the developing world. Most of my work has been focused on human efforts to adapt to and cope with changing water resources. I have studied both floods and chronic water scarcity and the ways in which they are intensifying already radically uneven patterns of vulnerability in places like Ladakh, India and Zambia’s Zambezi River Basin. My two most extensive research projects were supported by fellowships: a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship, which funded my Master’s research in Nepal’s lower Karnali River Basin and a Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Grant, which allowed me to spend a year in India examining efforts to build artificial glaciers across Ladakh and revitalize springs in the Himalayan foothills of Uttarakhand. Currently I serve as a consultant and project manager for the The Resilience Adaptation and Feasibility Tool (RAFT) and Dialogue + Design Associates.

 

Recent Research

I recently completed a one year (August 2017-July 2018) Fulbright-Nehru Student Research Grant and cross-cultural exchange program funded jointly by the U.S. Department of State and Government of India. During this time, I was working collaboratively with Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU)’s Disaster Research Programme and India’s National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM) to study local…

Read more Recent Research

Pipeline CSI: A volunteer army of citizen scientists is watching pipeline construction and safeguarding waterways

This article was written for and appeared in Blue Ridge Outdoors on March 29, 2019. More than 50 residents pack into the Rockfish Valley Community Center in Nellysford, Virginia, to learn how to fight pipelines even as they begin going into the ground. Coordinators of the Pipeline Compliance Surveillance Initiative (CSI) are teaching this group…

Read more Pipeline CSI: A volunteer army of citizen scientists is watching pipeline construction and safeguarding waterways

Photos from the Field

Photo gallery of recent research expeditions. These images taken during fieldwork for my Master’s thesis in July 2015, document the impacts of inundation in the Kanali River Basin and the creative ways people have adapted to live with floods.

Read more Photos from the Field

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Blog at WordPress.com.
Cancel

 
Loading Comments...
Comment
    ×