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Sierra Gladfelter

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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 10 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 Institute for Engagement & Negotiation at the University of Virginia and The Resilience Adaptation and Feasibility Tool (RAFT) where I facilitate community engaged resilience planning for rural communities across Virginia impacted by climate-induced flooding as well as deeper structural vulnerabilities.

Recent Research

From August 2017-July 2018, I completed a 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 technologies that…

Read more Recent Research

Community resilience work in rural Virginia through The RAFT featured in Envision Magazine

It is an honor to have the community-driven resilience work that my team and I have been leading at the University of Virginia (UVA)’s Institute for Engagement & Negotiation (IEN) in coastal Virginia featured in Envision Magazine. I have been working on The Resilience Adaptation Feasibility Tool (RAFT) as a project manager at IEN for…

Read more Community resilience work in rural Virginia through The RAFT featured in Envision Magazine

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

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