 We're going to attack teams at it. There's been a double act. Two for the price of one. Yeah, it's very good because there's two for the price of one. Thank you very much for our time to allow us to speak about our current project, which we just finished. It's a pilot project. But before I start talking about the project, I thought it's a great title, just add water. When I first came to Belfast almost 20 years ago, my colleagues in Northern Ireland in Belfast said, hey, this place rains all the time, OK? You're adding water all the time. And I said to them, I come from a place where I get water. We get more rain in a day that Belfast gets in a year. I come from the rainiest spot in the world called Cherifungi. Those of you who are physical geographers and who understand climate change will understand that even that region is changing quite rapidly. So when we look at this particular area, Marjuli, when I started thinking about Marjuli, Marjuli is located, it's one of the largest inhabited river islands in the world. It has this unique culture which stopped at almost 16th century, 450 years of existence. And it had applied for the world heritage status, Venuscosite status twice over. It failed quite significantly. And when I started inquiring about it, I realized that the government had a position to say that floods are not a problem here. At the same time, the people said, we don't have a problem with the floods as well. So I said there are different discourses about floods. And there's something happening here that I need to put my hand on it and get a sense of what exactly is happening. And that's how we took this project. And we were funded by the Global Challenge Fund, which is great. So looking at this area of Brahmaputra and Marjuli particularly, Marjuli is about 352 square kilometers. It has a population of 167,000, as I said. And it became an island in 1750 after a large earthquake followed by flooding. There is a mix of communities here, both the indigenous groups. And I heard yesterday a lot of discussion around indigenous groups. So they have their own traditional culture, which has been in existence for quite some time. Then you also have these indigenous groups, particularly Misheng, Deorees and Sonowal, will link up with what Elizabeth mentioned in the morning session. And I think we are grateful for both Toby and Stephanie and everyone else who have provided some framework in terms of how to go forward in terms of these communities. Marjuli is also as a center of Assamese neo-Vishnevite culture based on 30 monasteries. So historically there were about 72 monasteries which have disappeared over a period of time. And with the current floods, think about floods happening every time. And I'll give you some brief figures about these floods and why the floods in the Brahmaputra is so critical. Brahmaputra River is the youngest river within the context of South Asia and the world as well. It has a catchment area of close to 712,000 square kilometers rising in China. So you heard about the Three Gorges Dam. That's exactly where the origins of this particular river is. It flows through about 2,880 square kilometers. It comes from to the Bay of Bengal. The river gradient is also interesting. Over the first 300 kilometers, it drops very significantly more than three kilometers, abruptly at certain parts of that catchment area. The other important feature about this river is the fact that it has a huge sediment load. It's the world's highest sediment loaded river. So in terms of Elizabeth's framework of what we call the whole idea of floating habitation is quite a challenge. I have a colleague who just sent me a note today saying that they are looking at flotations and flotation options and have sent me pictures to get some thoughts about it, but I'm glad I heard you first. So I should be able to respond to him quite significantly on that. So in terms of the annual sediment load, the suspended sediment load is a staggering 852 metric tons per kilometer. It's massive. Just to give you a perspective, it's close to about 500 Olympic size swimming pools deposition. The highest river sediment yield in the world. And it has 45 million people living on the entire banks of the Brahmaputra. So around the catchment. So Majuli, as a site, has shrunk from 1,256 kilometers to about 875 square kilometers. So there's a massive question of erosion. And that is what is the biggest challenge to the cultural heritage that is there for the last 450 years. At places, it has shrunk to almost 500 kilometers. So there are places you cannot even go by boat because the sedimentation is so high it can get stuck anywhere, which is of great challenge. And the Brahmaputra River changes courses almost every time there is the monsoons. But the biggest challenge of Brahmaputra, I think, is that there are 70, within Majuli, there are about 70 sattras which have now been reduced to 30 sattras, which is monasteries as a care. And they have their own cultural landscape management in operation for many years. And that is why it is so unique in the way it is presented. Majuli, location, just to give you a very quick site, it is on the River Brahmaputra. You can see the maps there. Total catchment, again, gives you a bit more of the perspective that we're talking about, the scale of which we are dealing with when you're dealing with cultural heritage on the context of Majuli. And I think that is important to bear in mind. The sattras, again, are quite significant in terms of this tangible and intangible cultural heritage. We spent both, we had a team of 24 members around different cycles of the project. And we spent time in the first half, first part of the project, for four days in the sattra, the Ras Festival, which runs for four days and normally starts at half nine in the evening and goes up to four in the morning, half four in the morning. It's basically ballads and songs and dances. So it's incredible in terms of the perspective that they provide. Historically, the repositories, materials that are there have been there for quite some time. And what we try to do is to be able to document because every time there's a flood, if something disappears, no one knows what is gone. So we needed to get a documentation of the sattras. We couldn't do all of them when we started by looking at almost 1,659 documents which have been listed now and the government of India has also been very supportive of us providing that information. So that's to give you insights about the heritage that's there and it's a massive amount of stuff. Things between, even they didn't know it existed. Great. I'm just gonna take over now and just give some context as to why a project like this is relevant. I along with several other colleagues in the room, we heard about this yesterday and part of an ICOMOS working group working on the question of climate change and cultural heritage at the moment. And we talked yesterday a lot about how important it was to be bringing what we're doing with cultural heritage into the context of the wider conversation about climate change. And really within that, the main show in town is the Paris Agreement, which doesn't explicitly reference archeology but it does talk about culture through this kind of idea of traditional ecological knowledge of indigenous peoples and local knowledge systems. And I think Majuli is a really, really nice example where we can study like that. Following that at our most recent ICOMOS meeting in Delhi, there was a motion passed which stressed this and I think this is a nice way to think about it, that cultural heritage is both impacted by climate change and is a source of resilience. And the basic ideas about this is that these heritage sites can actually act as laboratories to help us understand things about climate change. Now we talked this morning briefly about the idea that we need to be very careful that we don't lose the sense of urgency in this dialogue because cultural change, climate change is happening so much faster now than it's ever happened before. But that doesn't mean that these sites cannot teach us things. Again, we talked on this yesterday but I've done this presentation beforehand. I think we need to be careful to use the right terminology especially if we're engaging within this dialogue with the wider climate change community that when we talk about mitigation, we're talking specifically about greenhouse gases and adaptations, everything we do to kind of react to the influence of climate change. So this is a satellite synthetic aperture radar image. Synthetic aperture radar is a wonderful program because it captures every part of the Earth's surface every 14 days. It also penetrates cloud cover, which is very useful if you're trying to look at flooding in parts of the world often covered by cloud. But what this image really shows us is that the flooding on Majuli isn't something that just happens once in a season. It's something that happens time and time again. There could be numerous floods happening and then the water pulls back and then the floods happen again and then the water pulls back. So for three, four months of the year, people are living in this constant state of change with the water coming and receding and repairing and receding again. And if we put the extents into this all together, we can pretty much see that every part of Majuli at some point during every season can pretty much get flooded, all right? The triangles here represent the satyrs and then the reds are the parts of the island that get flooded more than others. Satish already mentioned about erosion. This is an image actually one of my students made, but it really shows, it's taken from Landsat imagery from 1973. It really shows how quickly and the river island is eroding. So you have these dual problems of both flooding and erosion. And especially in terms of erosion, we've seen this massive increase in how quickly the island is eroding and the impact that is then having on communities. Now, we hear anecdotal evidence as to the effects of climate change on this community. It's almost certainly getting worse, a lot of these questions and there have been various adaptations put in place to try and manage this. One of the primary things is for about the last 40 years they've been putting in levees and that means that an awful lot of the communities have moved behind the levees and these levees are a way of dealing with both the erosion issue and the flooding issue. One of the challenges though, which this has raised is that when you build a levee, it breaches. It has the potential to breach. And so if you're dealing with societies which have a traditional ecological knowledge as to how to actually live with flooding and then you're changing the way in which the flooding is occurring through the construction of levees, that we need to be aware of the fact that that's going to change people's capacity to actually adapt to it. Now, that's not to be disparaging about the levees. The levees are incredibly important. They have improved the quality of life of people in Majuli massively. People now live along them and live on them and they retreated them in times of floods. But we talk to a number of people who used to remember the flooding happening as the water came up like this. And then in more recent years, when it breaches, the water just comes in and amasses the torrent. And that's a much, much harder thing to actually deal with. So one of the challenges, as I said, understanding the traditional ecological knowledge system that has existed quite some time has been quite eye-opener for us. Initially, in my project, I said, we have to go and build capacity. And the term is very famous because everyone uses the concept, the term building capacity. But when you're going to the people there and it's quite humbling to know that they already have a capacity to deal with their own cultural heritage. So it's quite foolish for us to say, hey, I'm here to build your capacity. It may be strengthening capacity or raising the awareness about the capacity because more relevant in the context of the project. This is an image that they have built up, the tribal communities, indigenous groups who have built up their perceptions about floods and about the cultural heritage. And this is part of the thing which we picked up which I thought was quite representative of what it is all about. So in terms of the whole idea of cultural resilience to changing climate, cultural resilience, it's not that life is going to be easy. I've asked them this question many times in terms of their perceptions of floods which is very different from a scientist's perception of floods. And I had my team, within my team, members of the BGS, British Geological Survey. And it was an eye-opener for all of us scientists there to say that, hey, the community themselves had a new perception of floods and their own concept of what threat is all about. I asked them how many people lose lives every year and they said, this year only two person lost their life. And I said, and a dog. And I said, how did that happen? And he said, because they did not care about the erosional banks and they took the risk of going to those erosional banks. So they already have an advanced warning system. Please don't go any further than a given site. So again, you can see the heritage is very much part of it. The Satras, the monasteries are quite important because as I said, 22 monasteries. I just give an example of three of them there. Duckin Park Monastery, founded in 1662. It has moved three times because of the floods. So I asked the people, the people who are in charge of the monastery, how did you decide where to relocate? And they said, we have an understanding. You know, GPS, by the way, they have an understanding of how high, which is the high points in the island that they can go to if their flood waters come in. So it's mostly sheet flooding. And if there's a sheet flooding, they need to move up to a higher area to protect the cattle and whatever little belongings they have. Just give me an idea of things which are in terms of the movement of the people, along with their sort of mobile heritage. Just then also, thinking we've already talked a little bit about architectural styles and things today and using of local materials, sustainable materials, and different kind of portable construction techniques as well. What we'd often see was, this is your kind of typical traditional house. But, you know, we usually were seeing actually kind of hybrid houses where people were using concrete as well. And during times of flooding, they could take down parts of their house, move them away and then they could come back to it later as well. So thinking about modular building and using sustainable materials and stuff like that. One of the big turns we kept hearing was that the river never takes away, it always gives back. And one of the things about that was that these economies are based around the river and cycle as well. So specifically pottery making, which is incredibly dependent on the alluvium deposited by the river, but also kind of agricultural practices as well, and that there's been noted increase since the construction of Dykes and Neves in the kind of yields people are getting from agriculture too. So just to summarize and to finish up, basically this has been about those two things we were talking about. The idea that sites are both a threat and therefore a need of documentation. So we've been doing a huge amount of documentation, but also that these places can be laboratories for help us understand about climate change. And these are just some of the things that we're thinking about doing. I'll kind of find out this idea of kind of inverted capacity building. It's like she's just saying, we don't want to go and say you need capacity, but maybe actually you have something that you can tell us as opposed to something that we can just bring you, especially when dealing with communities who maybe are not used to dealing with clothing. Just a few words in terms of the sustainable development goals because that is the key area of our intervention. And particularly sustainable development goal 15 in terms of strengthening resilience and integrating climate change measures in the planning and development of these cultural landscapes. That was one of the key areas. Sustainable development 13 is also looking at heritage related livelihoods and how we could support entrepreneurship, et cetera. And at the same time looking at the aspect of inclusion. I think sometimes you forget that about climate justice, that there are communities who can let out in the context of cultural heritage and climate justice. So again, issues of justice. So just to end by stating that there's a critical role of traditional knowledge systems and the engagement is critical in the context of climate change. At the same time, one at the end when we ask this question, so how do you feel about the barriers coming up? And I know Will had just made a reference to it. The tribal elder told me, told us this particular fact that he said, we have lost our boats. We don't have access to the river anymore because embankments are very good. We don't have any floods, but we have lost the knowledge of how to deal with the floods. I'll stop there. We have a small clip, but we can read later. We'll do that again. Thanks very much. Any quick questions for Will and Satish? Thank you very much.