EVENTS AT OXFORD

Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development Michaelmas Events 2022/23

Sign up links for these events are provided below. For any queries, please contact: oicsd@some.ox.ac.uk.

How can we improve cooling sustainability for factory workers? Learning from the case of Bangladesh's ready-made garment industry

Bangladesh factories OICSD event

Date: Tuesday 18 October | 10-11 am BST | 2:30-3:30 pm IST | Online event

Speaker: Jean Palutikof, Professor and Founder of the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, Griffith University, Australia

Event link: https://www.crowdcast.io/c/sustainable-cooling

The ready-made garment (RMG) industry in Bangladesh is a mainstay of the economy, a strong driver of economic growth and a major contributor to GDP and export earnings. The industry accounts for 82% of exports by value and 12-15% of GDP. In 2021-22 it generated USD42.6 billion to the economy and employed around 4 million people, of whom 60% are women. As such, it provides financial independence to young women of modest education – a rarity in low- and middle-income countries.

Any threat to the productivity of the industry and the welfare of its workforce will have major implications for the nation as a whole. Working conditions in RMG factories are stressful to the point of threatening workers’ health, and a major contributor is excessive heat. The situation is highly likely to worsen in future due to global warming. Furthermore, if in future the industry becomes more reliant on air-conditioning for cooling purposes, this will simply add to the burden of greenhouse gases, since Bangladesh is heavily reliant on natural gas for electricity generation.

Prof Jean Palutikof and team at Griffith University, Australia, are coming to the end of the three-year project funded by Wellcome to explore low- to moderate-cost sustainable strategies to reduce heat stress in two Bangladesh RMG factory buildings, and their performance under future climate change. The strategies are green roofs (vegetation), white roofs (paint) and shading. Using a combination of monitoring, modelling, worker interviews and climate chamber experiments, they have been able to show that all interventions produced improved conditions, though to varying degrees.

This one-hour webinar will report on the approach, methods and findings of the project. There will be a 30-minute presentation by Prof Jean Palutikof, followed by the opportunity for questions and discussion with Jean and two project investigators, Aaron Bach and Fahim Tonmoy.

Durable Derangements: The Climate of Mumbai's Coastal Road

Graphic Durable Derangements

Date: Tuesday, Nov 1 | 5:30-7 pm GMT | In-person event

Venue: Flora Anderson Hall, Somerville College

Speaker: Nikhil Anand, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania

Discussants: Hannah Knox, Professor of Anthropology, UCL

Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/HdK4Lu3wF3

In this talk, Prof Nikhil Anand will examine the making of Mumbai’s Coastal Road Project. How might we account for the production of a highway in a climate changed city, one that it is situated on made-up land that fills an increasingly restive, rising sea? Thinking with Amitav Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2016), Prof Anand will draw attention to the interests, aesthetics and technologies with which the road and is made durable. He will argue that Mumbai Coastal Road is not made with “rational” plans, designs and studies of urban infrastructure. It is mobilized by the aesthetics of modernity (Ghertner 2015) and particular “habits of thought” (Benedict 1934) that privilege, valorize and assume the possibility of bourgeois regularity in the city; a deeply felt orientation and mode of intervening in the world that continues to produce the climate crisis, both in Mumbai and beyond.

This lecture will be followed by a reception.

Rebellion: XR Documentary Screening and Panel Discussion

Film screening cop27

Date: Wednesday, November 23 | 4:30-7 pm GMT | In-person event

Panellists:

Farhana Yamin, environmental lawyer, author, activist

Maia Kenworthy, documentary filmmaker and director of 'Rebellion'

Prof Sam Fankhauser, Research Director, Oxford Net Zero

Moderator: Prof Radhika Khosla, Research Director, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development

Venue: Flora Anderson Hall, Somerville College

Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/W9zdX6sFqN

Following COP27, join filmmaker Maia Kenworthy, climate lawyer Farhana Yamin, Sam Fankhauser of Oxford NetZero and OICSD Research Director Radhika Khosla for a discussion of Rebellion, Maia’s new film about XR, featuring Farhana.

This talk will be followed by a reception.