Kavya Michael

Kavya Michael is an environmental social scientist with expertise in analyzing the ‘natural environment’ through a social science lens. Her research and professional experience broadly lie in examining global environmental change and energy-related issues through a human rights and justice lens. Within this domain, questions of class, caste, and gender have been central to her analysis. She also studies the multiple intersections of climate change/environmental hazards, urban inequality, informality, and inter and intra-regional migration with a special focus on the Global South. Her current work examines how the various structural elements of gendered injustices and the resultant forms of exclusion in different sectorial contexts, interact with the impacts of climate change as well as climate action and energy transitions across the globe.



Prior to joining Chalmers, Kavya has worked as an Associate Fellow at The Energy and Resources Institute, researching how communities plan and adapt to climate change across multiple scales and regions. While at TERI, Kavya also conducted an in-depth analysis of climate change policies at the national and sub-national levels in India. She was the lead coordinator of the Adaptation Futures 2020 conference, the world’s largest conference in the climate change adaptation space hosted by TERI and the World Adaptation Science Program. Kavya has also worked as the lead of the urban research team of the Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions (ASSAR) project at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Her research in the ASSAR project examined how the experiences of climate change by the most marginalized groups (in this case Bengaluru’s informal settlement dwellers) are filtered through existing socio-economic-political-cultural dynamics. Her work has theorized the differentiated experiences of vulnerability within informal settlements as well as the emergence of grass-roots resistance movements and insurgent citizenship practices within these communities.



Kavya is a recipient of the IDRC Climate Leadership Fellowship and was hosted at the Political Economy Research Institute, Amherst, USA as a visiting scholar with Prof James K Boyce researching urbanization and climate change in the Global South. She is also an author of the recently launched urban background paper of the Global Commission on Adaptation which underscored the need for urban climate change adaptation measures to be underpinned by justice, equity, and nature for ensuring transformative action. Theoretically, Kavya’s research falls within the domains of political ecology, feminist post-colonial theories, and social inclusion/justice.