Dhrupad Choudhury For a little over two decades, Dr. Choudhury has been working among marginalized mountain communities of the Himalayas, initially as a researcher but later, progressively as a development practitioner. His focus of interest has spanned natural resource management, policy and market driven transformations, livelihood security and poverty reduction. His special area of interest is Managing Transformations in Shifting Cultivation, with special focus on tenurial and access regimes. Significant contributions of his work has included the designing, development and successful implementation of a strategy for managing transformations in shifting cultivation areas (in an IFAD funded development project in India), and the contribution as member of the Technical Support Group for drafting the Scheduled Tribes and Other Forest Dwellers (Recognition of Rights) Bill in India, enacted as an Act of the Parliament in 2007. During his tenure in ICIMOD, Dr. Choudhury has worked on aspects of livelihoods security and approaches for enhancing adaptive capacities of mountain communities to socio-economic and climate change.
Over the last few years, he has designed and executed an extensive participatory assessment to document community perceptions on, and responses to the impacts of climate change covering 90 villages across Bhutan, India and Nepal, spanning an altitudinal range from 50MSL to 3500MSL. Following this assessment, he has designed a process framework that fosters information and knowledge flow among communities and between communities, the scientific and technical support services as well as local administration. This framework, called the Adaptation Learning Highway, strengthens inclusive, consultative processes for formulating adaptive strategies and livelihood security, thereby facilitating a more responsive governance mechanism. His work has also included supporting and providing guidance to the development of a quantitative vulnerability and poverty framework (Poverty and Vulnerability Assessment Framework). His interests have included designing and piloting mountain specific adaptation approaches for strengthening local adaptation. Currently, as Programme Manager, his work includes fostering multi-stakeholder partnerships and engagement with policy makers for strengthening adaptation at different scales. Dr. Choudhury has a D.Phil from the University of Oxford in Ecology.