Our story starts in the lush mangrove forests of Sundarbans, located in the Bay of Bengal. Thickets of salt-tolerant mangrove trees in this enormous area are home to diverse species of birds, reptiles, mammals and more. Not only are these tidal forests home to beautiful fauna, but they also support livelihoods of millions of people.
It is this intimate relationship between nature and its inhabitants that motivated Jenia Mukherjee, a principal investigator at IIT Kharagpur, to pursue research in the Sunderbans.
Among the biodiversity of Sundarbans are over 300 species of fish that serve as vital sources of food and income for the communities that call this region their home. Unfortunately, both of these groups are affected adversely due to the ill-effects of climate change. Increasing global temperatures is leading to higher salt levels in the Sundarbans marshes, causing fish reproductive behaviours to alter, ultimately reducing their abundance. As one can imagine, this directly causes harm to the livelihoods of the Sundarbans fishing communities.
Some of these groups turned to Jenia for help with devising newer and more sustainable fishing practices in alignment with the changing environments. They needed scientific advise for their proposed methods, and Jenia was more than happy to oblige.
As with any new project, Jenia and her team needed funding to see it through. As luck would have it, Jenia came across the announcement for K2A’s small grants and applied with a stellar proposal to work with local communities and help mediate the transfer of their knowledge towards actionable steps in their favor. The 2021 small grant allowed the team to co-create a manual with the fishing community. But more work needed to be done to put these new practices into action. The 2022 small grant provided support to the team to show that their well-thought out actions have real-life potential in solving the fishing communities issues.
Despite the progress made using the K2A small grants, the research team ultimately aimed towards creating a wholesome approach combining the communities inputs and their own scientific perspectives. The results they had obtained up till now served as the basis for something bigger. Jenia, along with her collaborators Samiya Selim, René Véron, Tapas Mandal and Muhymin Chowdhury, received the prestigious Solution-oriented Research for Development grant (SOR4D) of the Swiss National Science Foundation, being 1 out of 7 selected from a shortlist of 75. This would not have been possible without the steps that came before. With each stepping stone, the research team worked closely with the fishing community to achieve their goals, turning knowledge into action.
Knowledge2Action 
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