Explore how digital tools and community data are building climate resilience in rural landscapes -with lessons for water managers worldwide.
As climate change intensifies, rural communities that depend on agriculture, forests, and water for their livelihoods face compounding ecological, economic, and social pressures. How can data and digital technology help communities not just survive these pressures, but actively shape their own resilience?
Join us for another Data for Lunch (or rather, Data for Breakfast) as Dr. Aaditeshwar Seth explores this question in the context of rural central India, where intersecting environmental and livelihood crises demand solutions that are both technically sophisticated and deeply rooted in community knowledge and equity.
In this session, you'll learn how a collaborative team of civil society organizations, environmental researchers, and computer scientists developed the CoRE Stack (Commoning for Resilience and Equality), a digital public infrastructure that puts data directly in the hands of communities. You'll see how it enables local partners to:
- Build a shared understanding of how their landscapes are changing
- Plan and advocate for natural resource management projects
- Shift day-to-day practices toward greater sustainability and regeneration
The CoRE Stack leverages geospatial algorithms, machine learning on satellite imagery, and innovative data visualization approaches to track social-ecological sustainability at the landscape level — with open building blocks for further innovation.
Dr. Seth will also reflect honestly on the limits of this approach: where data falls short in capturing the full complexity of social-ecological systems, and what that means for how we design and deploy these tools.
This session offers valuable lessons for anyone working at the intersection of water data, community engagement, and climate resilience — with particular relevance to groundwater modeling, biodiversity monitoring, and forest ecosystem work here in California and beyond.
Register now to join this global conversation about the power, and limits, of data for community-driven climate adaptation.
Dr. Aaditeshwar Seth is a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi, and co-founder of both Gram Vaani, a social technology enterprise, and the CoRE Stack infrastructure and network. His work centers on building participatory digital tools that empower marginalized communities to organize, advocate for themselves, and strengthen their climate resilience.
Technology platforms developed by Seth and his teams at Gram Vaani, the CoRE Stack, and his ACT4D (Appropriate Computing Technologies for Development) research group at IIT Delhi have reached several million people and more than 200 organizations worldwide. Elements of this work have been adopted by government agencies and have shaped how technology is applied for community development in the social sector.
Dr. Seth is a recipient of the ACM SIGCHI Social Impact Award (2022). His book, Technology and (Dis)Empowerment: A Call to Technologists (2022), argues that technologists have a responsibility to design for equality and to challenge unjust social and economic structures through their work.
Data for Lunch is a free and dynamic virtual event series for water professionals, researchers, policymakers, and other partners to explore and discuss the latest water-related datasets, technologies, and governance innovations.
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Funding for this project has been provided in full or in part from the Budget Act of 2022 and through an agreement with the State.
