Garima Gupta

My name is Garima Gupta and I have a long-standing interest in questions of conservation, and I have been working on understanding the challenges to the global biodiversity and how we can make better progress towards bridging those gaps and make informed decisions to protect our ecosystem and biodiversity. I completed my PhD entitled ‘Data and conservation of Galliformes in the Greater Himalaya’ from Newcastle University, UK. My research focused on addressing biodiversity loss and human linkages in the Greater Himalayan region, a biodiversity hotspot. During my doctoral research, I worked on the importance of existing data in conservation science and decision making. I am also involved in the IUCN Green Status of Species assessments.

Currently, I am working as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow on the Beacon Project (https://www.thebeaconproject.net/) at the University of Stirling. The Beacon Project uses hydropower development as a model system and employ interdisciplinary thinking and methods to quantify the trade-offs, conflicts and synergies between SDGs and stakeholders. The overarching aim of The Beacon Project is to identify, forecast, prevent and mitigate conflicts associated with development processes, to achieve equitable sustainable development now and beyond the 2030 sustainable development targets. For the next two years, I will be working directly with local communities, as well as with Regional (subnational) and/or national-level decision-makers in four different countries (India, Scotland, Kazakhstan, and Brazil) to understand how different people approach these difficult SDG trade-off decisions (i.e. renewable energy generation, biodiversity conservation, livelihoods and communities).