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Climate monitoring, environmental protection, and water management
6 Problem Statements in this Domain (5 Standard + 1 Open Innovation)
Beyond acute outburst-flood warning (see AUB-SIH26-PS-021), there is a broader, longer-horizon challenge of assessing which of the many hundreds of Himalayan glacial lakes are developing meaningfully elevated breach risk over months-to-years, to prioritize limited monitoring and mitigation resources — but comprehensive, comparable risk assessment across so many remote lakes with wildly varying data availability (some with occasional satellite imagery only, a few with more instrumentation) is not currently done systematically.
Many Indian aquifers are severely over-exploited, and while the physical hydrology of decline is reasonably well understood, translating this into workable, locally-acceptable extraction management is extremely difficult because farmers have conflicting, legitimate interests (immediate livelihood needs vs. long-term aquifer sustainability), extraction is largely unmetered/uncontrolled at the individual well level, and any imposed restriction faces real enforcement and equity challenges across farmers with very different landholding sizes and crop choices.
Effective air pollution mitigation in Indian cities requires knowing which sources (specific industries, traffic corridors, construction sites, stubble burning influence) are driving pollution in a specific neighborhood at a specific time, but this requires source attribution at a spatial resolution far finer than the small number of expensive reference-grade monitoring stations can provide, while the low-cost sensor networks that could achieve finer spatial coverage suffer from significant calibration drift and cross-sensitivity issues that undermine attribution accuracy if not properly addressed.
Heat-wave mortality risk varies enormously within a city — dense, unplanned settlements with poor ventilation, limited tree cover, and predominantly tin/asbestos roofing experience dramatically higher effective heat exposure than surrounding areas, but current Heat Action Plans generally issue city-wide warnings without fine-grained spatial risk mapping that could direct scarce cooling-centre and outreach resources to the specific settlements and even specific streets facing the highest actual risk, especially for vulnerable groups (elderly, outdoor workers, infants).
Coastal erosion is progressively threatening homes and livelihoods in many fishing villages along India's coastline, but systematic shoreline change monitoring at the resolution and frequency needed to give affected communities meaningful advance warning and inform relocation/protection planning is currently limited to periodic satellite-based studies covering large stretches at coarse temporal resolution, missing the more frequent, localized dynamics (seasonal monsoon impact, individual storm events) that actually drive village-level risk.
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