Mangaluru: The National Institute of Technology Karnataka (NITK) Surathkal inaugurated a two-day workshop on ‘Emotional Drivers for Biodiversity Conservation Action’ on Wednesday at the Silver Jubilee Auditorium, NITK campus. About 150 students, researchers and academicians from universities across India are participating in the programme.The workshop brings environmental psychology and biodiversity conservation into one conversation. Its themes include emotions and values, environmental behaviour, mental well-being, nature connectedness, wildlife conservation and human-wildlife coexistence.C Ravishankar, deputy conservator of Forests, Mangaluru Division, said legal frameworks and population estimates are essential, but conservation succeeds only when local communities join in. He cited the forests of Madikeri, where faith in local deities has brought villagers and the forest department together to protect forest land. He also pointed to the role of mangroves and the vulnerability of India’s coastal ecosystems, and called on young people to take up conservation.Prof Matt Hayward from University of Newcastle, Australia, described the loss of the thylacine and the gastric-brooding frog in Australia, and compared an ecosystem to a game of Jenga, where removing a keystone species can bring the whole structure down. Conservation science now draws on psychologists, economists and computer scientists.Andrea Griffin from University of Newcastle, Australia, said that information alone rarely changes behaviour, and that emotion is what moves people to act. She recalled how images of koalas during Australia’s 2019–20 Black Summer bushfires drew millions in donations from around the world. The task, she said, is to turn such surges of feeling into lasting habits of care. She noted that the SPARC collaboration between Australia and India offers a chance to study how emotions toward nature differ across cultures.Ullas Karanth, Padma Shri awardee and emeritus director, Centre for Wildlife Studies, Bengaluru, who is also an alumnus of NITK said that engineers have no option of saying they have no solution, and that problem-solving habit gave him confidence in a field where it is easy to become a doomsayer. The mathematics he studied at NITK later proved central as wildlife ecology became highly quantitative. He added that conservation also needs biology and the social sciences, which is the cross-disciplinary approach the workshop follows.In his presidential address, Prof B Ravi, director NITK, said conservation needs the public to act, not only govts, researchers and industry. He said NITK is working to turn this into practice on its own campus, where students learn through hands-on work. He invited workshop participants to bring their own ideas, and said that NITK will support experiments on campus.
