Ashwin Ravikumar

Background

About Ashwin Ravikumar

Since November 2015, I've been working as an Environmental Social Scientist with the Field Museum based in Chicago. Our team works to support the establishment and collaborative management of protected areas in the Amazon rainforest by conducting rapid inventories to assay biological and cultural diversity in conservation hotspots. We leverage the results of these scientific inquiries to support partners and coalitions advocating for local and indigenous people as managers and decision-makers around protected areas. I am an applied researcher in environmental policy and natural resource governance. My primary research focus has been on how people create institutions to manage natural resources. In the past, I've conducted research on forest conservation, climate change, and the politics of land use across the tropics with the Center for International Forestry Research. In addition, I've done field work in India, Bolivia, Peru and the United States, with additional work on the ground in Indonesia, Tanzania, Mexico, and Vietnam. I've worked on a range of topics including US municipal adaptation to climate driven disasters, the capacity for income-generating asset transfer programs to alleviate extreme poverty among groups too poor for traditional microfinance in India, and the types of mutually beneficial arrangements that forest communities and timber companies form around the world. One of my central goals is to not only produce research that has utility to decision-makers, but to participate actively in stakeholder engagement, dissemination, and socialization of science to facilitate the effective uptake of information in a form that lends itself well to improved decision making.