Y. Punia (Yashi)

I studied Mechanical Engineering and some Sociology for my bachelors at Shiv Nadar University in India and then Engineering and Policy Analysis at Delft University of Technology. I started working on NbS at Delft, mostly on the question of who ends up bearing their costs and the distributional effects of these green projects. My supervisors Nazli, Theodoros, and Neelke shaped a lot of how I think about this concept. For my master's thesis we developed a simple agent-based model to look at urban greening initiatives like green roofs and who gets displaced because of them in two specific electoral wards of Cape Town, South Africa. Green interventions, especially in complex, multi-layered cities in developing countries push people who are already vulnerable to adverse climatic events even further to the sidelines, and this uneven distribution of disbenefits is worth studying more consciously.

I want to explore how evaluation tools for NbS get mobilised in different contexts, and how the frameworks we use to measure the "goodness" or value of a solution end up shaping what gets built, funded, and prioritised. I'm interested in peatland restoration and rewetting projects: the ecological processes involved, and how different people relate to these landscapes in very different ways. I'm also interested in how evaluations move through governance processes, which metrics gain authority and how, and how people who live and work around implementation sites experience and interact with them. NL feels like a really rich place to be doing this work, given the scale and ambition of the nature restoration work happening here right now through NL2120 and other green innovation projects.

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Universiteit Twente

Horst Complex (gebouwnr. 20), kamer W214
De Horst 2
7522 LW Enschede

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