Benjamin Zaitchik Faculty Spotlight

“One thing that has struck me traveling and working in India is the public recognition of the importance and value of infrastructure for natural resources.”

Benjamin Zaitchik, a professor in the department of earth and planetary sciences at Johns Hopkins University, focuses mostly on regional climate in his research, trying to understand the atmosphere, the climate system, and what factors drive and extreme weather events.

“We try to apply that knowledge to a number of application areas and work collaboratively with communities and stakeholders to understand the impacts and responses related to health, food security, water resources, and other issues,” he said. “My research group is currently working with water resource experts in India to connect with various governments and folks at the state level.”

He noted that his work has a very real need for work to be led by local experts in India to shape water and climate policy. “The solutions for India are going to be very specific to a particular region, especially when you bring agriculture into it,” he explained. “There is already a lot of good thinking going on about what could be done to reform these issues.”

His own perspective brings knowledge from a country that faces similar climate issues, but where the solutions and dialogue around environmental reform are very different.

“I think the United States, where a lot of those investments in natural resources were made a long time ago, the infrastructure is taken for granted. There’s a recognition of the importance of things like access to clean water and sanitation, but it requires a directed conversation,” he said. “India has more recent and more rapid development, and it’s a conversation that just comes up more naturally than it does in the United States.”

The Issue with Water

Dr. Zaitchik’s current project is a USAID sponsored study with colleagues in India analyzing and quantifying groundwater resources in India—something he sees as one of the biggest resource issues in the world.

“We use a combination of models and satellite image analysis to understand how much water is being consumed, but also how we can incorporate satellite data to models of hydrology and water resources so we can get better estimates. These can be applied to scenarios for analysis,” he said. “We’re focused on both the impacts on resources and the implications of water resources for the massive drinking water supply initiatives currently going on in the country. For example, there’s a massive initiative underway to get piped water into more homes in rural areas.”

He noted that one of the biggest drains on resources is irrigated farming mixed with drought caused by shifting climate patterns. Lack of water and land degradation can cause erosion and potential desertification.

“If you can’t have access to water in these places, then you lose production and that has implications for cash crops and the local regional economy, and it has an impact on your local climate conditions,” Zaitchik said. “All of these potential follow-on effects from what happens when land management changes in response to a loss of water access are tremendous.”

“It can lead to significant social instability because populations shift away from areas where economies have been supported through irrigation,” he elaborated. “There’s also political instability associated with any attempts to regulate it. That’s highly controversial in both India and the United States.”

“The key is partnership, and it’s about finding the best way to collaborate.”

Zaitchik explained that water and climate projects are a great area for US-India collaboration because the United States has had the same emerging crisis. He references unsustainable groundwater pumping as something both countries have in common, and that each could learn from each other’s research.

“Collaboration could be really powerful at this time in history. It’s an area where both countries are facing substantial stresses in their own ways, and both countries have tremendous capacity to address them,” he said. “It’s always so exciting to work in India because of the number of researchers and practitioners doing tremendous work to address these evolving crises. The ability of India and the US to be resilient to ongoing global change will be determinative of how the whole world deals with it.”