THINKPAWS

The rapid pace of urbanization, characterized by the growth of infrastructure and migration of populations from rural areas to cities, is a global issue. In the coming decades, the majority of urban dwellers will be located in tropical regions, particularly Asia and Africa, which face complex challenges in balancing conservation and development. As developing countries prepare to urbanize over 2.5 billion citizens, it is crucial to assess the wide-ranging ecological, health, social, economic, and cultural impacts of urban expansion on both humans and non-human life forms across various scales, including land, water bodies, seas, and oceans. Thinkpaws Sustainability Research Foundation is a scientific think tank based out of New Delhi, India and our research is dedicated to advancing our understanding of the “Planet of Cities”. We are exploring the ways in which urbanization and the associated waste it generates are transforming the global biosphere and altering the relationships between humans and animals in shared spaces. The objectives of Thinkpaws include long-term, actionable research for urban systems in order to understand key vulnerabilities that underlie a complex web of interdependent players and components constituting urban systems across the world with a key focus on global south, where the process of urbanization is still ongoing. By studying the complexities of urbanization in these regions, we aim to tackle sustainable human-animal coexistence. The idea is to understand systems at a very fundamental level by aggregating knowledge and expertise from across multiple domains in order to better learn about the factors that pose great risks to ecological systems, living species and the future of sustainability.