Aishani Pandey supervised by Dr. Aniket Alam received her Master of Technology – Dual Degree (LCD). Here’s a  summary of her research work on Modelling Polycrisis in the Western Himalayas: Interdependent Risks and Systemic Vulnerabilities

This thesis examines polycrisis as a condition of interdependent and mutually reinforcing crises, focusing on the Western Himalayan region encompassing Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand. In recent years, the term polycrisis has gained prominence to describe situations in which environmental, economic, political, and social stresses overlap in ways that blur causal boundaries and complicate policy responses. While existing studies have extensively analysed individual crises in the Western Himalayas such as climate change impacts, agricultural stress, migration, and disaster risk, these processes are often examined in isolation. This thesis argues that such siloed approaches are insufficient for understanding the region’s systemic vulnerability. The central contribution of this work is the development of a structured modeling framework that represents polycrisis as an interconnected system rather than a collection of parallel challenges. Our approach begins by identifying four main domains of environmental, economic, political and social aspects of polycrisis. Within these, we select key variables (nodes) such as climate change, migration, agricultural productivity, and disaster preparedness and governance; each broken down into concomitant sub-factors (subnodes). Using an extensive review of peer-reviewed literature, government reports, and region-specific case studies, the thesis systematically maps both first-order relationships between nodes and the subnodes and second-order relationships between subnodes themselves. This two-level mapping reveals feedback loops and cascading pathways that are often obscured in domain-specific analyses. Across both mapping iterations, that is first-order relationships (node ↔ subnode) being the first iteration and second-order relationships (subnode ↔ subnode) being the second iteration, the thesis identifies and documents approximately 120 relationships, which are categorised using a five-point ordinal scale ranging from Very Strong to Negligible. This categorisation is grounded in empirical evidence and conceptual studies centered around Western Himalayas or comparable mountain ranges. The resulting network highlights the centrality of climatic variables, the mediating role of governance, and the reinforcing interactions between agricultural stress and migration. The framework serves as a proof of concept for simulating cascading effects across socio-ecological systems and informing anticipatory policy responses in mountainous regions under stress by addressing how multiple, co-occurring crises interact across environmental, economic, political, and social systems to constitute a regional polycrisis, and proposes a systematic model to represent and quantify these linkages. 

June 2026