What does multispecies co-existence, governance, and care look like from within South Asia?

This convening brought together practitioners working across ecology, law, technology, research, design, arts, justice, and philanthropy, the first of what is intended to be an ongoing series. The focus was on surfacing the range of approaches already underway, and understanding where they align, contradict, or run in parallel.

Using Future Back scenario-building, participants worked with overlapping temporalities rather than linear planning, moving through scenarios drawn from grounded geographies of urban heat corridors, salt migration zones, and estuarine ecosystems. The process invited participants to sit with layered, situated futures and trace the relational and structural shifts already underway.

What became clear was how much is already held in South Asian vocabularies, practices, and seasonal knowledge systems and how rarely these are the starting point. The session pointed toward a need for new shared language and a South Asia-specific reference frame for this work.