Climate Change
Climate Change, Conflict, and Everyday Crisis
Nyan Corridor studies climate change in contexts of violent conflict and political rupture. This research examines how climate-related stress is experienced, interpreted, and managed by communities living under conditions of armed conflict, militarisation, and economic collapse following Myanmar’s 2021 military coup.
Drawing on long-term community-based ethnographic research across eight regions of Myanmar, the Nyan Corridor explores how rising temperatures, erratic rainfall, floods, droughts, environmental degradation, and health impacts are lived alongside insecurity, displacement, and breakdowns in local governance. Rather than treating climate change as a separate or abstract threat, the study shows how climate impacts are intensified by conflict and repression, shaping people’s ability to cope, adapt, and plan for the future.
The research foregrounds local perceptions of climate change, documenting how people explain environmental change through material, moral, religious, and political frameworks. Climate stress is often understood not in terms of global emissions, but through deforestation, mining, militarised extraction, pollution, and the erosion of social and spiritual norms. In many places, climate change is narrated as part of a wider crisis—one marked by violence, greed, moral decline, and loss of control over land, forests, and resources.
By centering everyday experience in conflict-affected settings, this strand of research deepens understanding of the climate–conflict nexus. It highlights how war, authoritarian governance, and economic breakdown reshape environmental vulnerability, silence environmental action, and force communities to prioritise survival over long-term ecological care. At the same time, the research documents how people continue to make sense of climate change through memory, belief, and local knowledge, even under conditions of extreme uncertainty.
Climate Change in the Naga Indo–Myanmar Borderlands
We are also studying the climate change in the Naga Indo–Myanmar borderlands which is not studied as a single or isolated environmental problem. It is understood as a lived condition that unfolds through changes in governance, belief systems, livelihoods, and everyday practices. In this region, shifts in rainfall patterns, forest cover, crop reliability, pests, and water availability are closely entangled with political histories, development interventions, religious change, and borderland dynamics.
Nyan Corridor is studying climate change through the lens of agrarian change, understood in a broad sense. Rather than focusing narrowly on land and environmental changes, the research looks at long-term transformations in power, authority, morality, and human–environment relations. These transformations shape how people farm, move, worship, extract resources, and imagine their futures under conditions of ecological uncertainty.
Using ethnographic and social-analytical research across Naga communities on both sides of the India–Myanmar border, the organisation documents how climate change is perceived, interpreted, and acted upon in everyday life. Farmers describe unpredictable seasons, declining soil fertility, drying springs, new pests, and failing crops. These experiences are not framed only in technical terms. They are also understood through moral and spiritual explanations, historical memory, and local ecological knowledge passed across generations.
The research pays close attention to consequences. Climate stress interacts with state policies, market pressures, and religious institutions to reshape livelihood choices, food security, and social relations. Households respond by adjusting crops, shortening fallow cycles, entering cash markets, migrating, or relying more heavily on purchased food. At the same time, climate change provokes reflection on responsibility, human greed, care for forests, and obligations to ancestors and future generations.
By grounding climate research in lived experience and borderland history, the study shows that climate change is not only about environmental exposure. It is about how political arrangements, moral worlds, and historical trajectories condition who bears risk, who adapts, and whose knowledge counts.
