A large amount of rice straw is burned after the kharif crop season in the northwest India region. This practice of crop residue burning releases large amounts of pollutants into the atmosphere, causing severe conditions for human health and economic activities. The Aakash project is delineating the science of air pollution in the region (including the national capital of Delhi), raising social awareness, and exploring ways for sustainable agriculture.

Climate change and social change, including accelerating development, urbanization, and globalization are increasing pressure on water, energy and food resources, increasing the number of tradeoffs and potential conflicts among these resources that have their complex interactions. In order to address these issues, the objectives of the project were to understand the complexity of the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus system and to create policy options to reduce trade-offs among resources and to alleviate conflicts of resource users using scientific evidence and under assumptions of uncertainty to maximize human-environmental security. The project also proposed solutions to local and global environmental problems by contributing to global research networks associated with the Future Earth platform and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

Climate change and social change, including accelerating development, urbanization, and globalization are increasing pressure on water, energy and food resources, increasing the number of tradeoffs and potential conflicts among these resources that have their complex interactions. In order to address these issues, the objectives of the project were to understand the complexity of the water-energy-food (WEF) nexus system and to create policy options to reduce trade-offs among resources and to alleviate conflicts of resource users using scientific evidence and under assumptions of uncertainty to maximize human-environmental security. The project also proposed solutions to local and global environmental problems by contributing to global research networks associated with the Future Earth platform and the U.N. Sustainable Development Goals.

The great coastal cities of Asia place substantial burdens on subsurface environments, but little is known of the impact or its environmental or potential social significance. Subsurface conditions merit particular attention in Asian coastal cities where population numbers, urban density and use of subsurface environments have expanded rapidly. The goals of this project were to evaluate the subsurface environments of seven Asian coastal cities for such problems as subsidence, groundwater contamination and subsurface warming, and to suggest how they can be addressed or avoided. This project was therefore designed to reveal the groundwater recharge rate, storage, redox and other natural subsurface capacities in Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Taipei, Bangkok, Jakarta and Manila, and to measure the pace and scale of human disturbance of subsurface environments in these cities in the past century.