The main source of indoor air pollution in Sri Lanka is biomass burning, primarily firewood combustion for cooking. In this study, Ajantha will try to assess the cost of indoor air pollution in terms of health cost and productivity loss to female workers in the tea estate sector in Sri Lanka. He will create a panel dataset by using secondary data available on tea worker wages, productivity and changes made in housing in different tea plantations to estimate the impact of improved kitchen facilities on reduced indoor air pollution and worker health.

There is great concern in all the countries in South Asia about the impacts of climate change on the farming sector. Paddy being the most important cereal crop in Nepal, this study seeks to understand how climate change may affect paddy yields. Prakash will create a historical dataset with information from the different districts in Nepal and use Ricardian and production function approaches to assess the magnitude of likely impacts of climate change on paddy production.

Floods can cause enormous damage, destroying standing crops, houses, lives and livestock. Floods also deposit layers of sand on existing crops, which can cause irreversible harm. The goal of this study is to measure the impact and costs of flood induced sand deposition on cultivable land in Assam. The study will also examine how farm households cope with this situation and what kinds of migration may occur as a result.

The Sundarban Biosphere Reserve, besides being home to one of the largest contiguous mangrove forests in the world, also includes 54 inhabited islands with more than one million people on the Indian side. These remote islanders build river embankments around the islands to protect cultivable land from the saline water. This study seeks to examine locally developed institutional arrangements for managing embankments. It will identify the causes of institutional failure and estimate the cost of embankment failure to the local stakeholders. This is an issue that is likely to become increasingly important as sea levels rise as result of climate change.