“Climate Brides” by Climate Brides

South Asia has one of the highest rates of child marriage, and it is also highly vulnerable to climate change. But how are these two issues connected? 🌊

At Climate Brides, we are documenting the many ways climate change is deepening the drivers of child marriage across South Asia—through loss of livelihoods, displacement, food insecurity, and disruptions to schooling.

Our #ClimateBridesMap explores these linkages in a clear, visual way. Visit www.climatebrides.com to download the map and our short explainers for a deeper dive. All resources are available in multiple languages.

Use them in classrooms, public forums, conferences, and media spaces to inform discussion and inspire action. For now, help us spread the word.

Illustration: @dore.mai
Research: @reetiks7

“Mapping child mariage in South Asia” by Climate Brides

What changes when child marriage is viewed through both prevalence and population scale?

Child marriage in South Asia looks very different depending on what we measure. Prevalence rates are often used to compare countries, highlighting where the practice is most common. By this measure, Bangladesh (51%), Nepal (35%) and Afghanistan (29%) continue to record high proportions of women married before the age of 18, reflecting persistent structural inequality and vulnerability.

But prevalence alone tells only part of the story. India’s rate (23%) is lower than several neighbouring countries, yet its population size means it accounts for the largest (absolute) number of women and girls who have been married in childhood globally, an estimated 222.4 million. Elsewhere, countries such as Sri Lanka (10%) and the Maldives (2%) show comparatively low prevalence, illustrating the region’s uneven trajectories.

Even these figures remain incomplete. Many marriages are never formally registered, meaning some of the most vulnerable girls remain absent from official statistics.

📌🗺️ South Asia therefore reveals a key point. Child marriage is shaped not only by how common it is, but by how many lives it affects. This map brings prevalence and demographic scale together as part of the Climate Brides project.

Compiled by: Reetika Revathy Subramanian, PhD
Data Source: The Child Marriage Data Portal, UNICEF (2026)

“Dynamics of Tamil Urban Ethnoterritories in Diaspora” Video Podcast of Delon Madavan’s presentation during Cornell University’s South Asian Program Seminar (2020) 

We would like to share the online video presentation on “Dynamics of Tamil Urban Ethnoterritories in Diaspora (Kuala Lumpur, Paris, Singapore)” given by Delon Madavan on Monday October 5th at 11.15AM (New York time)/ 5.15 PM (Paris time).
Sharika Thiranagama was the respondent for this presentation.
This online event was hosted by the South Asia Program of Cornell University

About the Seminar:

Studying the ties and practices that bind Tamils to the districts they inhabit or visit is essential to understand the ways Tamils use and transform space in diaspora. The territorialization of Tamil identity, that is, their spatial extension and the continuation of their socio-cultural practices, is not always immediately visible in multi-ethnic cities in which Tamils are a minority. Tamils transform those spaces where they are dominant according to their own cultural and social practices and establish venues conducive to social interactions. Furthermore, the polarization of space and the dynamics of identity networks explains the various attitudes of Tamils towards the social frequentation of certain areas. Finally, the presence and role of places of sociability, such as religious, cultural or commercial establishments, are essential to understand Tamils’ relationship with locality and thus the reasons for which these districts are recognized or not as “Tamil” by Tamils themselves. With specific examples drawn from fieldwork in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and Paris, this paper shows that the affirmation of Tamil identity and the constitution of Tamil ‘ethnoterritories’ in certain areas is not only the outcome of Tamil action but also the consequence of state-sponsored urban planning policies, such as eradication of slums, gentrification and heritagization of specific zones, and the frequentation of these zones by non-Tamil migrants.

About the Speaker:

Delon Madavan was the Tamil Studies Visiting Scholar at Cornell’s South Asia Program in Spring 2020. He completed his PhD in Geography at Paris-Sorbonne University (France) in 2013. He has taught at the Department of Geography at Sorbonne University and also gave lectures at the National Institute for Oriental Languages and Civilizations (INALCO) in Paris. Madavan is Researcher Fellow at the Centre of Studies and Researches on India, South Asia and its Diaspora (University of Québec à Montréal, Canada) and Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the Centre of Studies and Researches on India and South Asia (CNRS-EHESS, France). In his research, he examines the articulation between migration, identity and space to analyze forms of integration of the Tamil populations in several cities (Jaffna, Colombo, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Paris & Montréal). Madavan is the author and co-author of several articles and books on Tamils in Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Singapore and France.

About the Respondent: 

Sharika Thiranagama, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University. Her research explores the intersection of political mobilization and domestic life, focusing on highly fraught contexts of violence, inequality, and intense political mobilization. Her major work has been on the Sri Lankan civil war and research with two different minority ethnic groups, Sri Lankan Tamils and Sri Lankan Muslims, exploring the ways in which militancy, political violence and large-scale displacement became folded into intergenerational transmissions of memory and ethnic identification. Most recently, in new fieldwork on Dalit communities in Kerala, South India, she examines how communist led political mobilization reconfigured older caste identities, re-entrenching caste inequities into new kinds of private neighborhood life. She focuses on the household as the prime site of the inheritance of work, stigma and servitude as well as the possibility of reproduction, dignity and social mobility. She is the author of “In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka” (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011).

 

“NASA Earth Observatory images of flooding in Sri Lanka in late May 2017″by Joshua Stevens

Torrential rains caused severe flooding in Sri Lanka in late May 2017. After more than 48 hours of nonstop rain, water levels rose rapidly in the country’s south, spurring emergency evacuations in multiple districts.

On May 28, 2017, the MultiSpectral Instrument (MSI) on the European Space Agency’s Sentinel-2 satellite captured a false-color image of the flood. An earlier image taken on January 29, 2017, by the Operational Land Imager (OLI) on Landsat 8 shows the same area before the waters rose. Both images were made with visible and infrared light (OLI bands 6-5-3 and MSI bands 11-8-3) to distinguish the presence of water on the ground.

Matara was among the hardest hit towns. Low-lying areas around the Nilwala Ganga River (in blue) also have been submerged.

In many areas, flooding has contaminated wells and tainted water supplies. Sri Lankan Foreign Minister Ravi Karunanayake said his country has received medicine and relief supplies from at least a dozen countries, according to reporting by Al Jazeera. Sri Lanka’s Disaster Management Center reported more than half a million people have been affected by the flooding. Search and rescue operations are underway.

to read more: https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=90322&src=iotdrss

“3 Maps to understand Sri Lanka’s Minority-Majority divide in today’s vote” by The Republic Square

Trois cartes qui donnent à comprendre un peu de la complexité ethno-religieuse du Sri Lanka.

As personalities, both President Mahinda Rajapaksa and common candidate Maithripala Sirisena appeals to the same rural Sinhala vote base. Their political coalitions however means that candidate Maithripala will draw in the majority of the votes from the minority communities, while President Rajapska is expected to win in bulk of the areas where there is a Sinhala-Buddhist Majority.

The South Asia blog has helpfully developed three maps that visualizes the geographic ethnic distribution which may resemble their vote when Sri Lankans go to the polls today.

via: http://www.therepublicsquare.com/…/3-maps-to-understand-ma…/

Cartes géologiques de Sri Lanka par André Louchet

André Louchet, Professeur de géographie à l’université Paris-Sorbonne, nous fait l’amitié de partager une série de cartes géologiques des différentes régions de Sri Lanka qu’il a dessiné.

 

La carte géologique de la région de Jaffna

 

Agrandissement de la légende de la carte de la région de Jaffna

 

La carte de la région d’Anuradhapura

 

La carte géologique de la région de Batticaloa

 

La carte topographique de la région de Galle

Agrandissement de la légende de la carte de la région de Galle

La carte géologique de la région d’Hambantota

La carte géologique de la région de Trincomalee

 

La carte géologique de la région de Colombo.