We found Hari Srinivas in an effort to contact someone from the Global Development Research Center (GRDC) just in time for World Oceans Day on June 8. The Center had already made every effort to promote ocean conservation and appeal to the United Nations in order to make World Oceans Day an official day of recognition. See here.
We got one of the best people we could--Hari is The coordinator of the Center.
Little did we know that the GRDC was based in Japan, and when we found Hari Srinivas, he had just returned from Ethiopia to be thrust into all the chaos and conservation that went into promoting World Oceans Day.
Hari wasn't able to get to us in time for the big Ocean event, but he kindly answered our questions later and we had the opportunity to find out a great deal--from his opinion on current climate issues to the perspective of the GRDC to the marine situation in Japan!
Explain your background and how you got to the position you are in today?
Trained as an architect and urban planner, I am currently Coordinator of the Global Development Research Center (GDRC) in Kobe, Japan. I am concurrently also a Visiting Professor at six universities in Japan.
I have a Masters degree in Urban Development and Management (1991) from the Asian Institute of Technology in Bangkok Thailand, and a Ph.D. (1996) from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan.
Besides global and urban environmental issues, my current interests range from governance, information management and rural development issues to community innovativeness and NGO development. Much of these varied themes came into fore as a result of exploring interlinkages among different themes and looking at ‘problems-behind-problems’. This approach lies at the center of GDRC’s 15 programmes which I set up in 2001.
What is the Global Development Research Center?
The Global Development Research Center is an independent nonprofit think tank that carries out initiatives in education, research and practices, in the spheres of environment, urban, community and information, and at scales that are effective.
GDRC is an attempt to consolidate disparate issues, themes and topics into one umbrella to highlight their interconnectedness and interdisciplinary nature. With the focus being more on knowledge transfer and information dissemination, GDRC focuses on the micro scale - at the level of the man-on-the-street, where most of the everyday decisions are taken.
GDRC aims at bringing together the disparate resources on a three pronged approach:
Research and development at the global level
Education and Training at the regional level
Policy and programme development at the local level
It functions as an information repository (in terms of gathering, collating, packaging and disseminating information); as a research and training center (in terms of organizing facilitating training sessions, seminars and conferences) and as a educational center (knowledge developed from the activities of the center will be fed back into academic programmes and capacity building exercises).
How does the GDRC or your role in particular play a role in bring environmental awareness and change, especially in the marine department?
One fact struck me as significant – most ancient civilizations, as well as most of today’s major megacities were/are built very close to rivers or coasts.
While exploring the interlinkages between cities and coasts, I also expanded the scope to include oceans in general, as well as small islands (because they are fragile ecosystems that are first impacted by any changes in our oceans).
As the volume of research that I carried out on this theme – oceans, coasts and small islands – grew, and the network of people expanded, this became a significant GDRC programme in itself.
And therein lies the key message and thrust of GDRC’s approach – that much of what is happening to the marine environment today is a result of our everyday lifestyles and consumption patterns that is cumulatively and eventually impacting the marine environment in different ways.
You're currently living in Japan. Explain what the marine/ocean situation is like there?
GDRC’s global work is based out of Kobe, Japan.
Japan being an island nation has an intrinsic and symbiotic relationship with the oceans around it from ancient times – whether it is for food, for travel or for mineral extraction.
As its economy grew over the years, and the quality of life improved significantly, this ‘demand’ on the oceans, especially for food, also increased substantially. While there are a number of aspects of Japan’s history and culture that can provide important lessons for living symbiotically with the oceans, the sheer pressure that modern lifestyles and patterns of development put on coasts and oceans override any ‘benefits’ from its ancient culture.
With Japan’s food self-sufficiency currently standing at less than 40% in 2008 in calorific terms, its dependency on external and foreign sources of nutrition, particularly deep-ocean sources of fish and other seafood and meat, places a considerable burden on global food stocks.
What are some of the problems going on with the ocean these days?
GDRC’s approach to understanding problems faced by oceans go beyond that of environmental or ecological aspects. Much of the problems that oceans are facing today have precedences and starting points that are not in the oceans at all – it lies on land: our lifestyles, the things we manufacture, produce, use and dispose on a daily basis.
Every decision we take on a daily basis – what shall I have for lunch today? – has an eventual and cumulative impact on the oceans.
We need to look at the land, at our lifestyles and at the futures we are creating, to understand the problems of oceans today.
What is your opinion on topics like climate change, ocean acidification, marine conservation?
As mentioned above, and as implied by GDRC’s feature on “Urban Interface:
Human fingerprints all over ... “ the eventual and visible problems such as climate change, ocean acidification and marine degradation all have human precedences on land.
For example, ocean acidification has a long string of problems-behind problems that start with the quality of life and lifestyle decisions that we take on a daily basis, resulting in the production and consumption patterns, leading to wastes and chemical pollution that eventually find their way to the oceans.
Do you think we need a day like World Oceans Day to remember the ocean? Shouldn’t we celebrate the ocean everyday?
Yes and Yes.
Walk into a local Mayor’s office and try to explain about the problems that oceans are facing. He will listen to you, but will forget about it – because behind you is a person who wants to talk about World Health Day, and a long line of people wanting to talk about various different global observations. Yes, we need a World Oceans Day, to highlight the problems being faced by oceans, and to channel energies and action for the oceans.
But the real aim of raising awareness of the problems of oceans is more than just a beach cleanup. It is to link the problems back to our everyday quality of life/lifestyle decisions. Like the butterfly effect of chaos theory, we need to look at out tiny individual everyday actions that will eventually lead to a better ocean environment. And so yes, we also need to celebrate it everyday.
What are some of the things we can do to spread awareness and combat the problems the ocean is currently facing?
I think we need to go beyond visible one-off activities such as exhibitions or beach clean-ups to more actions that create the intangible interlinkages of our lifestyles to ocean problems. Every lifestyle decision we take – have lunch, buy a TV or washing machine, drive to work and more – has an impact little by little, on the environment, both land and ocean. Are you doing anything special on World Oceans Day?
Yes – GDRC will continue to work with local citizen’s groups, NGOs and networks to highlight the messages outlined above. For more information on Hari Srinivas, please visit his CV site here.
We found Hari Srinivas in an effort to contact someone from the Global Development Research Center (GRDC) just in time for World Oceans Day on June 8. The Center had already made every effort to promote ocean conservation and appeal to the United Nations in order to make World Oceans Day an official day of recognition. 
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