The ambition in this study is to acknowledge the importance of involving local people in sustainable development work. Also to emphasize the great value of collaboration between global organisations, grassroots organisations and local people in the progress of development work. The method being used in this thesis is mainly semi-structured interviews with six representatives from four different non-governmental organisations, NGOs. Two of these organisations have a more environmental and conservation purpose while the other two focus more on the human perspective as they are working with empowerment, education and food security.The area that I have chosen for this research is called Nilgiris which is located in south India. In this research I focused on World Wildlife Fund, WWF, as a global organisation and the purpose is to see whether or not they collaborate with some of the local grassroots organisations in the area. Local organisations generally have good contact with the local people so I consider them as a link between the global organisation and the local people. The theories I have used are a theory of sustainable development, which argues that none of the three approaches, economic, environmental or social can be excluded when sustainable development is pursued. I have also focused on Participatory Rural Appraisal, PRA, this theory is underlying the importance of the local people’s involvement and that organisations must trust the local people’s capacity. The third theory for this research is three interpretations of environment. The conclusion is that co-operation between the global and local organisations are essential in the process of making good sustainable development. The local people that are being affected and emerged in various development projects need to be involved and informed about the project´s aim for the projects to be successful.

A considerable amount of knowledge exists for planning, designing, and implementing rural water supply schemes in developing countries around the world. Generic decision support systems (DSS) and techniques are used to tackle the daunting task of providing water in areas that have poor water resources and limited financial capacity. However, there is a lack of site-specific DSS that utilise local hydrological and socio-economic data for assessing regionally-based rural water supply schemes. In the Nilgiris District of South India, an organizational structure exists for improving local water resources through watershed management projects, but many of the tools used to make informed decisions are ineffective, leading to poorly designed systems. Developing a DSS that uses models applicable to the local conditions, minimizes the need for gathering complex data, and incorporates non-technical factors into the computer algorithms, would greatly improve the process for selecting rural water supply sources in the Nilgiris District. Organising the selection process into a user-friendly computer program would not only benefit the social and economic status of the villages, but also improve the environmental condition of the watershed area. As a result of the need for an improved organizational structure for rural water supply, a prototype DSS called NRWS (Nilgiris Rural Water Supply) was developed in this research. NRWS aids in the process of identifying key issues in selecting sustainable water sources, and systematically guides the user through various methodologies to quantify the potential water sources. The shell of NRWS is developed through Microsoft® Excel using the Visual Basic for Applications programming language. A user-friendly interface directs the user through the program functions by a network of links and forms. The DSS is divided into six modules that represent different criteria used to evaluate potential water sources: water source yield, capital costs, cost and ease of operation and maintenance, impact of development, political and legal constraints, and water quality. The criteria are organized in a decision matrix that provides a total score and rank for each potential water source. There are many different sources that can be used to supply water for domestic use, but only five are considered for NRWS due to their popularity within the Nilgiris District: rooftop rainwater harvesting, check dams, reservoirs, springs, and dug wells. The development of simulation models within the water source yield module for the rainwater harvesting and check dam sources involved gathering local hydrological data. An extensive database of precipitation data was developed for the Nilgiris District, including 19 rain gauge stations spread evenly across the district. It was discovered that three distinct precipitation regions exist which are influenced to a different degree by the dominant northeast and southwest monsoon periods. As such, point precipitation data for villages throughout the district were calculated based on their location within one of the three regions. The methodology used for developing streamflow was analyzing the baseflow recession constant during the dry season. Since it is only during the dry season that streamflow is significantly reduced, the critical factor is assessing the rate at which flow decreases. A general application of the rooftop rainwater harvesting simulation was applied to ten villages throughout the Nilgiris Distract. One important discovery was that the village of Masinigudi, which lies in a rain shadow and receives the lowest level of annual rainfall in the district, performed to the same level as villages with a high annual rainfall. Since the region surrounding Masinigudi is deprived of water sources such as mountain streams and dug wells, rainwater harvesting may be a feasible and economically viable solution. Next, the entire DSS was applied to a specific case in the Emerald Valley village within the Red Hill micro-watershed. Three sources were considered including rainwater harvesting, check dam, and reservoir. After completing the DSS and viewing the decision matrix, it was found that the check dam source was the most feasible source to implement. The significant factors influencing the decision were a low capital cost and higher water quality level. Water resources rely on a fine ecological balance to ensure a sustainable supply is available to future generations. Over the past fifty years, this balance has not been achieved in India with water resources showing rapid signs of depletion. The total renewable freshwater available in India dropped from 5277 m3/person/year in 1951 to 1342 m3/person/year in 2000: where a condition of scarcity is considered to be below one-thousand m3/person/year (Lal, 2002). The government should play a central role in developing effective management tools that promote better decision-making in meeting the basic water needs of the people, while ensuring the longevity of India’s water resources. As more strain is placed on river systems due to increased demand and industrial uses, coordinated activities are crucial to understanding the real impacts and developing a proactive plan for sustainability. The development of NRWS will hopefully provide an organizational structure that enables decision-makers to understand the impacts associated with different actions related to local water resources. / Thesis / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

The Nilgiri tahr (Hemitragus hylocrius) is an endangered mountain ungulate endemic to the Western Ghats in South India. I studied the status and ecology of the Nilgiri tahr in the Mukurthi National Park, from January 1993 to December 1995. To determine the status of this tahr population, I conducted foot surveys, total counts, and a three-day census and estimated that this population contained about 150 tahr. Tahr were more numerous in the north sector than the south sector of the park. Age-specific mortality rates in this population were higher than in other tahr populations. I conducted deterministic computer simulations to determine the persistence of this population. I estimated that under current conditions, this population will persist for 22 years. When the adult mortality was reduced from 0.40 to 0.17, the modeled population persisted for more than 200 years. Tahr used grasslands that were close to cliffs (p <0.0001), far from roads (p <0.0001), far from shola forests (p <0.01), and far from commercial forestry plantations (p <0.001). Based on these criteria I mapped the suitability of tahr habitat using a GIS and estimated that only 20% of the park area had >50% chance of being used by tahr. I used the GIS to simulate several management options to improve the quality of tahr habitat. Suitable habitat for tahr increased two-fold when roads within the park were closed to vehicular access. Similarly, removal of commercial forestry plantations also resulted in a two-fold increase of suitable habitat, and finally when both road access was restricted and commercial forests were removed, suitable tahr habitat increased three-fold. I used micro-histological analysis on tahr fecal pellets to determine food habits. Grasses constituted 64.2% of their diet. Five plant species (Eulalia phaeothrix, Chrysopogon zeylanicus, Ischaemum rugosum, Andropogon sp., and Carex sp.) accounted for 84.6% of the tahr' diet. These species were found in higher densities in the grasslands of the north sector than the south sector of the park (p <0.001). Predators such as leopard (Panthera pardus) and tiger (Panthera tigris), killed and consumed tahr. Tahr constituted 56% of the leopards' diet and 6% of the tigers' diet. I estimated that leopards and tigers in the park killed and consumed 30 to 60 tahr per year, and this accounted for 19% to 38% of the tahr population. The tahr population in the park has undergone a decline, possible causes for this decline includes high mortality from predation and poaching and loss of habitat. / Ph. D.

Over the last two decades, there have been increasing concerns about environmental degradation and its consequences on the long-term sustainability of socio-economic systems around the world. The publication of the report of the Club of Rome in 1972, (Meadows et al. 1972) focused on the issue of limits to growth. Since then, there has been a profusion of literature and general models have been developed to address the causes of environmental degradation and the unsustainability of current patterns of growth (Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1970; 1990). Essentially these models used parameters that included population growth, consumption levels and aspects of technology, and their effects on the environment. While these models and studies were at a macro level that helped focus attention on the patterns of growth and their unsustainability, they did not provide insights into the mechanisms that were driving ecological change, nor suggest alternative models of growth. An entry point into the current study is to understand the mechanisms that drive ecological change. Motivated by concerns for environmental degradation, and the need to understand the mechanisms that drive ecological change, the study is situated in the academic domain of studies on human-nature interactions. The complex nature of interactions between human groups with their environment and their dependence on the situational context, requires that such studies be at a regional and local scale for which sufficient detail is available. This particular study is situated in the Nilgiri hills in the Western Ghats of Southern India for which such detailed information is available. The study reconstructs the ecological history of the Nilgiri area during the last 200 years, and from this laboratory of human-nature interactions, attempts to derive general patterns.

The oldest dated rocks from the Acasta gneisses of the western Slave Province, Canada present an igneous age of ~4030 Ma. Following this the detrital zircons from the Jack Hills, Narryer Gneiss Terrane, Yilgarn Craton, Western Australia are identified as 4404 ±8 Ma. These discoveries suggest that crustal formation started as early as the Priscian Eon. Hitherto the Earth has gone through a series of interactions involving the atmosphere, hydrosphere, crust, mantle and core. However, only limited remnants of these early processes remain on the accessible crust due to extensive crustal reworking. The Southern Granulite Terrane (SGT) in the southern part of India represents the most extensive exposure of lower crustal granulite terranes in the world. This study mainly focuses on the characteristics of Archean (~2500 Ma) tectonics and nature of subsequent crustal growth, which led to the formation of Archean Nilgiri Block. Detailed fieldwork in this terrane and subsequent petrographic analysis revealed charnockites, hornblende-biotite gneiss, metagabbro/mafic granulite, websterite, amphibolite, Grt-Ky metasediment, metatuff and banded iron formation as the main rock types in this terrane. Field and petrographic results show a regional trend with garnet-orthopyroxene-biotite-quartz-plagioclase-K- feldspar bearing charnockites in the southern part which gets subsequently enriched in clinopyroxene that forms garnet-absent two pyroxene granulites consisting of orthopyroxene-clinopyroxene-quartz-plagioclase-K-feldspar towards the central part. Further north, metagabbro/mafic granulite is enriched in garnet-clinopyroxene-plagioclase assemblage. Websterite, amphibolite, metasediment, metatuff and banded iron formation are stacked and closely associated within this mafic belt in the north. The metagabbro represents peak P-T conditions of ~850°C and ~14kbar compared to the charnockites, which recorded a peak P-T of ~850°C and 9-10kbar. Petrographic results of oxide minerals show that the southern charnockitic part is abundant in rutile-ilmenite association represent reduced conditions compared to the oxidized magnetite-hematite-ilmenite associations in the mafic rocks. This oxidation trend is followed by pyrrhotite-chalcopyrite enriched southern charnockitic region that transforms to pyrite rich northern mafic belt. Ilmenite¬titanite association with no sulphides characterizes the hornblende-biotite gneiss in the entire Nilgiri Block. The geochemical variations of major, trace and rare earth elements show that the granulite-amphibolite grade felsic rocks evolved in an arc magmatic process leaving behind mafic magma, which later intruded into these rocks, in a subduction related arc magmatic process. The U-Pb LA-ICPMS and SHRIMP dating of charnockite, hornblende-biotite gneiss and met gabbros shows ca. 2550 Ma formation age and ca. 2450 Ma metamorphism in this terrane.

Peat from the temperate regions has been used for paleoenvironmental reconstruction using diverse proxies for over a century now. Peat is rare and severely understudied in the tropics. The montane peat bogs of the Nilgiris, southern India have been found to preserve global climatic signals including the Holocene Optimum and the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM). At Sandynallah, one of the oldest peat accumulations in the world at >40 kyr BP, we had undertaken a high resolution paleoenvironmental reconstruction using multiple proxies which are yet to be evaluated in the tropical context. The study consists of 3 main objectives, i. Establishing an accurate high resolution chronology for the peat profile using radiocarbon dating, ii. Extracting vegetation and climate information from C/N ratio and Rock-Eval indices and iii. Using elemental profiles to establish the utility of inorganic geochemical proxies for processes such as weathering and dust transport. High resolution chronology for the site was built using Accelerator Mass Spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dates. To improve accuracy of the age-depth model, we also tested 4 samples for the effects of the AAA (Acid-Alkali-Acid) extraction method, the most common pre-treatment method for peat in the world. We compared ages on bulk samples (acid washed) and AAA treated samples from 4 different depths. We find that for all depths, the ages of the untreated samples do not lie within the internal uncertainty window and differ from the AAA treated sample age by at least an order of magnitude of the internal error, if not more. Based on these results we argue that the internal error should be used in conjunction with a reliable estimate of external error in an age-depth model for more realistic dating of paleoclimatic events. C/N ratios were explored for their paleoclimatic potential in conjunction with Rock-Eval indices and it was found that decomposition in tropical peat, as opposed to temperate peat, may not be sensitive to climatic perturbations. Inorganic geochemical proxies were also evaluated through this study. We see that the major and trace elements, except the lanthanide series do not show many significant trends for paleoenvironmental interpretation. But the lanthanides show some promise for identifying potential sources of dust and weathered material. Our study has addressed the gap in knowledge about the utility of recent geochemical proxies in tropical peat and has attempted to provide a solution to improve reliability in constructing age-depth models.