There is a particular kind of scientist who begins not in a laboratory but in a field, ankle-deep in the arithmetic of a village well, and who carries that ground-level vantage all the way to the rooms where nations argue over the fate of glaciers. Dr Anjal Prakash is that scientist. His career, read end to end, is less a curriculum vitae than a map of the water cycle itself, tracing every stage from the tap in a Gujarat hamlet to the frozen archive of the Third Pole, and now to the crowded, overheating cities where most of humanity actually lives.
He started, in 1997, at VIKSAT in Ahmedabad, working the unglamorous end of the problem: how a community organises itself around scarce water. It is easy, decades later and several IPCC assessment cycles on, to treat that beginning as a footnote. It should not be. Everything Prakash has done since, at WaterAid, at the Gujarat government’s WASMO, and across nearly six years leading SaciWATERs’ research and advocacy work on interdisciplinary water systems, has kept faith with a conviction formed at that ground level: that climate science which loses sight of the people standing in the water is not finished science.
That conviction is what took him to Kathmandu in 2014, to coordinate ICIMOD’s Himalayan Adaptation, Water and Resilience programme across the Indus, Ganges and Brahmaputra basins, and what has kept him returning to the mountains ever since. Between 2017 and 2019, still based in Kathmandu, he served as a Coordinating Lead Author on the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, a role that put him inside the room where the world’s understanding of shrinking glaciers, retreating snowlines and destabilising permafrost was formally written down. It is a credential that places him, quietly, among the handful of scholars who helped draft the very scientific vocabulary now being used to describe what is happening on Himalayan slopes in 2026, the vegetation lines climbing, the ice thinning, the valleys emptying without warning.
From there the arc widens rather than settles. A Lead Authorship on the Sixth Assessment Report’s chapter on cities and key infrastructure. A current Lead Authorship on the IPCC’s Special Report on Climate Change and Cities, still being written. Editorial seats at Frontiers in Climate, at Nature Portfolio’s Nature Urban Sustainability, at PLOS Climate, each one a small act of gatekeeping in the international conversation about how the planet is changing and who gets believed about it. A column, at various points, in BQ Prime, The Quint and Forbes India, because some ideas do not belong only in journals.
Today Prakash teaches public policy at FLAME University in Pune, having arrived there in May 2026 after several years as Research Director at the Indian School of Business’s Bharti Institute of Public Policy in Hyderabad, a city he still calls home and where he continues to teach as ISB’s Visiting Professor of Sustainability and Public Policy, and as adjunct faculty in the Department of Liberal Arts at IIT Hyderabad. It is a fitting geography for a career that has always refused to choose between the local and the planetary: a Hyderabad address, a Wageningen doctorate, a Kathmandu chapter, a body of IPCC work that spans oceans, cryosphere and cities in turn.
What makes Prakash worth listening to on the Himalaya’s present crisis is not that he studies ice. He does not, in the narrow sense. What he studies is the argument ice makes to the people living below it, and the policies that argument should produce. Few scholars now working have stood, quite literally, at both ends of that sentence.
