Jagdish Krishnaswamy is Dean – School of Environment & Sustainability (SES). He has a BTech in Civil Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, an MS in Statistics and Decision Sciences, and a PhD in Environmental Science with a focus on soils and hydrologic science, both from Duke University, North Carolina, USA. His PhD thesis was on the ‘Impact of Forest Conversion on Soil and Hydrologic Processes in the Terraba Basin of Costa Rica’.

As the Dean of SES, Jagdish leads the build-out of the School, providing strategic direction and operational guidance to expand its academic footprint, research activities, and network, practice portfolio, and capacity building initiatives. Jagdish helps in the development of the IIHS, Kengeri Campus and its environs as India’s first Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory (LTUEO) and strengthens the institution’s profile in ecology and conservation science.

Jagdish’s research has spanned the entire continuum from the semi-wild to the urban, covering USA, Costa Rica, Africa, and India in ecohydrology, climate change science, landscape ecology, ecosystem and ecosystem services, responses to global change, and biodiversity and conservation science. His work on conservation science and planning led to the nomination of the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, besides informing the investment of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund (CEPF) civil society-led pilot projects. His work on ecohydrology, impact of invasive species, and ecological flows in rivers has influenced policy and management at the state and Centre. He is part of the team that released a report for policymakers on the state of ecological restoration in India, as well the first ever mapping of priority sites for both biodiversity and ecosystem services, both sponsored by the Government of India’s Mission on Biodiversity and Human Wellbeing.

Jagdish uses time-series, remotely sensed and geo-spatial methods and Bayesian statistical models for his research on understanding complex changes in the environment over space and time.

Jagdish’s work in climate science and impact of extreme rain and warming on ecosystems across India and globally, using both densely gauged catchments and remote sensing time-series data as well as his policy-relevant work in conservation planning, led to his nomination for the scoping and design of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Special Report on Land and Climate. Shortly after, he was nominated as Coordinating Lead Author for the synthesis chapter of this special IPCC report, besides contributing as an author to several parts of the entire report and negotiating its acceptance at the plenary with governments. In 2022, he was part of the team of IPCC authors who crafted and wrote the three-volume Summary for Urban Policymakers (SUP), a synthesis of the urban relevant parts of all the IPCC AR6 cycle reports.

In Bengaluru, his work on the LTUEO, the first of its kind for a mega-city in the Global South, includes research, practice, and training that connects food, water, ecology, and biodiversity in an urbanising context. Jagdish is one of the few scientists who has been involved with both the IPCC and IPBES, and in 2024, he was one of the scoping experts nominated for crafting the outline of the Intergovernmental Science–Policy Platform for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Second Assessment. Thus, Jagdish is one of the few scientists who have been involved with both of these important global science–policy assessments.

Jagdish has successfully supervised four PhD students and co-supervised three PhD students across multiple institutions, and 13 master’s students at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR. He has served on the PhD committees of eight PhD students in India and USA. He serves on the editorial board of three interdisciplinary journals: Urbanisation; Ecology, Economy and Society, and Water Security, and is on the Board of Trustees of the MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, Chennai.