Senior Research Associate,
Adaptation and Resilience

carol@sustainablefutures.org

Carol Wilson is a Senior Research Associate, Adaptation and Resilience, at the Sustainable Futures Collaborative. She focuses on how coastal communities and governments are responding to India’s climate crisis, from grassroots adaptation strategies to the policies and plans shaping coastal resilience at scale. Her research expertise spans the political ecology of health, the politics of development and environmental governance, and the socio-ecological determinants of health, an interdisciplinary lens she has built through ethnographic fieldwork across coastal communities and Adivasi villages. Her doctoral research at the Centre of Social Medicine and Community Health, Jawaharlal Nehru University, examined psychosocial distress and environmental crisis with the coastal communities of Chellanam, Kerala, tracing how ecological crisis reshapes everyday life and wellbeing. She has contributed to national and international collaborative research projects with WHO-SEARO, Jawaharlal Nehru University, WSSCC and University of Delhi. Her earlier work has included research on maternal health and climate change, behavioural transitions under the Swachh Bharat Mission (Rural), and a ten-month immersive action research on gendered 'kamzori' among tribal communities in eastern Madhya Pradesh. She holds an MPhil in Development Practice from Ambedkar University, Delhi, and submitted her PhD thesis at JNU in 2026. She has also completed a Post Graduate Diploma in Epidemiology from the Public Health Foundation of India and rounded out her training with intensive programmes at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health on environmental justice and the built environment.