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The Appraising Risk Partnership

A Historical Database of Climatic Crises in the Indian Ocean World

About Us

The Historical Database ↗

A major element of the partnership is dedicated to the creation of a database that can be used to store, categorize, analyze and disseminate information about historical events and locations in the Indian Ocean World.

Maps and Visualizations ↗

One of the goals of the Appraising Risk partnership is to utilize data collected from diverse specialties and disciplines to analyze and visualize the complex relationship between environment, ecology, culture and history in the Indian Ocean World.

The IOW Podcast ↗

The Indian Ocean World Podcast seeks to educate and inform its listeners on topics concerning the relationship between humans and the environment throughout the history of the Indian Ocean World.

Our Project

The Appraising Risk Partnership is an international collaboration of scholars and researchers dedicated to exploring the critical role of climatic crisis in the past and future of the Indian Ocean World. With generous support from The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the partnership seeks to create a comprehensive spatial and temporal database of human-environment interaction and interdependence during periods of climatic change.

Latest from the Partnership:

Our GIS team creates visualizations as they work on linking historical data with maps. Here is a selection of them!
View more of our visualizations
View some of our data sources

The Indian Ocean World Centre (IOWC) is a research initiative and resource base established to promote the study of the history, economy, and cultures of the lands and peoples of the Indian Ocean world (IOW) – from China to Southeast and South Asia, the Middle East and Africa.

Our most recent podcast:

Lukas Ley & Tarini Monga – S.AND – The Indian Ocean World Podcast

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Dr. Lukas Ley and Tarini Monga (both Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology) to discuss the research group, "S.AND – The Future of Coastal Cities in the Indian Ocean." Their conversation covers the shifting roles of sand in human environments, with particular attention to their current fieldwork in the port of Marseille and peri-urban Goa, respectively. Lukas Ley is Research Head of the S.AND research group. He holds PhD in Anthropology from the University of Toronto and his first monograph, Building on Borrowed Time: Raising Seas and Failing Infrastructure, was published in 2021. Tarini Monga is a PhD candidate in the S.AND research group at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology. Links: S.AND project website: https://www.s-and.org/ Dr. Ley's profile: https://www.eth.mpg.de/ley Ms. Monga's profile: https://www.eth.mpg.de/monga The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced and edited by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present." Music: "Nam Nhi-tu" by M. Nguyen Van Minh-Con
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Cover image from Pexels