About

Dr. Milan Shrestha is an ecological and environmental anthropologist, currently working as a Lecturer (School of Sustainability) and Senior Sustainability Scientist (Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability) at Arizona State University (ASU). Milan is also affiliated with the Central Arizona – Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research (CAP LTER) Program at ASU, where he completed his post-doctoral research focusing on a cross-site comparative study of urban sprawl and land fragmentation in the US Southwest.

Milan has a long-term research focus in the Nepal Himalaya and the US Southwest. His early work focused on agriculture and land use change, food security and vulnerability, and local knowledge and institutions. He analyzed how the shared cultural knowledge and rules shape agricultural land use strategies, forest governance, and agro-biodiversity, and what are relationships of land use change with the “exogenous forces” such as, market economy, institutions, deforestation, conflicts, and regional level land-cover change trajectories.

More recently, his research has focused on the climate-water-agriculture nexus, studying climate change (mainly glacier retreat and glacial lakes) and land fragmentation. His current research projects include an NSF’s CNH grant funded community-based approach to reduce glacier lake outburst flooding (GLOF) in the Mt. Everest region, adaptive pathways to climate change in the Gandaki River Basin of Nepal, and the urban conversions of agricultural lands in the Phoenix Metropolitan Area and the Kathmandu Valley.

Outside of academia, Milan is a serious hobbyist of nature-culture photography (500px and vimeo), always seeking to improve my design-visualization skills. He is captivated by mountain communities as well as Arizona’s unique landscapes, which are often the subjects of his research and hobbies.