Hi, I’m Bushra Zaheer and I will be completing my placement in Cape Town, South Africa!
I will be working with an organization called Natural Justice. For the past decade, these individuals have been working at the intersection between environment and law, by completing a variety of projects surrounding topics of climate change, indigenous land reclamation and traditional knowledge sharing.
As an intern at the Cape Town Hub, I will be mainly working under the Governance of Land and Natural Resources Programme and the Traditional Knowledge and Benefit Sharing Programme. I will be helping to address gaps in the publication of project results by exploring new interactive ways of sharing stories, such as annotated mapping techniques. I plan on connecting this role to my research as I seek to make existing knowledge about climate migration more accessible to wider audiences by surveying qualitative evidence.
Environmental law is where my passion for development studies lies, and I have been able to make this dream placement a reality after being offered the Filosa Family International Development Studies Placement Scholarship from the CCDS. I am so excited to see how I can be part of a local solution to complex global issues related to resource governance and indigenous rights.