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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:

Tasha Rijke-Epstein – "Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar" – The Indian Ocean World Podcast

Dr. Philip Gooding (IOWC, McGill) is joined by Prof. Tasha Rijke-Epstein (Vanderbilt) to discuss her wonderful new book, Children of the Soil: The Power of Built Form in Urban Madagascar. Their conversation takes us to Mahajanga, a port city in northwestern Madagascar, considering the city's contested built environment, as well as the human and more-than-human interactions and complex (and sometimes fraught) migration histories that play out against this backdrop. Prof. Rijke-Epstein is Assistant Professor of History at Vanderbilt University. She holds a PhD in History and Anthropology from the University of Michigan and an MPhil from the University of Cape Town. Children of the Soil is her first monograph. Links: University Profile: https://as.vanderbilt.edu/history/bio/tasha-rijke-epstein/ Book: https://www.dukeupress.edu/children-of-the-soil The Indian Ocean World Podcast is hosted by Dr. Philip Gooding, produced by Sam Gleave Riemann, and published under the SSHRC-funded Partnership "Appraising Risk, Past and Present."
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Cover image from Pexels