Geoethics Medal 2025 awarded to...
- iapgeoethics
- 30 minutes ago
- 3 min read
We are pleased to inform you that Ganapathy Pattukandan Ganapathy (India) and Ilan Kelman (United Kingdom) have been awarded the Geoethics Medal 2025 by the International Association for Promoting Geoethics (IAPG): https://www.geoethics.org/geoethics-medal
Congratulations!
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"Ganapathy Pattukandan Ganapathy demonstrates exceptional merits in the geoethical field by translating geoscience expertise into tangible societal benefits and robust governance, ensuring his work addresses community needs and ethical environmental stewardship. He plays a crucial role in national disaster governance: He was an invited member of the Working Committee on Landslide Hazard Mitigation for the National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA). He also advises state-level planning as a consultant for District Level Multi-Disaster Plans and contributed to the Global Assessment Report 2011 on Disaster Risk Reduction. His commitment to the community is reflected in his 18 years of active disaster education and public awareness efforts, which earned him six special awards from the District Disaster Management Authority (DDMA). His research explicitly addresses social issues, including assessing social vulnerability to liquefaction and estimating seismic damage potential to vital community facilities for emergency planning. Furthermore, he enforces environmental ethics by serving on key bodies like the District Environmental Appraisal Authority and the District Wetland Management Committee, and through publications on sustainable approaches like the "Zero Liquid Discharge System for the Tannery Industry", linking geoscience to responsible industrial practice."
Ganapathy Pattukandan Ganapathy has had a career defined by the rigorous application of geoscience and engineering for the public good, a testament to the power of fusing academic expertise with dedicated civic service. Serving as a Professor (Higher Academic Grade) at the Centre for Disaster Mitigation and Management at Vellore Institute of Technology (VIT), Dr. Ganapathy has spent decades at the forefront of tackling some of the most critical challenges facing South Asia: multi-hazard management, seismic resilience, and climate change adaptation.
"Ilan Kelman has researched within, published in, and connected physical sciences, social sciences, arts, humanities, and the professions of engineering, medicine, and law. Into much of this research, popular science dissemination of it, and implementation, he has integrated aspects of geoethics, covering the research process and the research results. Examples of his original geoethics research are the appropriateness of volcanologists taking life-threatening risks to obtain data, the duty of care by different parties toward geoscientists whose work might not be welcomed by certain authorities, and balancing the risks to rescuers as they try to save lives. He has also contributed to operationalising codes of ethics for geoscientists. A current research pathway is extending this work to more-than-human worlds. This research addresses geoethics for living and non-living entities on and beyond the Earth, including geological formations and ecosystem processes. Ilan applies these analyses for education, outreach, and engagement—in the classroom, for public talks, and when doing media interviews—to inspire action. Within his university teaching, examples of geoethics topics raised for his interdisciplinary students are activism roles for climate change scientists, decision-making dilemmas for post-disaster humanitarians, and translating innovative geoscience for constructive policy outcomes. He has written numerous blogs on geoethics topics, as well as raising geoethics subjects and material across social media and during podcasts and vlogs. The key to this work is promoting a geoethics evidence basis for a wide variety of audiences to ensure that geosciences (his own and from others) ethically serves society."
Ilan Kelman is Professor of Disasters and Health at University College London (UCL), UK as a joint appointment with the Department of Risk and Disaster Reduction and the Institute for Global Health. He is also Professor II at UiT The Arctic University of Norway and Visiting Researcher at the Heidelberg Institute of Global Health, Germany, among other appointments. His overall research interest is linking disasters and health, integrating climate change and ethics into both. Three main areas connecting these topics are: (i) disaster diplomacy, health diplomacy, and climate diplomacy; (ii) safe, healthy, and ethical living and livelihoods for islands and the polar regions; and (iii) ethical risk education for health and disasters. This research and application links directly to and collaborates with other fields including migration studies, international relations, peace and conflict studies, development studies, open science, and tourism research, often adopting a geoethics lens on both the research process and the research outcomes.
​Read more on the page of the Geoethics Medal:
IAPG - International Association for Promoting Geoethics
IUGS - Commission on Geoethics
EGU - Geoethics Working Group
CIPSH - Chair on Geoethics