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Shared Ground is a Mumbai-based community platform that seeks to make climate conversations more accessible by connecting them to everyday urban life. Through expert-led gatherings, citizen science initiatives, and collective documentation, the project is building an archive of public knowledge that captures how climate change is experienced at the grassroots level. Events such as Meeth, which examined Mumbai’s salt pan landscapes, demonstrate the platform’s commitment to making climate awareness tangible, participatory, and deeply rooted in local contexts.
Climate change can be extremely overwhelming. There is so much research, so many statistics, and every corner of the world is facing a completely different crisis specific to the place itself. All of this can make staying up to date and informed feel daunting. This is where Shared Ground comes in.
A community platform based out of Mumbai, Shared Ground is attempting to create an archive of public knowledge documenting how a city is affected by its changing climate at the grassroots level, from a street or a park to the city as a whole, in order to understand climate change from a micro perspective. Through events that aim to educate and raise awareness about the very cities participants reside in, in this case, Mumbai, Shared Ground is dissecting the intersection of ecology and urban systems in a way that feels accessible. By bringing in experts who help fill in the gaps for participants, these events provide context for these discussions, making them personally relevant and important to address. These gatherings encourage people to look more closely at their surroundings and ask questions that often go unasked.
One of its recent gatherings, मीठ (Meeth), perfectly embodied this approach. Held at The Find, the event explored Mumbai’s vast and often overlooked salt pan landscapes through games, conversations, mapping exercises, and collective storytelling. For many Mumbaikars, salt pans are familiar sights seen across the city as stretches of land passed by without much thought. Yet these spaces are far more than empty plots on the city’s margins. They act as crucial flood buffers, support diverse bird habitats and provide livelihoods, forming an essential part of Mumbai’s ecological infrastructure.
Meeth encouraged participants to engage with the facts firsthand, changing climate education into a participatory experience, demonstrating how seemingly small and ordinary things can reveal larger systems shaping urban life.
Shared Ground is most interested in helping people notice parts of their public life that most people miss. Every event concludes with a “Noticing Prompt,” encouraging participants to continue observing their own neighbourhoods and contribute their findings to the project’s growing archive, thereby building a community of people that are paying more attention.
Follow Shared Ground on Instagram for further event updates.
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