As part of the Emerson CoE’s commitment to experiential and field-based learning, undergraduate students of TERI School of Advanced Studies participated in a structured excursion to Mehrauli Archaeological Park, New Delhi, on 2nd May 2025. The activity was designed to bridge classroom concepts with real-world observation, enabling students to understand how climate change manifests as a tangible, measurable force acting upon urban heritage landscapes.
The visit was preceded by an interactive presentation session on 24th April and a briefing session on 1st May, making it a three-phase learning programme that moved from conceptual grounding to structured field inquiry.
Mehrauli Archaeological Park is one of Delhi’s most layered heritage landscapes where Sultanate-era stepwells, mosques, and tombs coexist with living ecosystems, degraded water bodies, and encroaching urbanisation. This complexity makes it an ideal site for understanding climate vulnerability not as an abstract threat, but as something observable in cracked stonework, silted wells, blackened walls, and displaced native vegetation.
Phase 1 — Presentation Session (24th April)
The programme opened with an interactive classroom session exploring climate change impacts on heritage landscapes. Students engaged with key vulnerability dimensions including biodiversity and ecology, hydrology and water systems, microclimate, soil stability, air quality, and governance. The session emphasized viewing heritage sites as integrated landscapes rather than isolated monuments, a conceptual shift that shaped all subsequent observation.
Phase 2 — Briefing Session (1st May)
A focused pre-visit briefing introduced students to the Microsoft Form-based observation questionnaire they would use in the field. Key parameters including water quality, vegetation condition, environmental change, and structural damage were reviewed to ensure that field participation was analytical and purposeful.
Phase 3 — Field Visit (2nd May)
The field day formed the core of the programme. Students traversed multiple zones of the park, making structured observations and linking what they saw to the concepts introduced in the classroom.
Metcalfe Lake
The visit began at Metcalfe Lake, where students were introduced to the park’s water management system where treated wastewater from Mehrauli passes through oxidation ponds before reaching the park’s water bodies. Students observed a foul odour indicating poor water quality, soil erosion along the lake margins, and the presence of fish and ducks suggesting partial ecological functionality despite the degraded conditions.
Dry Well and Subsurface Flow
At a traditional dry well, no water was visible at the surface, yet subsurface flow continued through underground channels. This prompted discussion on groundwater depletion, reduced aquifer recharge, and the widening gap between the historical purpose of traditional water infrastructure and its present neglected state.
Vegetation and Species Identification
Walking towards Rajon ki Baoli, students were guided on identifying tree species by leaf morphology and structure. The session highlighted the ecological services of native species like carbon sequestration, microclimate regulation, canopy-based cooling — and contrasted these with the damage caused by invasive species, whose aggressive spread threatens both biodiversity and historic fabric.
Rajon ki Baoli
At this historic stepwell, students observed reduced water levels, declining water quality, and fish presence indicating partial oxygenation. Discussions explored the historical significance of baolis as community water systems and connected their diminished state to shifting hydrological conditions driven by climate variability and urban groundwater extraction.
Monument Degradation — The Mosque
Near the mosque above the baoli, climate impacts on built fabric were clearly visible: walls blackened by air pollution deposits, and cracks in plasterwork caused by thermal stress and moisture infiltration. Students were introduced to traditional construction materials alongside contemporary climate-sensitive conservation approaches.
Neglected Sunken Monuments
The final stop was a cluster of unrestored, partially submerged monuments which illustrated the most severe consequences of compounded neglect. Invasive species had encroached extensively, waterlogging had caused structural subsidence, and the absence of maintenance had allowed ecological and structural degradation to reinforce each other. These sites made visible the governance gaps that leave much of India’s built heritage acutely exposed to climate risk.
The visit demonstrated that climate change impacts on heritage landscapes are not isolated phenomena — they are interconnected across ecological, hydrological, and structural dimensions. Degraded water quality affects foundations; invasive vegetation destabilises soils and walls; rising urban temperatures accelerate material decay; poor governance allows all of these processes to compound unchecked.
Students left with:
The integration of presentation, guided field observation, and participatory data collection made this a genuinely immersive learning experience, one that connected academic study to the living, vulnerable landscapes that heritage conservation must protect.