Rejina Tamang with one of their host families. Credit: Eileen McDougall.
The Neville Shulman Challenge Award was established for the Society by Neville Shulman CBE FRGS. Since its inception in 2001, the award has supported 23 projects aiming to further our understanding and exploration of the planet, its people, cultures, and environments.
The award grants the successful recipient with £5,000 for a project which demonstrates elements of both local and global interest, and a clear purpose to advance geographical knowledge through well outlined methods of data collection.
This year’s recipients of the Neville Shulman Challenge Award are writer Eileen McDougall from the UK and Rejina Tamang, a geology master's student from Nepal.
“The Neville Shulman Challenge Award supported us to journey in Nepal this summer, mainly on foot, through the highly inaccessible Bon settlements and places of worship of Dolpo. Our journey was motivated by a desire to learn about this mysterious and little-known religion, and to understand what challenges these remote communities are facing today, with particular those caused by the world’s changing climate.
On the edge of the inhabitable world, we found climate change is undoubtedly affecting the lives of the Bonpos. Locals consistently talked of increasingly erratic monsoon rains and winter snow in recent decades. This has been causing water shortages, flash hail storms and flooding, destroying irrigation canals, degrading animal pasturelands and causing significant problems in agriculture.”
You can read more about Eileen and Rejina’s journey in the Society’s upcoming Spring 2023 Bulletin, which will be with Fellows and Members - and available online - in November.
The deadline for this year’s award is 30 November.
Find out more and apply