The Himalayan Advocacy Center is a public interest environmental law firm founded in 2021.

It has been created to fill three critical gaps in legal practice in India, and also in the larger Hindu Kush Himalayan region. First, legal practice is highly concentrated in the metropolitan city, even if it is in the nature of public interest. Second, legal practitioners are more often than not, hesitant to be open to collaboration with other disciplines, despite the nature of problems at hand, which demand more system-wide research and redress approaches. Most importantly, there is no collaborative grassroots legal advocacy organization devoted to the third pole or the Hindu Kush Himalayan Region. All three are deeply concerning considering India’s rich decentralized democracy, and the sheer danger that the Himalayas face today, due to factors such as climate change, construction, agricultural intensification, and grazing.

The center seeks to directly address the lack of accessible and quality environmental legal assistance to Himalayan Communities. We strongly believe that there needs to be a connection between environmental law, best practice, and significant community knowledge on how to address climate change in and degradation of the Himalayas.