Climate Pathfinders: Dhruv Rungta’s Unusual Approach to Solving Environmental Problems

Whether it’s investigating pollution or protecting elephants, Dhruv Rungta is driven to find workable answers

How can we mend our relationship with the environment and wildlife?

Finding answers to this question led Dhruv Rungta to one of the most intense experiences of his student career. Clinging to the back of a ranger’s motorbike, he photographed a high-speed chase as rangers circled elephant herds at midnight, firing guns in the air and setting off firecrackers to drive them back into the forest. Their goal: to protect both farmers' crops and the elephants from potentially deadly conflict.

The journey to that moment started in 2023, when .

Rungta, now a rising senior, and other students identified environmental challenges they could address during the eight-week program, then they devised workable solutions. In one example, they conducted a small-scale artificial rumen study and, based on their findings, proposed diet changes for the cattle to help lower methane emissions — a potent greenhouse gas.

Person on a horse — Dhruv Rungta worked on a horse farm herding cattle as part of DukeEngage Costa Rica.

“In Costa Rica, I worked with an incredible community organization, , to help make their farm more sustainable,” he recalls. “I learned so much from my community mentors and that made me really believe in the [] program.”

Rungta realized that he wanted more experiences on the ground like this. It also inspired him to create a Program II major in Economics, Ecology and Sustainable Development – giving him an interdisciplinary approach to environmental problem-solving.

In 2024, Rungta received a , which supports DukeEngage alumni pursuing a second summer of immersive work abroad. He chose to explore two different approaches to environmental impact — top down working with a governmental agency, and bottom up documenting communities’ efforts to address problems.

Environmental Crime Scene Investigation

In summer 2024, Rungta embarked on an internship in the Environmental Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice, which handles some of the highest-profile environmental cases in the country. He was part of an interagency team between special agents and attorneys from the DOJ, Federal Bureau of Investigations and Environmental Protection Agency, where he helped investigate environmental crimes in historically overlooked communities. Rungta used AI to develop a tool called “Echomagic,” which allowed the team to create geospatial visualizations of company pollution violations in a fraction of the time.

Rungta had also learned about an ongoing ecological problem on pineapple farms in Thailand. Attracted to the smell of pineapple, elephants enter farms, eating crops and damaging the properties. Farmers often sleep in homemade shelters on their fields to protect their crops in case elephants enter, but sometimes these confrontations create dangerous situations for humans and elephants both — in some cases, even leading to deaths.

Under the mentorship of Duke faculty members Susie Post-Rust, a former National Geographic photographer, and Chris Sims, the director of Duke’s Center for Documentary Studies, and with Akaraphum Pisanwanich, social impact manager at Bring The Elephant Home, Rungta proposed a photojournalism project. He wanted to document how a community was creating new solutions to coexist with wildlife and address human-elephant conflict.

An elephant and some ducks — An elephant walks along truck tracks, demonstrating the area’s human-elephant conflict.

A Photo Project

The resulting photo project tells a compelling and serious story — about the conflict between humans and elephants and the impacts on both. He also explores potential solutions to the problem, like farmers planting alternative crops to deter elephants from farms and creating new sources of revenue, like community-based crafts and safaris.

An exhibition of Rungta’s photographs from Thailand — called “Coexistence” — is set to open next fall at Duke.

“At Duke, you can share a dream, and the people here will do everything they can to make it happen,” he says.

One of Rungta’s mentors, Stanback Dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment Lori Bennear, described the difference he makes.

"Dhruv is every faculty’s dream student. He has seemingly unlimited curiosity and excitement about engaging with complicated environmental issues. He embodies Duke’s ‘science in service of society’ ethos. Whether it is through his internships with NOAA and the DOJ working on investigating environmental crimes, to his work with elephant conservation in Thailand, he is a consummate problem solver,” Bennear said.

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