Aromar Revi
Affiliation: Director, Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Email: arevi@iihs.co.in
Country: India
Aromar Revi is the founding Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS). He is a global practice and thought leader, and educator with over 37 years of interdisciplinary experience in sustainable development, global environmental change, long-term futures, governance, public policy and finance, and urbanisation. Aromar is a global expert on Sustainable Development; Co-Chair of UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN). He is a member of the Advisory Board of UCLG the global voice of local and regional governments from 0.24 million towns, cities and regions.
Aromar is a leading expert on global environmental change, especially climate change. He was a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of the 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C. He is a CLA of the synthesis chapter on Climate Resilient Development Pathways of the IPCC AR 6 on Adaptation, and a member of the AR6 Synthesis Report Core Writing Team. He was also a CLA of the 2018 SR1.5 Summary for Urban Policymakers, and the 2021 Summary for Financial Decision Makers. He was earlier a CLA of the IPCC Assessment Report 5 on Urban Areas, that established the role of cities and regions in addressing climate risks in 2014.
He is one of South Asia’s most experienced risk and disaster management professionals and has been a member of the Advisory Board of UNDRR’ Scientific & Technical Advisory Group (STAG) and its bi-annual Global Assessment of Risk (GAR), from 2008. He has led the design for UNDRR of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) a global partnership to promote the resilience of infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks.
Debra Roberts
Affiliation: Co-Chair, IPCC WG II; Head, Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit, EThekwini Municipality; Honorary Professor, University of KwaZulu Natal.
Email: debra.roberts@durban.gov.za
Country: South Africa
Professor Debra Roberts is currently head of the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit in eThekwini Municipality (Durban, South Africa) and was selected as the city’s first Chief Resilience Officer in 2013. Professor Roberts was a lead author of Chapter 8 (Urban Areas) of Working Group II’s contribution to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). She was elected as Co-Chair of Working Group II for the IPCC’s sixth assessment cycle in 2015. She was also a lead negotiator for the South African delegation involved in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations until December 2015. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the School of Life Sciences and has been an advisor to the Global Commission on Adaptation, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) and the United Nations Secretary General’s 2019 Climate Summit. In 2019 she was included in a list of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Policy.
Seth Schultz
Affiliation: CEO, Resilience Shift
Email: seth@resilienceshift.org
Country: United States of America
Seth Schultz is the CEO of The Resilience Shift. He has a long track record of building consensus and initiating change in the field of sustainable development, and of raising international awareness on the role of cities in tackling climate change. He is a passionate advocate for a safe, resilient and sustainable future and the role that post-Covid-19 economic stimulus packages can play in contributing to long term resilience.
With over 20 years of experience, Seth has worked with leading and innovative organisations in this space including the Louis Berger Group, the US Green Building Council, the Clinton Foundation, C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, the Global Covenant of Mayors, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), where he was Co-Chair of the Scientific Steering Committee for Cities IPCC and served as a lead author on the groundbreaking IPCC Special Report on 1.5 Degrees.
Ian Klaus
Series Editor of SUP Series
Affiliation: Senior Fellow, Chicago Council of Global Affairs
Email: ianrklaus@gmail.com
Country: United States of America
Ian Klaus is a senior fellow on global cities and foreign policy at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He also serves as director of research and policy for the Global Parliament of Mayors and as the series editor of the AR6 Summary for Urban Policymakers. Previously, he served as a diplomatic adviser to the Urban 20 and C40 City Climate Leadership Group.
He was senior adviser for global cities at the US Department of State. In that role, he led urban diplomacy for the United States, engaging dozens of foreign ministries and development agencies from Africa, South America, North America, Asia, and Europe on urbanization and foreign policy issues. He also internally managed the State Department’s efforts to develop urbanization-related policies. Klaus was deputy United States negotiator for the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development. From 2011 – 2016, he served as a member of the policy planning staff in the office of the Secretary of State, advising the Secretary of State and Director of Policy Planning. He has been a member of the World Economic Forum’s advisory board on the future of urban development, the Creative Cities Working Group at Stanford University, a visiting fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, and the Ernest May Fellow for History and Security Studies at the Kennedy School of Government. He holds a Ph.D. in international history from Harvard University, and is the author of Forging Capitalism (Yale, 2014) and Elvis is Titanic (Knopf, 2007).
Amanda Eichel
Head- Management and Delivery of the SUP Series
Affiliation: Senior Advisor, The Resilience Shift
Email: amanda.eichel@resilienceshift.org
Country: United States of America
Amanda Eichel is a Senior Advisor at The Resilience Shift. She was the Executive Director of the Global Covenant of Mayors for Climate & Energy based in Brussels. Previously, Amanda worked at the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, where she led the regional and programmatic teams, and directed research and knowledge management efforts. Prior to joining C40, Amanda worked for Mayor Bloomberg’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability in New York City and served as Climate Protection Advisor to the Mayor of Seattle, Washington.
Amir Bazaz
Head – Technical Support Team
Affiliation: Associate Dean, School of Environment and Sustainability; School of Systems and Infrastructure; Senior Lead-Practice, Indian Institute for Human Settlements.
Email: abazaz@iihs.ac.in
Country: India
Amir Bashir Bazaz is Senior Lead-Practice at IIHS. He has a PhD in Management from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, with a specialisation in Public Systems. He has substantial experience of working with various integrated assessment frameworks and modelling arrangements. His current research interests are low-carbon societies/infrastructure, climate change mitigation and adaptation (across scales) with specific focus on urban climate change linkages and climate, energy and environment policy.
Amir he has been a Contributing Author to the IPCC Special Report on 1.5C (Chapter 4), is Contributing Author to the Feasibility assessment in the AR6 cycle, has been a Lead Author on the Summary for Urban Policy Makers (SUPM), and has been a Lead Author on the Summary for Financial Decision Makers (SFDM). He was also the National Expert Consultant to the Government of India, managing the production and submission of India’s Second National Communication to the UNFCCC.
At IIHS, Amir had been the Regional Research Lead for a multi-partner, multi-year climate adaptation research project — Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions (ASSAR).
This project was part of an IDRC/DFID funded global climate adaptation research programme — Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA) operational across West, South and East Africa as well as South Asia. In addition, Amir has been a part of many practice-based engagements at IIHS, notably on ‘Energy Innovation’ in partnership with Cambridge University; and ‘GCRF-PEAK program, focusing on sustainable energy transitions in the Urban context’ in partnership with Oxford University, Peking University, and the University of Cape Town and EAFIT University, Colombia. He is the Lead Researcher for the Volkswagen Foundation funded multi-country, multi-year RESET project (Reconfiguring Sustainable Energy Transitions) that tracks the energy transition in India, Germany, the Netherlands and South Africa. He also manages the Disaster Risk & Resilience portfolio at IIHS.
Chandni Singh
Deputy Head – Technical Support Team
Affiliation: Senior Research Consultant, Indian Institute for Human Settlements.
Email: csingh@iihs.ac.in
Country: India
Chandni Singh has a PhD in International Development from the University of Reading, United Kingdom and works at the interface of climate change and development in the global South. At IIHS, she works on climate change adaptation, drivers of differential vulnerability to climate change and hazards, and rural and urban livelihood transitions. She was a Contributing Author on the IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C and is a Lead Author on the Working Group II Assessment Report 6 (Chapter 10 Asia and Cross-chapter Paper on Cities and Settlements by the Sea).
Chandni is also a Lead Author on UCCRN’s Third Assessment Report on Climate Change and Cities, and Contributing Author on the UNESCO-ICOMOS-IPCC “Cultural Heritage and Climate Change” Initiative. She serves on the editorial boards of Regional Environmental Change, Urbanisation, and Climate and Development, and is the ‘Vulnerability and Adaptation’ Domain Editor for Wires-Climate Change. She has previously worked in research and practice-based organisations such as the University of Reading (UK), Bioversity International, Pragya, and WWF India across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. Chandni is also deeply interested in science communication for lay audiences and is a published poet.
Prathijna Poonacha Kodira
Lead- Programme Management and Consultation
Affiliation: Senior Consultant- Director’s Office, Indian Institute for Human Settlements.
Email: ppoonacha@iihs.ac.in
Country: India
Prathijna Poonacha Kodira earned MSc in Human Settlements from Katholieke University, Leuven, Belgium. She is senior consultant with the Director’s Office, the Practice team and is a part of the School of Environment and Sustainability. She mainly works with the climate change team.
Her work focuses on understanding climate change impacts and responses in urban and peri-urban geographies both from top-down and bottom-up perspectives. In peri-urban Bangalore, her research looks at how communities are responding to climatic and non-climatic risks in the context of rapid social and ecological changes with a particular focus on gender dynamics. She is also interested in understanding and applying various tools to enable multi-stakeholder participation in decision making especially in the urban context. One such tool is Transformative Scenario Planning which facilitates her interaction with diverse stakeholders to imagine the future of water in Bengaluru.
Prior to IIHS, Prathijna has worked in various organizations ranging from civil society organizations, academic and research institutions in the field of heritage planning and conservation, and design consultancy.