Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change : CSEP

Welcome Remarks

 Rakesh Mohan is President Emeritus and Distinguished Fellow at CSEP. Previously, he was Senior Fellow at the Jackson Institute for Global Affairs, Yale University, Professor at Yale’s School of Management, and a Distinguished Consulting Professor at Stanford University. Closely associated with the Indian economic reforms process since the late 1980s, he has served in senior roles including as the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank of India, Secretary, Economic Affairs and Chief Economic Adviser, Ministry of Finance.

 Author

 Vinod Thomas is currently Visiting Senior Fellow at Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, and previously Visiting Professor at National University of Singapore. He is Distinguished Fellow at the Asian Institute of Management, Manila, and a member of the Advisory Panel on Climate Change at CSEP. His current work concerns risk and resilience, new directions in evaluation, climate change and sustainable development, inclusion, and welfare. Previously, he was Senior Vice President of the Independent Evaluation Group at the World Bank Group and Director General of Independent Evaluation at the Asian Development Bank. During his time at the World Bank, he was also Director of the 1991 World Development Report, Chief Economist for Asia, Country Director for Brazil, and Vice President of the World Bank Institute. He has a PhD and MA in Economics from the University of Chicago and a BA from St. Stephen’s college, Delhi. He has authored 17 books including The Quality of Growth, 2000, Multilateral Banks and the Development Process (with Xubei Luo), 2012, Climate Change and Natural Disasters, (with Namrata Chindarkar),2017, Economic Evaluation of Sustainable Development, 2019, and Risk and Resilience in an Era of Climate Change, 2023.

Discussants

 Sunita Narain is an environmentalist and writer. She currently serves as the Director General of the New Delhi based organisation Centre for Science and Environment (CSE). She is also the Editor of the fortnightly magazine, Down To Earth. Through her research and advocacy, she has been influential in building public opinion on the challenges and solutions for the environment, particularly in countries in the global south. She has over four decades of experience, particularly with in-depth research on the governance and management of the environment. She has also directed campaigns on air pollution control, community water management, pesticide regulation and sustainable urbanisation. For her lifelong and distinguished work in the area, she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India. She was a member of the Prime Minister’s Council for Climate Change which decides on actions to address climate change impacts.

 Olivia Jensen is an economist and public policy scholar specialising in water and environmental risks. She is Deputy Director and Lead Scientist (Environment and Climate) at the LRF Institute for the Public Understanding of Risk (IPUR), National University of Singapore (NUS). Previously, she was Senior Research Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of NUS. She is the author of numerous authoritative reports, academic papers and articles on risk perceptions and risk communications, water policy and governance, and economic and environmental regulation. She teaches post-graduate and executive courses at NUS and is the lead instructor of the Massive Open Online Course “Understanding and Communicating Risk” hosted on the edX platform. She has experience in academia, consultancy, the media and the non-government sector and has led projects for public and institutional clients including the World Bank, OECD and UNEP on finance, management and governance of water services and risks.

 Laveesh Bhandari is President and a Senior Fellow at CSEP. He has been leading climate change and sustainability research at CSEP, and has published widely on subjects related to sustainable livelihoods, industrial, economic and social reforms in India, economic geography and financial inclusion. He has taught economics at Boston University and IIT Delhi. He has been the managing editor of the Journal of Emerging Market Finance and worked at the National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER), New Delhi.

Moderator Janak Raj is Senior Fellow  at CSEP and leads the macroeconomic segment in the Growth, Finance and Development vertical. He has over 37 years of experience working in the Reserve Bank of India, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Ministry of Finance (Dept of Financial Services). He has served as an Executive Director in the Reserve Bank of India and as a member of its Monetary Policy Committee (MPC). He was also the Principal Adviser of the Monetary Policy Department and International Department of the RBI and headed its Department of Economic Policy and Research. During his time at the IMF in Washington DC, he was Senior Advisor to the Executive Director for Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Sri Lanka. He has a PhD in Economics from IIT Bombay.

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