AMIR BAZAZ
Associate Dean – School of Environment and Sustainability; School of Systems and Infrastructure
Senior Lead – Practice
Amir Bashir Bazaz is Lead-Practice at IIHS. He holds a PhD in Management from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, with a specialisation in Public Systems. He works on issues at the intersection of economics, climate change mitigation, and adaptation and sustainable development. He has substantial experience in working with various integrated assessment frameworks and modelling arrangements. His current research interests are low carbon societies/infrastructure, climate change adaptation and mitigation (across scales), with specific focus on urban-climate change linkages and climate, energy and environment policy.
Amir has a first degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and started his career in the manufacturing industry, working across functional responsibilities of projects, production planning/control and engineering. He has previously been the National Expert Consultant to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of India for the Second National Communication to the UNFCCC and taught courses in Development & Environmental Economics during his academic engagements at Symbiosis International University, Pune.
At IIHS, Amir is the Regional Research Lead for a multi-partner, multi-year climate adaptation research project – Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions (ASSAR). This project is a part of an IDRC/DfID funded global climate adaptation research program – Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), operational across the regions of West, South and East Africa as well as South Asia. In addition, Amir is a part of many practice-based engagements at IIHS, notably; on ‘Energy Innovation’ (on a project led by Cambridge University), ‘Sustainability of Ecosystem Services’ (in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy India and Keystone Foundation) and ‘Migration-Climate Resilience dynamics for Indian cities’ (supported by the Swiss Agency of Development & Cooperation). He has been a regular team member for many ‘Disaster and Climate Resilience’ projects at IIHS and teaches regularly in the Urban Fellows and the Urban Practitioners Program.
AMLANJYOTI GOSWAMI
Chief – Legal & Regulation
Amlanjyoti Goswami heads the Legal and Regulation team at IIHS. He plays
a key role in strategic decision making from a legal and regulatory point of view. His work involves transactional practice, advisory opinion and related legal matters. He also works on building appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks and enabling institutional development in key sectors such as land, urban development, decentralisation and higher education.
He heads the Land Governance team at IIHS which works on advisory, practice and research-based aspects of land systems and governance, including political economy of urban land and land regulation, as well as the legal and regulatory framework that governs urban development. He has wide ranging experience in regulation, litigation, policy advisory, research and transactional practice for nearly two decades. An Inlaks Scholar, Amlan holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard University, an LL.B. as well as a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Delhi, where he was a university gold medallist.
CHANDNI SINGH
Senior Research Consultant – Practice
Chandni Singh works at the interface of climate change and development in rural and urban geographies within the global South. At IIHS, she works on issues of climate change adaptation, differential vulnerability and wellbeing, disaster risk and recovery, livelihoods transitions, and rural-urban migration. Chandni has worked on climate change projects such as the IDRC/FCDO funded Adaptation at Scale in Semi-arid Regions (ASSAR) and SDC-funded ‘CapaCITIES – Migration, Livelihoods and Climate Resilience’. She has led interdisciplinary, international projects such as IIED-funded ‘Long-term Impacts of Humanitarian Action in Chennai’ (2016-2017), British Academy funded Recovery with Dignity (2018-2021), and Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture as Green Infrastructure (2019-2022). Using a social-ecological systems lens, her work examines human dimensions of global environmental change, pathways for transformational change, and levers for equitable adaptation.
Chandni is a Lead Author of the IPCC’s Assessment Report 6 in 2022 on ‘Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability’ and a Contributing Author of the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on 1.5°C. Chandni serves on the editorial boards of Regional Environmental Change, Climate and Development, and IIHS’s in-house journal Urbanisation. She is the Domain Editor on ‘Vulnerability and Adaptation’ at WIREs Climate Change.
She has previously worked in research and practice-based organisations such as the University of Reading (UK), Bioversity International (Italy), Pragya, and WWF India across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. She has taught postgraduate level courses on climate change adaptation, sustainability, research methodology, and development studies. She is also interested in science communication for lay audiences and is a published poet.