DR. SHIV SOMESHWAR - Fmr. European Chair for Sustainable Development & Climate Transition - Sciences Po

How do urbanization and rural development impact communities differently? How can we make public policy and enlightened self-interest advance climate action?

Dr. Shiv Someshwar is a Development Clinician, diagnosing development of cities and nation states. A Visiting Professor at Columbia University, New York and at Sciences Po, Paris, he was the founder chair-holder of the European Chair for Sustainable Development and Climate Transition at Sciences Po. He helped set up the initial national and regional networks of the global Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

His publications cover a range of issues: planning, institutions and governance of sustainable development; climate change mitigation, adaptation, risks and offsets; and ecosystem management. He edited Re-living the Memories of an Indian Forester: Memoirs of S. Shyam Sunder and is presently writing The Fallacy of Evidence-Based Policy Making.

He convened and chaired the Independent Task Force on Creative Climate Action. Dr. Someshwar received a Ph.D. in urban planning from the University of California, Los Angeles, and he was a Bell-MacArthur fellow at Harvard University. He has two masters’ degrees, on housing and on environmental planning, and is also trained as a professional architect. He has previously worked at the Earth Institute, Columbia University, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York, and the World Bank in Washington D.C.

"I'm kind of concerned when people put the promise on silver bullets of regenerative agriculture or growing a trillion trees or sucking carbon through CCS technologies. Because what happens then is people take comfort that there is a practice or a technology around the corner. Hydrogen is another one. Fusion energy is yet another. And I think we need to be going kind of full throttle on all of those, but at the same time, that doesn't mean that we give up on mitigation or we give up on climate risk management, which I think is technically the correct term to say, rather than adaptation. How do you manage the risk of a changing climate? How do you then emit less and basically get fossil fuel out of your system? And that again is long-term. It's not for the next five to ten years. So, when you have these kinds of promises, invariably the market signal is aha. So now, we don't really need to do much on mitigation because something is there around the corner, whether it's regenerative agriculture, which holds enormous promise, or through reforestation, green hydrogen. We're not anywhere close to scaling up, and some of them really have deep technological challenges."

https://www.sciencespo.fr/psia/sites/sciencespo.fr.psia/files/ITFClimateReport_Web.pdf www.amazon.com/Reliving-Memories-Indian-Forester-Memoir/dp/9388337131

www.creativeprocess.info
www.oneplanetpodcast.org
IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast