Radhika Khosla

Dr. Radhika Khosla is the Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development and Research Fellow at Somerville College; and Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, School of Geography and the Environment, at the University of Oxford. She works on examining the productive tensions between urban transitions, energy services consumption, and climate change, with a focus on developing country cities.

Radhika is the Principal Investigator of the Oxford Martin School's interdisciplinary and multi-country program on the Future of Cooling. This includes complementary research projects on urban transitions and space cooling consumption (focusing on India), and on sustainable cold-chains. She is also co-investigator for the Oxford Net Zero program, and leads the climate change strand of the India-UK Global Partnership Programme on Development. She is a contributing author to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and lead author of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report (2020). Her other academic affiliations are at the University of Pennsylvania and the Centre for Policy Research, New Delhi. Radhika provides input to government policy committees and serves on boards of journals.

The two sets of interrelated questions underlie her research priorities. First, how does consumption of energy-related services change as cities urbanize? What are the socio-technical drivers, systems, and institutional structures that shape (and can reconfigure) energy and carbon emission pathways? Second, what forms of governance and political rationalities characterize the varied urban responses to climate change in rapidly developing cities, given their (often competing) objectives to provide urban services? Her broader interdisciplinary research examines how cities in transition manage the tensions of meeting growing energy needs for development while protecting the local and global environment.

Previously, she has been at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, and Staff Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council in New York. At the latter, she helped set up the organization's work on clean energy and climate change in India and led research and implementation on energy policies in the built environment in Indian states. Radhika holds a Ph.D in the Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago and undergraduate and Master's degrees in Physics from the University of Oxford.