Dr Radhika Khosla

About

Dr Radhika Khosla's work seeks to advance understanding of one of the most fundamental questions of our time: how can societies improve human well-being while preserving and enhancing the natural environment? Her interdisciplinary research examines the productive tensions between urban transitions, energy services consumption and climate change, with a focus on developing country cities.

Her research looks at two sets of interrelated questions. How does consumption of energy-related services change as cities urbanize? What are the socio-technical drivers, systems and institutional structures that shape energy and carbon emission pathways? And 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?

Dr Khosla also leads the Future of Cooling Programme at the Oxford Martin School, is the programme lead for zero-carbon energy use at Oxford’s ZERO Institute, is co-lead of Oxford Net Zero, and is a member of the UK Government’s UK-India Advisory Committee. Dr Khosla works closely at the interface of research and policy. She is Editor-in-Chief of the high-impact peer reviewed journal, Environmental Research Letters. She has been Special Scientific Advisor to the UK’s House of Commons Environment Audit Committee for the inquiry on heat resilience and sustainable cooling (2023-24). She serves on the UK Government’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office UK-India Advisory Board.

Dr Khosla has supported authorship of a number of international scientific reports and is lead author of the UNEP’s spotlight report on the first Global Cooling Watch (2023). She has also been an author of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report 2020 and the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report (2022).

In 2023, she received an Honourable Mention for the Bina Agarwal Prize in Ecological Economics for her work on energy consumption pathways. As Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, she helps bridge research and networks on India at Oxford and internationally and was recognized as one of the ‘most influential people’ in UK-India relations (2019).