Aromar Revi is the founding Director of IIHS. He is a polymath, local-to-global practice and thought leader, educator, and institution builder, with over 40 years of interdisciplinary problem-solving experience. He is an alumnus of IIT Delhi and the Law and Management Schools of the University of Delhi. He is one of the world’s leading climate scientists, urban sustainability and disaster risk reduction professionals, and has deep governance, institutional development, management, and implementation experience across public, private, academic, and civil society institutions.
Aromar is a globally-ranked scholar across multiple interdisciplinary fields, whose work has been cited over 80,000 times across: urban, climate change adaptation , disaster risk reduction , infrastructure, and sustainable development. He has lectured and taught at 100 of the world’s leading universities and think tanks across six continents; with over 80,000 participants in MOOCs that he helped design and deliver.
Aromar has, over 40 years, led over 250 major practice, consulting and research assignments in India and abroad, and helped structure, design and review development investments of over USD 15 billion. He has travelled extensively to over 65 countries; worked on 5 of the world’s 10 largest cities; across urban and rural areas in all of India’s 28 States and in 5 Union Territories, and on multiple international projects across over a dozen countries.
He is a global expert on implementing sustainable development; Co-Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), where he led a successful global campaign for an urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 11) as part of the UN’s 2030 Development Agenda. He is a member of the UCLG-Ubuntu and policy Advisor to the UCLG Presidency that represents 0.24 million towns, cities, and regions across the world.
Aromar is a member of key international commissions on water, climate change, finance, health, sustainable development and cities. He was a Commissioner and Lead Expert of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (GCEW) that presented its report to the UN Global Conference on Water 2023. He is a Commissioner of the Global Commission on Urban SDG Finance, enabling cities to obtain better financing to implement the SDGs, and the Lancet Pathfinders Commission that identified global, regional and local pathways to a healthy, low-carbon future.
Aromar has been a senior advisor to multiple ministries of the Government of India since the late 1980s, and consulted with a wide range of international development institutions, national and transnational firms on economic, environmental and social change at global, regional and urban scales. This includes extensive in-country and regional experience across key UN, multilateral and bilateral agencies, including UNDP, UNICEF, UNEP, UN-Habitat, UNDRR, UNESCO, UNU; the World Bank, ADB, GCF, DFID (now FCDO), CIDA, GIZ, IDRC, NORAD, RVO, SDC, SIDA, USAID, and AusAID/DFAT.
He is the Editor of IIHS’ international interdisciplinary journal Urbanisation (Sage) and on the Editorial Boards of Urban Climate (Elsevier), International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development (Taylor & Francis), npj Urban Sustainability (Springer), Sustainable Earth Reviews (Springer), and Journal of City Climate Policy and Economy (University of Toronto Press).
Aromar is a member of the Steering Committee of the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities, with over 430 member universities from 86 countries, the International Advisory Board of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, and the Advisory Board of the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Centre for Cities.
