Aromar has over 40 years led 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.
Institutional Building
Over 15 years, Aromar has built IIHS into one of the world’s leading education, research, training, advisory and implementation support institutions in the Global South, focusing on the multi-sectoral and multi-dimensional challenges and opportunities of sustainable urbanisation.
He led the design for UNDRR of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI), an India-based international organisation to promote the resilience of infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks. CDRI was launched by the Prime Minister of India at the UN General Assembly and Climate Action Summit 2019 in New York.
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; World Bank, ADB, GCF, DFID, CIDA, GIZ, IDRC, NORAD, RVO, SDC, SIDA, USAID and AusAID/DFAT.
Global Thought Leadership and Scholarship
Aromar is an globally ranked scholar across multiple interdisciplinary fields that intersect with his policy, practice and research work: climate adaptation (#1), disaster risk reduction (#1), rural development (#1), urban (#2), infrastructure (#4), governance (#9) and sustainable development (#10). His work has been cited over 48,000 times, with an h-index of 46, an i10 index of 76.1
Aromar 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. This brought together global urban institutions (UN-Habitat, UCLG, C-40, ICLEI, Metropolis, Cities Alliance, SDI and WIEGO) and over 300 cities and organisations.
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 that presented its report to the UN Global Conference on Water 2023, building on the Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change (2006), and the Dasgupta Review of the Economics of Biodiversity (2021). He is a Commissioner of the Global Commission for Urban SDG Finance that is defining how cities can obtain more and better financing to implement the SDGs.
Aromar was a Commissioner of the Lancet Pathfinders Commission that identified global, regional and local pathways to a healthy, low-carbon future. He was also a member of the Task Force on Global Health Diplomacy and Cooperation of the Lancet COVID-19 Commission that made recommendations on strengthening global governance and multi-lateral cooperation to build back better post-pandemic, paying particular attention to global health governance and science diplomacy. He was also a member of the International Advisory Board of the Oxford Commission on Creating Healthy Cities.
He is a member of the UCLG-Ubuntu and policy Advisor to the UCLG Presidency. UCLG is the global voice and advocate of local and regional governments, representing 0.24 million towns, cities, metropolises and regions across the world. He was a member of UN-Habitat’s Stakeholder Advisory Group (STAG) tasked with global stakeholder engagement (2019–21). Aromar was also a member of the Managing Board of Cities Alliance, the global partnership for sustainable cities and urban poverty reduction (2016–19).
Aromar was a long-standing Board member of the Balaton Group that pioneered the development of sustainability. He was earlier a Leadership Fellow of the India China Institute, where he worked on long-range development pathways for India and China.
Aromar is a member of the Steering Committee of the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities that has over 430 member universities from 86 countries, the International Advisory Board of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town, the External Advisory Board of the India China Institute (ICI) at the New School University, the Advisory Board of the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Centre for Cities.
Interdisciplinary Practice, Implementation and Research
Aromar has led 250 major implementation, consulting and research assignments in India and across the world, in over a dozen areas: sustainable cities and urban development (41), infrastructure and services (34), disaster risk reduction (33), rural development (27), climate change (24), sustainable development (16), development strategy and international cooperation (15), technology (13), governance and public policy (12), education (13), economics and finance (11), health systems (9), and social transformation (2).
Aromar’s policy, practice and research work lies at the interface of four themes: sustainable development and sustainability science; sustainable urbanisation and the emerging discipline of ‘urban science’; climate action and climate science; and disaster risk reduction and risk science, which he has helped define internationally.
Teaching and Digital Education
Aromar has lectured and taught at over 100 (including 9 of the top 10) leading universities across all six continents, over the last 40 years, across multiple areas of his research and policy competence. He has trained leaders and professionals across the public, private and non-profit sectors for over 35 years, including at the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration (LBSNAA).
He has led the development of the IIHS Masters of Urban Practice (MUP): Curriculum Framework that led to the creation of a dynamic, interdisciplinary, South Asia-centric and globally relevant curriculum that spans the around two dozen disciplines and practice areas that define urban transformation. This brought together over 200 of India and world’s leading academic, researchers and practitioners, and was supported by MIT, UCL and UFABC. This learner-centric framework for educating professionals, practitioners and researchers from India and other parts of the world, bring together practice and theory, and problem-based learning and has been effectively proven via a decade of teaching at IIHS.
Over 80,000 people from 160 countries have registered for massive open online courses (MOOCs) curated and anchored by Aromar. In 2016, UNSDSN and the SDG Academy launched a 70-session global MOOC on Sustainable Cities and SDG 11, curated by him, featuring 30 of the world’s leading urbanists and shot on location in 20 cities across six continents. Over 67,000 participants from 160 countries have registered for this course, also on edX, making it one of the top five urban courses in the world. Aromar is the academic anchor for a MOOC on The Art and Science of Economic Policy, which provides an understanding of the relevance and impact of economic policymaking in everyday life, and the means for citizens to be involved in shaping economic policy. The course runs on Coursera and has over 8,500 participants registered. He has also participated in a MOOC on Shaping Urban Futures, which brought together leading urban researchers from the University of Oxford, University of Cape Town, Peking University, EAFIT University and IIHS, and has had over 6,000 participants.
Journals
Aromar is the Editor of the 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).
Multi-stakeholder Negotiation
He has led and managed multiple sensitive international and national multi-stakeholder negotiations and strategy development. In 2020, he led a special XV Finance Commission report on The Potential of Urbanisation to Accelerate Post-COVID Economic Recovery that defined a USD 300 billion package of strategic measures and priorities at national, state and regional levels to enable the process of urbanisation to accelerate post-COVID-19 economic recovery, which would impact 450 million people in about 8,000 urban areas over 2021–31.
In 2014, he assisted the Government of India in the partition of the erstwhile state of Andhra Pradesh, with a population of 85 million people. Aromar led a complex process of structuring a USD 75 billion investment plan for infrastructure and development across all districts and cities for the successor state of 50 million people; helped identify options for a new state capital and conducted stakeholder negotiations and public consultations across the state, over four months.
Aromar was one of the dozen thought leaders from across the world invited in 2019 by the South African Presidency to review South Africa’s progress 25 years after the end of Apartheid and help define pathways to overcome its persistent socio-economic challenges towards shared growth, sustainable development and prosperity.
Climate Change
Aromar is one of the world’s leading experts on global environmental change, and the most cited author in the world on climate adaptation. He has served the IPCC for over three assessment cycles (AR5, AR6 and the current AR7).
He was a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of the seminal 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR15) that was released in 2018 to global scientific and media acclaim. SR1.5 identified four major global system transitions necessary for the successful implementation of the Paris Climate Agreement, assessed the feasibility of mitigation and adaptation options, and defined investment and other enabling conditions.
He was a CLA of the synthesis chapter on Climate Resilient Development Pathways (CRD) of the IPCC Working Group Assessment Report 6 (AR6) on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, which defined CRD as a process of implementing greenhouse gas mitigation and adaptation options to support sustainable development for all. It identified five system transitions, key options and multiple pathways by which communities, nations and the world can pursue CRD, based on timely societal choices.
He was also a member of the Core Writing Team (CWT) of the 2023 IPCC AR6 Synthesis Report (SYR) that considered policy priorities for climate action between now and 2030–40. He was earlier a CLA of the IPCC Assessment Report 5 (AR5) on Urban Areas, which established the role of cities and regions in addressing climate risks in 2014. He was a Co-PI of ASSAR, a large five-year international Climate Adaptation research programme that spanned India and eight countries in Africa, and explored mechanisms to take climate adaptation to scale in semi-arid regions.
Aromar has worked extensively to bring the global urban and climate change agendas together. He is the CLA of ‘Chapter 1: Cities in the Context of Climate Change’ of the IPCC AR7 Special Report on Cities and Climate Change. He was a Co-lead of the independent four-report Summary for Urban Policymakers series of the IPCC AR6 cycle on Climate Science, Adaptation and Mitigation. A synthesis report of this series was presented at CoP27 in Egypt in 2022, and formed the basis for the first ministerial discussion at a CoP. He was earlier a CLA of the SR1.5 Summary for Urban Policymakers, released at CoP24 in Poland in 2018.
Aromar was a CLA of the Scaling Up Climate Finance Report 2021 that was commissioned by the Green Climate Fund (GCF). He was a member of the GCoM-Climate-KIC global Policy Innovation Task Force that helped cities and local governments worldwide define a common, groundbreaking vision of transformational urban systems change to achieve deep decarbonisation by 2030.
Disaster Risk Reduction
He is one of South Asia’s most experienced risk and disaster management professionals, having led teams to plan and execute rehabilitation programmes for 10 major earthquake, cyclone and flood events affecting over five million people, and has been a member of the Advisory Board of UNISDR/DRR’s Scientific & Technical Advisory Group (STAG) and eight of its bi-annual Global Assessment of Risk (GAR) reports since 2008. He is a co-author of the synthesis chapter of the CDRI’s Global Infrastructure Resilience report (2023) and assisted the Ministry of Home Affairs in the process of the amendment of the Disaster Management Act (2025).
Sustainable Cities
Aromar led a successful global campaign for an urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 11) as part of the UN’s 2030 development agenda. He was a member of the UCL-Nature Sustainability Expert Panel on science and the future of cities, which issued its seminal 2018 report on the global state of the urban science–policy interface.2
He was a Co-I on three large international urban research programmes that have helped redefine: the future of urban science (PEAK), responses to urban inequality (KNOW) and urban risk (Risk Hub), with leading universities and researchers from across five continents.
He co-authored IIHS’ reports on Localising SDGs for India 2019 and the India SDG Report (2018) that presented the first comprehensive state-level assessment of performance across key SDGs in India.
Aromar helped develop a long-term planning, economic transformation and design framework for sustainable cities in the early 2000s. He was a team leader of the international award-winning Goa 2100 Sustainable RUrban systems project that developed a vision, design and investment plan for a 100-year sustainability transition in western India. He subsequently led the India team in the ‘Bridging to the Future’ urban planning programme that brought together the Greater Shanghai and Greater Vancouver regions, three provinces in the Netherlands, and the state of Goa in India.
Rural Development
Aromar has led the process of developing India’s National Action Plan for Rural Housing, 19 State Action Plans and the scale-up of India’s rural housing programme that enabled the building of two million houses a year over 1995–2012 at an overall investment of over USD 8 billion. He was active in reviewing and designing a sector reform programme for the rural water sector that led to the development of a USD 0.45 billion investment plan, and in developing a 15-year sustainable rural livelihoods and watershed development programme in Himachal Pradesh.
Housing and Human Settlements
Aromar has made significant contributions to human settlements’ development in India, for which he was elected an Ashoka Fellow in 1990. This includes a key role in the design of India’s national public housing programme, which facilitated the building of over two million rural houses a year; infrastructure planning, upgrading and institutional reform in multiple million-plus cities. Aromar has served on high-level committees of the Government of India and was responsible for the development of housing and urban development plans for two-thirds of India’s states in the 1990s.
Technology and Innovation
Aromar has led the planning, design and execution of the USD 200 million, 54-acre, IIHS Campus in Kengeri, Bengaluru, that will host up to 3,000 learners and 600 faculty and staff, and set global benchmarks for teaching–learning, sustainability, and digital connectivity, and establish the world’s first mega-city Long-Term Urban Ecological Observatory (LTUEO). The Campus is expected to be one of the greenest net-zero and disaster-resilient campuses in the world, with high-performance buildings, physical and digital infrastructure and services, integrated with biodiversity, conservation, sustainable agriculture and forestry. This builds on four decades of experience and leadership in technological innovation in built environment and infrastructure, using innovative low-energy, local materials and building systems deployed in lakhs of buildings across rural and urban India.
Health Systems
He has worked on a range of themes on health systems ranging from environmental health, built environment and health, and immunisation systems to more recent work during the COVID-19 pandemic on emergency response and global health diplomacy. He co-led one of the first systematic appraisals of private health provision in India in 2001. He is a member of the Lancet Pathfinder Commission on pathways to a healthy, low- carbon future and on the International Advisory Board of the Oxford Commission on Creating Healthy Cities, which presented its findings to the UK Parliament in 2022.
Education Policy
Apart from his pivotal role in building IIHS into a leading heterodox, 21st-century educational institution, Aromar has made significant contributions to domestic and international policy and innovation in higher education. This includes developing a roadmap for higher education sector reform, priorities for this reform, public investment and private participation in the sector, for the Government of India. He has co-led the development of IIHS’ Higher Education Atlas and School Education Atlas for India, which enables tracking and planning across the entire education sector in the country, from the village, town and city level, through the district, state and country level.
Public Lectures and Appearances
Over the last decade, Aromar has delivered close to 600 keynote addresses, speeches, and seminars, and made public and TV appearances across the world. He has addressed special sessions of the 77th UN General Assembly on Water in 2023, the Second Committee (on Economics & Finance) of the UN General Assembly in 2020, the 71st UN General Assembly on the New Urban Agenda on Sustainable Cities, in 2014 and 2017, the UN Open Working Group on the SDGs in 2014, the UN-Habitat Governing Council in 2015, the Opening Plenary of the UNDRR Global Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (GPDRR) in 2019, and TEDx Palais des Nations on Sustainable Cities in Geneva in 2015.
He delivered the first Kapuscinski Development Lecture in Africa on sustainable cities in 2014; the Khemka Distinguished Lecture on India’s urbanisation at the University of Pennsylvania in 2015; the annual Curtin University Lecture on Sustainability in 2016. In 2017, he opened the Going Global Higher Education Summit 2017 in London on the ‘University and the City’ and the EcoCity World Summit in Melbourne. In 2018, he delivered the opening keynote addresses at the CitiesIPCC conference in Edmonton and at the Urban-20 (U-20) Summit in Buenos Aires. In 2021, he delivered the Tata Sustainability Lecture on the Urgency for Ecosystem Restoration.
1 Google Scholar, accessed 25 March 2025
2 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-018-0209-7, accessed 25 March 2025