Aromar is a global expert on implementing Sustainable Development and co-chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), from where he helped lead 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 a 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 is a member of key international Commissions on Water, Climate change, Finance, Health, Sustainable Development and Cities. He is a Commissioner and Lead Expert of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water that presented its first 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 on the Urban SDG Finance that is defining how cities can obtain more and better financing to implement the Sustainable Development Goals.
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 multilateral 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 also a member of the Steering Committee of the Talloires Network of Engaged Universities, that has over 430 member universities from 86 countries
Aromar’s policy, practice and research work lie 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 – that he has helped define internationally.
He was a member of the UCL-Nature Sustainability Expert Panel on science and the future of Cities that issued its 2018 report on the global state of the urban science-policy interface. He was Co-I on three 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.
In 2016, UNSDSN and the SDG Academy launched a 70-session global Massive Open Online Course (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 46,000 participants from nearly 170 countries have registered for this course, now on EdX, making it one of the top 5 urban courses in the world. Aromar is the academic anchor for a MOOC on The Art and Science of Economic Policy that 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 4,000 participants registered. He has also participated in a MOOC on Shaping Urban Futures that brings together leading urban researchers from Oxford, IIHS, University of Cape Town, Peking University and EAFIT University which has over 2,500 participants.
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 designing India’s national public housing programmes, that facilitated the building of over 2 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.
Aromar is one of the world’s leading experts on global environmental change, especially climate change. He was a Coordinating Lead Author (CLA) of the 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR1.5). He has worked extensively to bring the global urban and climate agendas together, including as a coordinating lead author of the SR1.5 Summary for Urban Policymakers, released at CoP24 in Poland in 2018 and the Summary for Financial Decisionmakers in 2020.
He was the CLA of the synthesis chapter on Climate Resilient Development Pathways of the IPCC Working Group Assessment Report (AR6) on Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, released in 2021. He was also a member of the Core Writing Team (CWT) of the 2023 AR6 Synthesis Report (SYR). He was earlier a CLA of the IPCC Assessment Report 5 (AR5) chapter on Urban Areas, that established the role of cities and regions in addressing climate risks in 2014. He was a co-PI of a large five-year international Climate Adaptation research programme (ASSAR) that spanned India and eight countries in Africa, that explored mechanisms to take climate adaptation to scale in semi-arid regions.
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, GCOM-Climate-KIC global Policy Innovation Task Force that helped cities and local governments worldwide define a common, ground-breaking vision of transformational urban systems change to achieve deep decarbonization by 2030.
He is one of South Asia’s most experienced risk and disaster management professionals having led teams to plan & execute rehabilitation programmes for ten major earthquake, cyclone and flood events affecting over 5 million people and has been on the Advisory Board of UNDRR’s Scientific & Technical Advisory Group (STAG) and eight of its bi-annual Global Assessment of Risk (GAR), since 2008. Aromar has led the design for UNDRR of the Coalition for Disaster Resilient Infrastructure (CDRI) a global partnership to promote the resilience of infrastructure systems to climate and disaster risks that was launched at the Climate Action Summit 2019 in New York. He is a co-author of the synthesis chapter of the CDRI report on Global Infrastructure Resilience 2023.
Aromar has led and managed multiple sensitive international and national multi-stakeholder political and development negotiations. In 2020 he led a special XV Finance Commission report on The Potential of Urbanisation to Accelerate Post-COVID Economic Recovery that defined a $300 billion package of strategic measures and priorities at national, state and regional levels to enable the process of urbanisation to accelerate post-COVID economic recovery, addressing 450 million people in about 8,000 urban areas over 2021-31.
In 2014, he assisted the Govt. 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 $ 75 billion investment plan for infrastructure and development across all districts and cities for the successor state of 50 million; helped identify options for a new state capital and conducted stakeholder negotiations and public consultations across the state.
Aromar is also an internationally cited scholar, with over 36,500 citations across multiple fields that overlap with his policy and practice work: urban (#3), rural development (#2), climate adaptation (#2), disaster risk reduction (#1), infrastructure (#4), sustainable development (#9), and governance (#9)[1]. Aromar has lectured and taught at over 100 (9 of the top-10) leading universities across all six continents.
He’s the Editor of the interdisciplinary international 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).
He is a member of the International Advisory Board of the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. He is also a member of the External Advisory Board of the India China Institute (ICI) at the New School University and the Advisory Board of the University of Melbourne’s Melbourne Centre for Cities.
Aromar was a long-standing Board member of the Balaton Group, that pioneered the development of sustainability. He was earlier was a Leadership Fellow of the India China Institute, where he worked on long-range development pathways for India & China.
He has been a senior advisor to multiple ministries of the Government of India, since the late 1980s; and consulted with international development institutions, national and transnational firms on economic, environmental and social change at global, regional and urban scales. This includes 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, CIDA, GiZ, IDRC, NORAD, RVO, SDC, SIDA, USAID and AusAID/DFAT.
Over the last decade, Aromar has delivered over 540 keynote addresses, speeches, and seminars and made public, TV and radio 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, UN Open Working Group on the SDGs in 2014, the 71st UN General Assembly on the New Urban Agenda on Sustainable Cities, in 2014 and 2017, 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 September 2015; the annual Curtin University lecture on Sustainability in May 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.
Aromar has led 235 major practice, consulting and research assignments in India and internationally; has deep governance, institutional development, management and implementation experience, across public, private and academic institutions; is a widely cited scholar across multiple fields (urban, infrastructure, climate adaptation, disaster risk reduction and sustainable development), has lectured and taught at 100 of the world’s leading universities and think tanks across six continents; has travelled extensively to over 65 countries, including 19 of the G-20; helped structure, design and review development investments of over $ 15 billion; worked on 5 of the world’s 10 largest cities; across urban and rural areas in all of India’s 28 states and 5 Union Territories and on multiple international projects across over a dozen countries.
[1] Google Scholar accessed 15th March 2024