Dr. Divya Sharma leads Climate Group’s biggest regional office in India. She leads a team of highly motivated professionals across our four key systems industry, transport, energy and food. She’s ensuring they lead on climate action, mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, and ensure a just and fair transition.
Divya also plays a crucial role in building Climate Group’s membership base on global campaigns with businesses and eight sub national governments. As a thought leader, she speaks and writes on the relevance of accelerating climate action and achieving net zero targets.
Divya also sits on the advisory boards of Good Cities Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative, USA. She’s one of the Board of Directors of Transition Research, Goa, India and a Member of Global Covenant of Mayors on Climate and Energy in India. She advises Earth Warriors, a young startup working on climate curriculum for young children and a Founder Advisor for a design collective called Humanqind.
Divya brings over 25 years of experience as an international climate expert, trainer, executive leader, and programme manager. She specialises in climate resilience, sustainable urban development planning and the energy transition in India. Trained as an architect and urban planner, she started her career in urban development and planning. Over the years, and through her doctorate, Divya established herself as one of the key urban climate resilience experts in India. She has contributed to many groundbreaking projects on resilience and has been part of several large private and public initiatives such as the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Government of India’s flagship scheme Smart Cities, wherein she was involved in preparing the Smart City Plan for the hill city of Dharamsala and later was a working group member for the Climate Smart Cities initiative of the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development, Government of India.
Divya has a track record of establishing several new practices. She set up the Climate Resilience vertical at TERI, where she worked for several years on urban sustainability and climate resilience. She then transitioned to consulting by joining Oxford Policy Management (OPM). She established their new global portfolio on Urban Policy and Planning, contributing to the growth and success of the portfolio across OPM’s global offices. In academics, she taught postgraduate courses on resilience and sustainability and has previously worked with governments as an urban planner.
