Radhika Khosla

Research Director, Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development; Associate Professor, Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment; Senior Research Fellow

Dr Radhika Khosla is Associate Professor at the Smith School of Enterprise and Environment, School of Geography and the Environment, and Research Director of the Oxford India Centre for Sustainable Development, Somerville College, at the University of Oxford. She works on examining the productive tensions between urban transitions, energy services consumption and climate change with a focus on developing country cities.

Radhika is Principal Investigator of the Oxford Martin School’s interdisciplinary and multi-country programme on the Future of Cooling, which examines and helps shape the unprecedented increase in cooling energy demand growth. She is also Co-Investigator of Oxford Net Zero, an interdisciplinary research programme aimed at informing effective, equitable, and ambitious climate action; and Co-Investigator of the ZERO Institute, which brings together Oxford research on zero-carbon energy systems.

Alongside she leads complementary research projects on urban transitions and energy consumption (focussing on India). She is a contributing author to the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and lead author of the UNEP Emissions Gap Report (2020).

Radhika’s other current academic affiliations are at University of Pennsylvania (USA), and the Centre for Policy Research (India). She serves on the UK’s Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office UK-India Advisory Board; on the Steering Committee of the Smart Surfaces Coalition; on boards of journals and book presses; and on a range of advisory roles within Oxford.

The two sets of interrelated questions underlie her research priorities. First, how does consumption of energy-related services change as cities urbanize? What are the socio-technical systems and institutional structures that shape (and can reconfigure) energy and carbon emission pathways? Second, 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? Her broader interdisciplinary research examines how cities in transition manage the tensions of meeting growing energy needs for development while protecting the local and global environment.

Previously, she has been a Research Affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), Fellow at the Centre for Policy Research (India), and Staff Scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council (USA).

Radhika holds a PhD in the Geophysical Sciences from the University of Chicago and an undergraduate and master’s degrees in Physics from the University of Oxford.

Teaching

Spaces, Infrastructure and Technology for Net Zero, Sustainable Development, for the MSc in Enterprise and the Environment

Governance, Policy and Politics for the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance, School of Geography and the Environment

Environmental Governance and Development for the MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance, School of Geography and the Environment

Climate Change Negotiations: Policy Challenge for the Master’s in Public Policy, Blavatnik School of Government

Global Opportunities and Threats: Oxford Program for MBA students, Saïd Business School

Climate Change School, Oxford Climate Society, University of Oxford


Publications

Khosla, R. (2021) Electrifying the National Capital Region. In Colossus: The Anatomy of Delhi, eds. Chakravorty and Sircar, Cambridge University Press.

Khosla R, Jani A, Perera R. Health risks of extreme heat BMJ 2021; 375 :n2438

Khosla, R., Agarwal, A., Sircar, N. and Chatterjee, D. (2021) The what, why, and how of changing cooling energy consumption in India’s urban households. Environmental Research Letters, 16(4). 044035.

Khosla, R., et al. (2021) Climate Action Pathway: Net Zero cooling – Action table. The Carbon Trust

Mazzone, A. and Khosla, R. (2021) Socially constructed or physiologically informed? Placing humans at the core of understanding cooling needs. Energy Research and Social Science, 77. 102088.

Miranda, N.D., Renaldi, R., Khosla, R. and McCulloch, M.D. (2021) Bibliometric analysis and landscape of actors in passive cooling research. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 149. 111406.

Renaldi, R., Miranda, N.D., Khosla, R. and McCulloch, M.D. (2021) Patent landscape of not-in-kind active cooling technologies between 1998 and 2017. Journal of Cleaner Production, 2196. 126507.

Al Saud, N., Al Shalan, M., Al Shehri, T., Bari, M., Beaugrand, M., Howarth, N., Khosla, R., Krarti, M., Lanza, A., Lebot, B., Mangotra, K., Odnoletkova, N., Patzek, T. and Saheb, Y. (2020) Enhancing Voluntary Collaboration on Cooling Through the G20. T20 Saudi Arabia 2020 Think

Bhardwaj, A. and Khosla, R. (2020) Superimposition: How Indian city bureaucracies are responding to climate change. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space: 1-32.

Capstick, S., Khosla, R. and Wang, S. (2020) Bridging the gap – the role of equitable low-carbon lifestyles. UNEP Emissions Gap Report.

Creutzig, F., Bai, X., Khosla, R., Viguie, V. and Yamagata, Y. (2020) Systematizing and upscaling urban climate change mitigation. Environmental Research Letters, 15(10). 100202.

Kamat, A.S., Khosla, R. and Narayanamurti, V. (2020) Illuminating homes with LEDs in India: Rapid market creation towards low-carbon technology transition in a developing country. Energy Research and Social Science, 66. 101488.

Khosla, R. and Dubash, N. (2020) Rethinking India’s Energy Policy: Development Challenge around Multiple Objectives. Economic and Political Weekly, 55(32-33): 38-44.

Khosla, R., et al. (2020) Climate Action Pathway: Net-Zero Cooling – Executive Summary. Cool Coalition / UNEP

Khosla, R., Kamat, A.S. and Narayanamurti, V. (2020) Successful clean energy technology transitions in emerging economies: learning from India, China, and Brazil. Progress in Energy, 2(4). 043002.

Khosla, R., Miranda, N.D., Trotter, P.A., Mazzone, A., Renaldi, R., McElroy, C., Cohen, F., Jani, A., Perera-Salazar, R. and McCulloch, M. (2020) Cooling for sustainable development. Nature Sustainability.

Ürge-Vorsatz, D., Khosla, R., Bernhardt, R., Chan, Y.C., Vérez, D., Hu, S. and Cabeza, L.F. (2020) Advances Toward a Net-Zero Global Building Sector. Annual Review of Environment and Resources, 45: 227-269.

Bhardwaj, A., Joshi, M., Khosla, R. and Dubash, N.K. (2019) More priorities, more problems? Decision-making with multiple energy, development and climate objectives. Energy Research and Social Science, 49: 143-157.

Khosla, R. (2019) India and Subnational Climate Change: An Emerging Discourse. Harvard Project on Climate Agreements

Khosla, R. and Bhardwaj, A. (2019) Urban India and Climate Change. Chapter 25 in, Dubash, N. (ed.) India in a Warming World: Integrating Climate Change and Development. Oxford University Press. 504 pp. ISBN: 9780199498734.

Khosla, R. and Janda, K.B. (2019) India’s building stock: towards energy and climate change solutions. Building Research and Information, 47(1): 1-7.

Khosla, R., Sircar, N. and Bhardwaj, A. (2019) Energy demand transitions and climate mitigation in low-income urban households in India. Environmental Research Letters, 14. 095008.


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