Speakers

Dr Ajay Gambhir is the Director, Systemic Risk Assessment at the Accelerator for Systemic Risk Assessment (ASRA), an independent non-profit hosted by the United Nations Foundation. He is responsible for ASRA’s approach to the science, data and evidence of assessing systemic risk, considering interactions, feedbacks, and amplifications between climate change, biodiversity loss, disruptive technologies, mis- and dis-information and other major societal and ecosystem stressors. He has led the development of an entirely new systemic risk assessment framework in the context of the global polycrisis, as published in a peer-reviewed paper in the journal Nature Communications in August 2025, and is currently applying this framework in a number of projects, including on systemic risk in development lending, the systemic implications of overshooting 1.5 degrees Celsius, and in a range of other projects and sectors. 

Before joining ASRA, Dr Gambhir was a Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College London, where he led a range of major UK and European research projects on decarbonisation of regional and global energy systems, as well as advising financial institutions and other sectors on physical and transition climate risks. He presented his research at the Paris COP21 conference in 2015, as well as the Glasgow COP26 conference in 2021. 

Before becoming an academic, Dr Gambhir worked in the UK Government in a number of policy and economics roles, including as part of the team that wrote the initial draft of the UK’s Climate Change Act 2008, the first such legislation on long-term emissions reductions anywhere in the world, and as the Team Leader for EU and International Climate Change Economics in the run-up to the Copenhagen COP15 conference in 2009.