Climate-Resilient Cities

Anvita Arora is an architect and transport planner whose current areas of research at KAPSARC include smart cities, public transport and active travel. She is the Executive Director of the Transportation and Infrastructure Department at the Centre which works policy and technology impacts on Aviation, Maritime and Road transport sectors. Before joining the Centre in 2018, she was the managing director and CEO of Innovative Transport Solutions (iTrans), an incubator company of IIT Delhi, where she led over 40 applied research and planning projects for 10 years for clients ranging from city level and country level authorities to funding agencies including the UNEP, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, and DFID. Anvita taught transport planning in the Urban Design Department of the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi and was visiting faculty at the TERI University, Delhi. She was also associated with the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Program (TRIPP) at IIT Delhi, a Volvo Research and Educational Foundations (VREF) Centre of Excellence, for 12 years.

Fateh Belaid is a Principal Fellow at KAPSARC. Before joining KAPSARC, he was a full professor of economics at Lille Catholic University (France) and director of the Smart & Sustainable Cities research unit. Fateh has also held various positions at the French Scientific and Technical Center for Building and led multiple collaborative projects for the French Ministry of Ecological Transition and the European Commission. He is an energy and environmental economist drawing from the fields of applied microeconomics, energy modeling, and econometrics. He has published widely on energy consumption drivers, behavioural interventions, individual preference and investment in energy efficiency, energy poverty, renewables, and energy climate policies. He received a habilitation for supervising doctoral research from Orléans University, a Ph.D. in Economics, an M.S. in Applied Economics & Decision Theory from Littoral University, and an engineering degree in statistics. His work has been published in journals including Ecological Economics , The Energy Journal , Energy Economics , Economic Surveys , Energy Policy , and Environmental Management .

Sara Lechtenberg-Kasten has more than 20 years of experience living and working on topics related to the GCC. She served as a diplomat in Kuwait, a public diplomacy officer with a Middle East portfolio in Washington, and later a researcher for the Department of Defense on civil-military relations in post-conflict scenarios in the Gulf. She joined KAPSARC in 2015 as a Research Fellow, working on resilient cities and energy access in the least developed countries. She holds a Juris Doctorate and a Master of Laws in International Protection of Human Rights. She was recently awarded a Veteran's Advanced Energy Fellowship with the Atlantic Council.