Sushila Pandit

Sushila is a PhD Candidate at the School of Politics and International Relations (SPIR) of the University of Kent (UK), since September 2021 as a Global Challenges Doctoral Centre (GCDC) fellowship awardee. 

 She has been working in the field of climate change for over a decade and had served national and international organisations like Practical Action, CARE, and Mercy Corps in Nepal focusing on disaster management, climate change, and resilience in and around policy/advocacy, technical expertise, and program management. 

She had been awarded as International Climate Champion in 2009/10 by British Council and Women in Environment Conservation by the Government of Nepal in 2013. She also got a fellowship to work in UNFCCC, Bonn, Germany. She has also co-founded an organization “Together for Human and Environment” in Nepal to work on the environment and human security issues. She holds a master's degree in Environment Science specializing in Climate Change from Nepal.

Sushila's research interests are in Climate Change Adaptation, focusing on climate policies, people's participation and voices (Governance), indigenous and local knowledge and practices, community-based adaptation, locally-led adaptation, and nature-based solutions. She has a keen interest in disaster risk management focusing on anticipatory action.

For her PhD, Sushila is working on an interdisciplinary project focusing on Climate Change Policy in the School of Politics and International Relations. Her research aim is to identify the major challenges and effectiveness of different frameworks for implementation of climate adaptation plans in resource-poor and vulnerable settings from local to global levels in the Eastern Himalayas Landscape covering Nepal, India and Bhutan. This research will also explore coordination between countries and the intervention for global adaptation in transboundary landscape settings.