Clare Shakya

Director, Climate Change

Clare is the director of IIED’s Climate Change research group. Her work focuses on the role climate finance can play to create inclusive and equitable delivery mechanisms that incentivise action to tackle the poverty, climate and nature crises.

Full biography

Clare works on improving access to climate finance as well as on its quality and quantity.

She supports the Least Developed Countries (LDC) Group leadership on their LDC Initiative For Effective Adaptation and Resilience (LIFE-AR) – developing vertically integrated delivery mechanisms that can channel resources and authority for climate action to local actors country wide.

She also works with partners who have endorsed the principles for locally-led adaptation in improving the quality and effectiveness of adaptation support.

Expertise

Clare’s applied experience includes:

Governing climate risk and uncertainty through flexible, adaptive and politically astute development
Shock responsive social protection, parametric risk insurance and climate information services
Strategic policy influence through amplifying real-time learning and the voices of women and other excluded groups for social justice
Coherent governance of landscapes (water resources, land and forests)
Enterprise development for affordable energy services and resilient value chains, and
Strengthening Southern climate capabilities through peer learning and shifting institutional culture.

Before IIED

Clare has over 30 years of experience on climate change, energy and natural resource management, including 15 years with the UK Department for International Development (now the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO)) where she led Asia and then the Africa Division’s climate change response.

She has experience working in Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Education

MSc (Oxon) forestry and its relation to land use, University of Oxford (Director’s Prize) 1996
BSc (hons) environmental science and development studies, University of East Anglia (first class) 1991

Current work

Clare is responsible for the oversight of the propositional research of IIED’s Climate Change research group into climate action that is far-reaching, far-sighted and socially just. She works with the group on:

Delivering climate ambition with the least developed countries (LDCs)
Getting money where it matters, invested behind poor people’s climate priorities
Governing risk and mechanisms to tackle the compounding risk for the poorest, and
Strengthening institutional climate capabilities, beyond ‘fly in, fly out’ technical experts.