Quick Facts
Biography
Shobhakar Dhakal (born in Nepal) is the Head of Department of Energy, Environment and Climate Change at the Asian Institute of Technology, Thailand. His main areas of expertise are energy and climate change policies. Dhakal actively contributes to international and scientific arena. He was the Coordinating Lead Author of the Nobel Prize winning 5th Mitigation Assessment Report written by the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change(released in April 2014) for the Chapter on Human Settlements, Infrastructure and Spatial Planning.
Education
Dhakal received his Bachelors of Engineering (BEng) degree in electrical engineering from the National Institute of Technology, Surat in India, his Masters in Energy Economics and Policy from the Asian Institute of Technology, Bangkok and his PhD from The University of Tokyo. He was also a visiting student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during his graduate studies.
Academic work
Currently he co-leads the ongoing Report on Climate Change and Cities. He served as a lead author of the Global Energy Assessment‘s for Urban Energy Systems and is the principle scientific reviewer of UNEP’s Global Environmental Outlook (GEO-5). He is also a member of the Consensus Panel on Low Carbon Cities of the Academy of Sciences of South Africa (2008-2010) and member of the Cities Energy Modeling Group of the International Energy Agency for World Energy Outlook 2008. He is considered an international expert in such fields and was appointed to the Taskforce on Urban Development and Energy Efficiency of the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development.
Together with Skee Houghton, Dhakal was founder and senior editor of the Carbon Management Journal published by Future Sciences in 2009 which has now been taken over by Taylor and Francis group. He was the co-editor of Carbon Management Journal until December 2016. He is also an associate editor of Elsevier’s Sustainable Cities and Society journal.
He is involved in city-based carbon mitigation research and was an executive director of the Global Carbon Project from 2006-2012 and played an instrumental role in bridging science and government policy. He was a guest scholar to the Transition to New Technologies Group of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, a visiting associate professor to Nagoya University, and is still a visiting researcher to National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan. He was also a senior policy researcher and project manager of urban program at Institute for Global Environment Strategies Japan until 2006.