DR. ASHOK KHOSLA

Ashok Khosla is Chairman of the thirty-year-old Development Alternatives Group. Headquartered in New Delhi, the DA Group was among the first civil society organizations set up to address the issues of sustainable development as a whole. It also pioneered systematic innovation of technologies for rural applications, the concept of social enterprise, creating business-like approaches for eradicating poverty and conserving the natural resource base.

Concurrently, Ashok is President of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the world’s largest and most representative alliance of conservation agencies and interest groups; Co-President of the Club of Rome, a group dedicated to promoting systems-based strategic understanding of the world problematique and the human predicament; and Co-Chair of the Resource Panel, which has been set up by UNEP to investigate the status and trends of natural resource use in the global economy and its impacts on the biosphere.

Ashok is an OBE and a Senior Ashoka Fellow, patron of LEAD-India and has received the United Nations Sasakawa Environment Prize, the Schwab Foundation Award for Outstanding Social Entrepreneur, the WWF Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal and the Stockholm Challenge Award. He has a BA in Natural Sciences from Cambridge University and a PhD in Experimental Physics from Harvard University.