Joyeeta Gupta

Joyeeta Gupta is the 2023 winner of the Spinoza Prize, the highest prize in the Netherlands for academic work (Euro 1.5 Million). She co-chaired UNEP’s Global Environment Outlook-6 (2016-2021), published by Cambridge University Press, presented to governments at the United Nations Environment Assembly in 2019, and won the Association of American Publishers PROSE award for Environmental Science. She is presently cochair of the Earth Commission (2019-2022), set up by Future Earth, together with Johan Rockström and Dahe Qin and has a plenary presentation to the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2023; and is member of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water (2022-2024) which is preparing a report for the UN Water Conference of 2023. In 2022, she was awarded the 2022 Piers Sellers Prize for world leading contribution to solution-focused climate research, recent world-leading research outputs and evidence of resulting impacts; application of an interdisciplinary approach; and focus on climate solutions, Priestley International Centre for Climate, Leeds University.

She is full professor of environment and development in the global south at the University of Amsterdam and IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. She is also the Faculty Professor on Sustainability (2019-2024). She leads the programme group on Governance and Inclusive Development. She was lead author in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore and of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment which won the Zaved Second Prize. She has published several books, is on the editorial board of seven journals, and has (co-)edited 13 Special Issues. Her Google Scholar Impact Factor is 64, with 120 journal papers and more than 17,000 citations. She has successfully supervised 29 PhDs and is currently supervising 20 PhD students in the areas of climate change, forest, food/fish, water and disaster governance as well as in development challenges such as food governance and child marriage. She has been on the scientific steering committees of international and national scientific programmes. At national level, she was the Vice-President of the Commission on Development Cooperation (2011-2019) and member of the Advisory Council on International Affairs (2011-2019), a statutory body that advises three Cabinet Ministers in the Netherlands. In 2019 she won an ERC Advanced Grant of 2.5 million Euros for work on climate change and fossil fuels.

Photo credit: NOW, Studio Oostrom