About

I am Ayan Kanhai Aman from Hyderabad, India. I am a geographer trained at the University of Oxford with a deep passion for realising a just net-zero transition. I am interested in environmental governance focused on climate change policy, decarbonisation strategy, green business, and renewable energy. 

I completed my schooling in 2016 from The Aga Khan Academy, Hyderabad, primarily focusing on Geography (Geopolitics and Sustainability), English (Linguistic and Literary Analysis) and Visual Art (Digital Media and Photography). Subsequently, I pursued a BA in Geography (Environment and Sustainability) and International Relations (Economy and Development) at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, with a focus on natural-resource governance. In Vancouver, the governmental climate was conducive to both environmentalist and extractivist institutions and this vantage point drove my academic investigations into Canada’s development agenda and its perpetual conflict with both sustainability commitments and Indigenous populations’ sovereignty. In 2021, I undertook a MSc in Nature, Society and Environmental Governance from the University of Oxford, as a Weidenfeld-Hoffmann Scholar. I focused on Governance (Environmental Politics, Social Justice and Science and Technology Studies) and Ecological Economics (Circular Economy, Degrowth Economics, and Business-Model Innovation), with a deep interest in the energy transition. My dissertation, Just-ifying India's Solar Transition, investigated how my province Telangana’s land-acquisition model has been inducing long-term community-displacement. With an environmental justice ethos, I explored the restorative potential of land-lease based business-models with a view to make Telangana's village-communities central stakeholders in its solar transition. 

Since 2018, I have acquired a diverse industry experience with organisations working in domains of climate change and sustainability. At the Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning, a research institute in the forestry sector, I assisted in the development, design and deployment of the iCoolKit, a climate-action product intended to engage neighbourhood communities on issues of and solutions to urban forestry. At the Canadian International Resources and Development Institute, a development organisation working in the mining sector, I conducted policy-oriented research on regulatory mechanisms like Community Benefit Agreements and Environmental Impact Assessments to gauge their efficacy and produce reports that identified policy-gaps and made recommendations to render mining projects environmentally and socially and sustainable. At Palmyra Partners, an advisory service in the development sector, I worked on coalition building, conducting network-analysis to build a database of donor and service-delivery organizations in the area of artisanal and small-scale mining. Currently, I work at the Louis Dreyfus Company, a commodity-trading multi-national company in the agriculture sector, and am assessing the carbon footprint of their edible-oil refinery in India and proposing a decarbonization strategy. I am also working with the LDC Foundation, auditing their global project portfolio since 2012 on the basis of their mission-alignment and KPIs to identify strategy gaps and inform the next project cycle. 

I now seek to build upon these experiences and equip myself with the skill sets to be able to deploy multi-pronged climate interventions in the spirit of environmental justice.