Mihir R. Bhatt is CDKN’s Country Engagement Leader for India, and the Director of the All India Disaster Mitigation Institute (AIDMI), Ahmedabad, Gujarat. AIDMI works on direct action and community learning integrating risk reduction with resilience building.

His role as Country Engagement Leader is to access and use high quality evidence and tools to integrate climate challenges into India’s national economic policies, plans and practices. His role also includes mobilising, channeling and leverageing finance strategically to low carbon and resilient options and coordinating, collaborating and scaling-out innovation from emergent practices while publicsing lessons learned.

He was one of the lead co-authors of chapter 9 of IPCC SREX Report, “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation”, and is working to strengthen integration between disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation through programme development, monitoring, evaluation, review, and donor dialogues. He is building synergies for Climate Smart Disaster Risk Management (CSDRM) partnerships at a subnational level in India.

Mihir has worked with IFIs, the UN, donors, government task forces and a wide range of local authorities and organisations on CSDRM, innovations in risk finance, autonomous adaptations, loss and damage, safer infrastructure services and ways of making the poor central to urban and sub-national resilience building processes.