Our Keynote Speakers of the 7th IHSA Conference 2023

Link to watch video recording coming soon!

Prof. Dorothea Hilhorst (President of IHSA)

Speech: The field of humanitarian studies

Dorothea Hilhorst is a professor of humanitarian studies at the International Institutefor Social Studies of Erasmus University in The Hague, and was one of the founders of the International Humanitarian Studies Association in 2009.

Her research focus is on aid-society relations: studying how aid is embedded in the context, impacts on governments and society, and is shaped by the manifold actions of actors in and around programmes for protection, service delivery and capacity development. She has a special interest in the intersections of humanitarianism with development, peacebuilding and gender-relations. With teams of researchers and PhD candidates, she studies humanitarian governance in Ethiopia, DRC, Colombia and elsewhere.

Prof. Mizan R. Khan has a Ph.D (Deputy Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development)

Prof. Mizan R. Khan has a Ph.D in Environmental Policy and Management from the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, MD, USA. Currently, he is Deputy Director, International Centre for Climate Change & Development, Independent University, Bangladesh. He is also the Technical Lead of the LDC Universities’ Consortium on Climate Change (LUCCC), which is an official program for capacity building of the LDCs. He serves as the LDC Coordinator of Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE), an agenda under the UNFCCC, which focuses on climate education & training. He served as
Adjunct/Visiting Professor/Scholar at the University of Manitoba; University of Calcutta; Universite de Poitiers; Brown University and the University of Maryland. He is a Lead Author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In the early 1990s, he worked for 3 years as a Senior Researcher at the Centre for International Development and Conflict Management (CIDCM) of the UMCP, MD, USA. He was Vice Chair of the LDC Expert Group under the UNFCCC during 2002-2004. He attends climate negotiations as a lead negotiator with the Bangladesh delegation since 2001. Dr. Khan speaks French & Russian as well.

Prof. Khan has a wide range of publications in peer-reviewed journals/magazines including in Nature & Science. He has to his credit a number of books on climate change economics, politics and capacity building, published by Routledge & MIT Press.

Prof Saleemul Huq (Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development)

UPDATE ON 29-10-2023. We are extremely sad to learn about the passing of Prof. Saleemul Huq. He was a renowned climate change expert, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and was going to be a keynote speaker at our Humanitarian Studies Conference in Dhaka next week. We send our deepest condolences to family, friends and colleagues.

Prof. Saleemul Huq is the Director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development (ICCCAD) and Professor at the Independent University Bangladesh (IUB) as well as Associate of the International Institute on Environment and Development (IIED) in the United Kingdom. In addition he is the Chair of the Expert Advisory Group for the Climate Vulnerable Forum (CVF) and also Senior Adviser on Locally Led Adaptation with Global Centre on Adaptation (GCA) headquartered in the Netherlands.

He is an expert in adaptation to climate change in the most Vulnerable developing countries and has been a lead author of the third, fourth and fifth assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and he also advises the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). In addition he is affiliated with the UN Food System Summit for 2021 as co-chair of the Action Track 5 on Building Resilience to Vulnerabilities, Shocks & Stress.

He has published hundreds of scientific as well as popular articles and was recognized as one of the top twenty global influencers on climate change policy in 2019 and top scientist from Bangladesh on climate change science. Recently he has been appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to combating international climate change.