What traits do successful climate professionals have? Expertise is key, but what soft skills does one need to get ahead? Where does one start?
The answer, Mr. Bahadur shares, is to make the most of everything. The way forward is to take every opportunity you get, be kind and expand your networks, say yes to traveling for work, work hard and with enthusiasm, trust your mentors – a little bit of everything – that is what got him to where he is today.
In this episode, our host, Shantha Venugopal, speaks to Dr. Aditya Bahadur as he discusses his role in research, thought leadership, technical assistance, capacity building, and organizational management. He emphasizes the importance of mentorship, internships, and opportunities in shaping his career. Mr. Bahadur also highlights the challenges of the non-profit sector, including long hours and stress, but underscores the fulfillment and privilege of working towards a greater cause with inspiring people.
Below is an edited transcript that provides a detailed description of the guest’s journey:
Success in Climate Research and Organizational Leadership: Director of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre, Dr. Aditya Bahadur
Aditya Bahadur:
My entry point wasn’t climate and sustainability. I had studied literature and English for my undergraduate degree which has a lot of critical theory in it. I ended up reading quite a lot of leftist ideology as part of our curriculum and as part of my own personal reading. Therefore, I was on a very healthy diet of lots of very exciting political literature. But after college, for some reason, I decided to take a job in advertising and my own nascent and slightly naive political ideology and my career were not matching.
So at that point, I decided to quit advertising and take up a job in a not -for -profit. And it wasn’t with a strategic thought that I’m going to work on climate and sustainability. I just joined something that was a not -for -profit institution. And there, I was lucky enough to get exposed to activities that were focused on disaster risk management, climate change adaptation, sustainability, public health, and that’s where my interest started.
Shantha Venugopal
Was there something about that workplace specifically that made you excited about the work or was it that you’d found a calling in the process of learning there?
Aditya Bahadur
Yeah, it was a mix of things. Firstly, I found the atmosphere of a not -for -profit institution much more aligned with my personal desires or what I hope to do with my life. The second thing was that I was lucky enough to be in a place where even as an entry -level person, I got to travel quite widely. So I went to Afghanistan to work with local volunteers working on disaster risk management. I traveled to Bangladesh to interview flood affected communities in different parts of the country. I traveled to Nepal to look at the institutional architecture for disaster management. And through this exposure, it became clear to me that a career in this field is enriching for a number of reasons.
Shantha Venugopal
What is your work like today managing such a large institution? What is the day -to -day work like – was it what you expected?
Aditya Bahadur
So I will give a one minute overview of what my job is, what my career actually is. After I did this initial stint, I went off to study and I decided to focus on climate resilience for my masters and my PhD. And after that, I’ve essentially worked consistently in research institutes and think tanks that work on climate and development policy. My job for the last 15 years or so has essentially been advising governments, international institutions, local NGOs, local governments on how to integrate climate risk in their work, if I was to sum it up in one slightly long sentence. So a lot of it is sort of technical input on how to make sure that the work that these institutions are doing is alive to the challenge of the climate crisis. Now, yes, my day -to -day work: there are three broad categories that my work falls into. One is research and thought leadership, where I write papers on various technical aspects of climate and development. I was privileged enough to contribute to the last IPCC working group to report in the sixth assessment cycle. I’ve written papers for academic journals that people use to do their own research and design their own programs and projects. I’ve written a large number of working papers, which are internal research documents targeted at particular institutions or governments.
So one is sort of research and linked to research also is an emphasis on communicating this research. I try and write op -eds and editorials and do podcasts like this one to communicate my ideas to TV interviews, speak to the press, et cetera. All this work takes place in coalitions and networks. All the work that I do is done in concert with other organizations trying to achieve similar objectives. For instance, I helped build something called the Adaptation Research Alliance, which is a group of 250 organizations spread across the world all working on climate adaptation that advocate for particular things from the international community and from national governments. So one is this thought leadership communication coalition building type work. The second bucket of activities is what I would call technical assistance and capacity building, where apart from research and thought leadership, sometimes they’re asked to do fairly focused pieces of work. For example, a particular international NGO will come and tell us, can you work with our people to design an organization-wide framework for climate resilience so that we have a set of guiding values and principles and a roadmap that all our different departments can use to make sure that they’re contributing to the goal of climate resilience for vulnerable communities that they’re working with. So we’ll work shoulder to shoulder with them and produce something that’s pretty bespoke and tailored to the needs of a particular organization. And I’ve done this with bilateral organizations, multilateral organizations, international NGOs, sub-national governments.
Linked to this very closely is a broadly set of activities that are called capacity building. We are trying to transfer knowledge and alter the behavior of people working on the ground. And we do this through designing short courses. For instance, recently, I was designing a short course for urban planners in Bangladesh and Kenya on how to integrate climate risk in urban development. We could do this through training and workshops where you include people in different settings and through interactive exercises and didactic learning, you try and enhance the knowledge in a particular topic. You could also do this through the development of particular institutional protocols. Like you can develop a process that the institution has to follow in order to do something so that it becomes more resilient to the impacts of climate change. So the second bucket of activities is around sort of capacity building and technical assistance.
And the final bit is, I would say, around organizational leadership, strategy development, and program management. And this basically looks like: making sure that the organization that I’m part of is running well, working with other managers to see how their portfolios are doing, liaising with donors to make sure that the organization is able to secure the funding that it needs, developing internal organizational strategies. At the moment, I’m about to kick off a process to develop the next five -year strategy of the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Center that I’m the director of.
And it looks like program management.You have to manage budgets. You have to hire consultants. You have to manage staff teams. You have to deliver outputs. And that requires a certain set of management capabilities.
Sorry for the slightly unwieldy answer, but I would say thought leadership, technical assistance, and leadership and management are the three sets of activities that I do on a day -to -day basis.
Shantha Venugopal
Not at all. This was actually extremely helpful in understanding the kind of skills it takes at this stage in a career to manage multiple fronts at once. Would you say a lot of this was learned on the job or were there certain factors like a work environment or a mentor or an experience with education that really pushed you forward in understanding all of these different buckets as you put it?
Aditya Bahadur
Everything that you’ve named has contributed to me acquiring the skills that I have. Now, I really want to underline, I feel like the role of mentorship is absolutely important. The role of mentors in my life has been absolutely key. And I can give you a few examples. When I started my master’s degree, there were three people who I worked with as a research assistant to, three professors. And I inculcated a very close relationship with the three of them. As a result of which, two of them agreed to be my PhD supervisors. And the third became an informal mentor to me. Now this third person then ended up recruiting me after my PhD. And one of my PhD supervisors became a long time collaborator with me, where my relationship with him transcended the PhD and continued into the different jobs that I took through my career.
These people did so many tangible things. Like to give you one small and focused example, my PhD supervisor, he really gave me a lot of confidence to speak on technical issues in public forums. I clearly remember as a first year PhD student, I took on some additional work. And that entailed travelling from the UK to Nepal to speak to a bunch of international organizations and government employees about climate resilience. And naturally, I was very nervous about it. And before I went, he sat me down and gave me some tips and tricks and gave me the confidence of presenting in front of this crowd. And also, actually, it was the opportunity also that came from him because he was asked to present, but he actually sent me instead.
That early experience, I felt it went well, people respected me and that kind of instilled a certain confidence. That was one of the many things that mentors have done in my life. Now you also talked about the role of internships. This whole thing started with an internship when I wanted to switch out of advertising into a nonprofit world.
The most important experience that I had because that influenced the entire course of my career that has now, it’s been 18 years since I did that internship. And so I think that was really, really very important.
Apart from this, there are a few other things also that I’d like to mention. I think sponsorship is also really critical. I was only able to do my PhD in the UK because I got a permanent part-time job with a strategy consulting firm that essentially helped me to sponsor my PhD. I wouldn’t have had the opportunity if they had not provided that.
And then along the way, I was lucky enough to get a few other opportunities, for instance, I got a fellowship to be based in Denmark for a few months at a university there through my PhD that exposed me to a whole new way of doing research and thinking about problems. I was lucky enough to get funding to attend a summer school on resilience and ecosystems in Hungary that exposed me to various technical aspects of ecosystem management and climate modeling that I wouldn’t have had exposure to otherwise. So absolutely, I think people and opportunities have played a very critical role in helping me develop the skills that I have now to do the kind of job that I do.
Shantha Venugopal
It actually is the perfect mix of all of these things. You have to kind of grab every opportunity, which is what it sounds like you did – from your internship to traveling through it, to taking speaker opportunities, meeting new people, forming those relationships, working and consulting while you did your PhD. You took every chance, which is really great to hear.
Aditya Bahadur
I really feel like, sorry, this is a bit of a philosophical diversion, but I’m going to indulge myself. Often, you know, one thinks about whether life is luck and fate? Or do you have agency? Do you have to be able to predetermine where you go? And I feel like it’s a mix of both things, right? I feel like the universe throws a lot of opportunities at you and what you’re alive to do and what you grab I think is up to you.
Shantha Venugopal
Yeah, absolutely. And you clearly took every one because it sounds like such an amazing career journey to where you are today as the director at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre. Can I ask, so now that you are working as director and that started this year, are there any unexpected challenges or rewards from this role?
Aditya Bahadur
There have been a number of unexpected challenges. One main thing that I have learned is, and I think people who don’t work in the sector that we do don’t appreciate this enough, is that it is very, very taxing. No one else in my family works in the not -for -profit sector. So they’re always surprised as to the levels of stress, the working hours that one has to put into the work that we do because to them it seems like you’re working for a not -for -profit right that should be pretty chilled but it’s absolutely not like that I feel like I it’s you know the last 18 years have been extremely exhilarating rewarding they’ve been fantastic experiences but they’ve been really grueling – I’ve put in hours and hours of work I put in 80 hour weeks you know traveling sounds very glamorous a lot of my work has involved a lot of travel. I would say on average, I’ve traveled for a week every six weeks for the last 10 years, and maybe a little more than that, actually. And it sounds glamorous, but it really takes a toll on the body and on the mind.
And so if anyone is thinking of getting into this field because they want a good work -life balance, I feel like you have to try really hard to achieve that. It is not a place where that is extended to you naturally. So I feel like that has been a really big learning and a big challenge for me. Even though I feel privileged and lucky and happy to be where I am, I do feel like it’s been a huge amount of very hard work in the truer sense of the word.
But on the flip side, it’s been an extraordinary privilege as well. And I’m not just saying that to be politically correct. I mean, the main thing is to be able to work for a cause that is more than only about me personally or the comfort of my family, I think is a huge privilege. To contribute in a tiny little way to perhaps the greatest challenge mankind has ever faced is an energizing prospect in itself and helps you weather the extraordinary hours of hard work that I just talked about and all other peaks and troughs. The second thing on a much more base level, the people that work in this field are really amazing. You know, they have a commitment to the communities that they belong to. They have a commitment to the people that they work with. They have extremely diverse interests. All of them are in love with the natural world in some way and up for an intellectual challenge. The people that you engage with are also great. Despite the grueling nature of it, the opportunity to travel around the world, work in different cultures, engage with different kinds of institutions really lends me a perspective of how the world works.
Shantha Venugopal
What I’m hearing is that if you’re passionate enough about it and you’re committed to these larger challenges that we’re all facing, and our generation has to contend with every single day, then the long hours and all of the work and travel that it requires feel more natural.
Aditya Bahadur
Which I imagine is quite peculiar to the kind of work that we do. Correct.
Shantha Venugopal
These are all really amazing things that you just conveyed to us about your own career and all the different things you’ve experienced through it. Finally, we would love to include a tidbit on the tips you might have gotten for public speaking that gave you the confidence to take that first leap. But also, more generally, what advice would you give to our generation that’s now stepping into either professional careers or deciding what they want to study or making pivots into the sustainability world.
Aditya Bahadur
I mean, the first thing I really want to underline and I really mean this. The young people that I meet are immensely inspiring and I actually feel much more capable than I am in many ways. So I would be hesitant to give them some advice. I mean, the fluency with technology, the commitment to the cause, the vigor that they bring, I think is really remarkable. But there are a few things that I can share that may be slightly counterintuitive.
Number one is to be a people person. I feel like a lot of the opportunity and success that I’ve had is because I’ve been able to forge relationships of trust with people that I’ve engaged with in the professional sphere. So, you know, be interested in people, keep up with people, build networks, networks give you power, networks give you credibility, networks give you a community. And focus on this right from the beginning, because over 10 years, then you’ll have a large group of people who want to support you and work with you. So don’t underestimate the power of personal relationships. Key to this is, and this is a direct quote coming from one of the three mentors that I talked about, is be nice.
You know, don’t be gruff. Don’t be rude. Be nice. And of course, I mean, I’m not saying be a pushover, but your instinct should be to be polite, supportive, helpful, kind. And I am convinced that this goes a much longer way than being cut and dried and matter of fact and skeptical.
The second piece of advice that I think is intuitive is try and develop a technical niche. I feel like the era of the generalist is well and truly over. The field that we work in has become really mature. So try and find a tiny little thumbnail size field of knowledge and through your career, try and become the dominant individual within that field. Respect, power, opportunities, love, affection will come if people recognize you as someone who has deep and useful knowledge about a small, however small domain. Yeah, I want to limit it to those two things.
Shantha Venugopal
Thank you so much. And I will remind you for one more, which is what was that advice about public speaking that encouraged you?
Aditya Bahadur
Yes, yes. OK. So my mentor said something to me, which I still remember. And this was said to me almost 20 years ago, which was, remember, if you’re speaking on a particular topic in a room full of people, the fact that you’re standing on stage means you know 90% more than everyone else in the room. So use that to give you the confidence to speak from a place of comfort as opposed to from a place of trepidation.
Shantha Venugopal
Right. Trust your authority on it.
Aditya Bahadur
Hmm, correct.
Shantha Venugopal
Well, thank you so much for all of this. This was really insightful and I’m sure our listeners are going to use this advice to gain an upper hand in their careers.
Aditya Bahadur
Thank you very much for giving me this opportunity.
