Dr. Adil Najam is the President of WWF-International and a global public policy scholar whose teaching, research and public engagement focuses on international environment and conservation policy with a particular emphasis on climate change, on global governance, and on international and human development.
He was the founding Dean of the Boston University’s Pardee School of Global Studies (2014-2022) and continues as Dean Emeritus and Professor of International Relations and of Earth and Environment at Boston University. Earlier, he served as Vice Chancellor of the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS) in Lahore, Pakistan and as the Director of the Boston University Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future. In addition to Boston University, Prof. Najam has taught at MIT and at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University. He was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Oxford’s Wolfson College in 2022-23 and was named the first De Janosi Fellow at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria for 2023-24. He is also the Mahathir Mohamad Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (OCIS) where he leads research on Islam and Environment.
Professor Najam was a co-author for the Third and Fourth Assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); work for which the scientific panel was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for advancing the public understanding of climate change science. In 2008 he was invited by the United Nations Secretary-General to serve on the UN Committee on Development (CDP). He is a past winner of MIT’s Goodwin Medal for Effective Teaching, the Fletcher School Paddock Teaching Award, and the Stein Rokan Award of the International Political Science Association. The government of Pakistan has conferred on him two of the highest civil awards for his global contributions to education and to climate change research: in 2010, the Sitara-i-Imtiaz (Star of Excellence); and in 2023, the Hilal-i-Imtiaz (Crescent of Excellence), both awarded by the then President(s) of Pakistan.