Ishita Aryan

Ishita is a Sustainability and Climate Adaptation Programme Manager for Arcadis.

I kept saying this to everyone post my graduation: ‘London will never be the same as it was during my time as a student of MPP at LSE’. My time during SPP was nothing less than surreal. I learned about topics that truly excited my core: it was like a sandbox where I had the freedom to test my wild, utopian ideas for public good. Beyond everything, I met and befriended some of the most genuine and passionate people from around the world. We hailed from 35 different nationalities, and every single conversation offered so much in terms of learning. And, of course, the faculty who always had their office doors open for us to discuss and debate anything and everything that mattered to us in life and career. I still go back to some of them for mentorship. It is indeed a life-long relationship we have signed up for. 

Growing up in economically fragile pockets in India and Nepal, I knew I wanted to work in the development sector. Thus, I pursued a bachelors and a masters in City Planning. I started my career as a city planner with the Government of India, working for India’s first high speed regional metro system. Thereafter, I transitioned to management consulting for public infrastructure in diverse emerging markets such as India, Nepal and the Middle East, often in complex stakeholder environments.

The choice to come to LSE was not a sudden epiphany, but was reinforced over ten years. It was in 2012 during my under graduation studies in City Planning when I attended a guest speaker session. The speaker was an LSE alumna who passionately talked about how urban planning is half-baked without an understanding of urban policy and politics. This resonated with me, and that day I decided, ‘I want to make it to this school one day’. Life went on, and while I was working on exciting infrastructure projects, I came to a juncture where I wanted to pivot my career to build expertise in climate resilience. I therefore decided to pursue this long-held goal and apply to LSE. The journey made so much sense when I sat in my first class.

I now work as a climate strategist with a consulting firm in London. I enable my clients to understand the cascading impacts of climate risk for both the public and private sectors. My work sits at the intersection of policy and economics, making compelling business cases for enabling climate investments. It is challenging at times to chart out the many-to-many linkages between the known unknowns and unknown unknowns of climate science and policy. But it also has the thrill of venturing into intersections that are probably being addressed for the first time during this climate crisis. I get to use so much of what I learnt during MPP, especially the quantitative economic argumentation tactics - the marginal abatement cost curve being my absolute favourite tool to convince the clients to opt for low carbon options. I owe this to my econometrics classes.

The SPP indeed has had a long-lasting impact on my career. When I came to LSE, I was clear on the new subjects I wanted to learn and the familiar areas where I wanted to build greater depth. The MPP provided me with all the necessary tools, theoretical grounding, and real-world examples. I am more than grateful to have attended seminars by Prof. Nicholas Stern, the ‘Father of Climate Economics’, whose work has been a single factor of motivation for many climate professionals globally. Another remarkable part of the journey was my policy application project with the IMF where I worked on enabling climate investment policies for the private sector fragile geographies in Bangladesh.It took me through many uncanny truths that further fuelled up my desire to work in climate adaptation. I always say it out loud: ‘Coming to LSE can never be the wrong decision, no matter where you are in your career journey.’