Susannah Fisher is a Principal Research Fellow at University College London and holds a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship. She works across research, policy and practice on adapting to climate change. Her interest is in ensuring these processes support effective and equitable adaptation, and that adaptation is at the scale and ambition we need for the escalating impacts of climate change. She is an invited working group member of the World Adaptation Science Programme, a member of the UCL Executive Group of the Climate Crisis Grand Challenge and on the Advisory Group of the Zurich Climate Resilience Alliance. In 2022-23 she was on the Advisory Board of the UKRI Future Leader Fellow's Development Network. She is the author of a popular science book, "Sink or Swim: how the world needs to adapt to a changing climate" (Bloomsbury).
Before taking up her Fellowship, she advised philanthropic foundations, multilateral climate funds, bilateral donors and research institutes on designing and evaluating practical climate change projects and programs. In previous roles, she led research across the European innovation agency for climate change where she developed a cross-cutting research and thought leadership portfolio on the role of innovation and policy experimentation in systems change. Prior to this she was a Team Leader and Senior Researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, where she led action research projects supporting national and sub-national governments to adapt to climate change in different contexts. Alongside these roles in policy and practice, she was also a Lecturer in the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at UCL teaching on climate change, poverty and measurement.In 2015-16, she was seconded to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa in Addis Ababa where she worked with the African Climate Policy Centre on supporting national planning for climate change. Previously, she worked with the adaptation and development research stream at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change at the London School of Economics (LSE). She has also worked as a policy advisor in the UK Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit and in public sector consultancy.
She holds a PhD from the Geography Department at the University of Cambridge on the politics and governance of climate change in cities and has published a range of policy-relevant publications as well as peer-reviewed articles and research papers on a range of topics around climate justice, planning and policy.