Austin Lord, Ph.D. is a Nonresident Fellow within the Energy, Water and Sustainability program at the Stimson Center. His research focuses on disaster and climate risk management, water and energy policy, infrastructure development, and environmental governance in Nepal and the broader Himalayan region. Austin is the Lead Consultant for Stimson’s disaster risk reduction and climate adaptation-oriented work in Nepal, which is currently focused on developing early warning systems for cascading hazards and extreme flow events. He will also advise Stimson on environmental issues related to water resource management, energy politics, climate-resilience, and socio-environmental politics in the Himalayan region.
Austin’s interdisciplinary scholarship has been published in a variety of academic journals, such as Political Geography, Economic Anthropology, WIREs Water, Modern Asian Studies, Eurasian Geography and Economics, and Limn. Lord was the lead author of Strategic Considerations for River Conservation Legislation in Nepal report for the Nepal River Conservation Trust and USAID’s Paani Program and the UNDP report Disaster, Disability, & Difference: A Study of the Challenges Faced by Persons with Disabilities in Post-Earthquake Nepal, as well as the second author on ICIMOD’s Benefit Sharing and Sustainable Hydropower: Lessons from Nepal report. He has also published several academic book chapters and written a variety of essays and commentaries for outlets like Cultural Anthropology, Society and Space, and the Nepali Times. Over the past ten years, Lord’s research has been supported by a variety of grants and awards, and he was both a Fulbright Scholar and a Fulbright-Hays Fellow.
Before he began working with Stimson in 2022, Austin worked as a Consultant with the United Nations Development Programme in Nepal, the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD), the Global Emergency Group, Lutheran World Relief, and USAID-funded programs with the Nepal River Conservation Trust. In the wake of the 2015 Gorkha Earthquake, he also served as the director of a grassroots humanitarian initiative called Rasuwa Relief. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto’s School of the Environment, where he works with colleagues in the field of human-computer interaction on research related to disaster, data and infrastructure, climate informatics, and environmental modeling.
Austin received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Cornell University, a Master of Environmental Science from Yale University, and a B.A. in Economics and Studio Art from Dartmouth College.
