Aarti Gupta is a Professor of Global Environmental Governance with the Environmental Policy Group of Wageningen University in the Netherlands, with a background in international relations, political science, and science and technology studies. She is currently also the 2025 Zennström Visiting Professor of Climate Change Leadership at Uppsala University in Sweden (March – July 2025).

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Her research focuses on questions of transparency and accountability in global environmental and climate governance. She also analyzes the politics and challenges of anticipatory global governance of novel technologies, such as modern biotechnology and solar geoengineering. She has published widely on these topics, including the co-edited book Transparency in Global Environmental Governance: Critical Perspectives (MIT Press). She is currently the principal investigator of a 5-year research project on the ‘Transformative Potential of Transparency in Climate Governance (TRANSGOV), funded by the Netherlands Research Council.

 

In 2024-2025, she was the recipient of an Impact Explorer Award from the Netherlands Research Council to extend findings of the climate transparency (TRANSGOV) project to the context of Least Developed Countries. As part of her research on global climate governance, she participates regularly in annual climate conferences, not only as a site of data gathering but also to bring research findings into this policy space. She has also co-led the consortium project ‘Reimagining Anticipatory Climate Governance in Vulnerable Regions of the Global South (REIMAGINE)’, which examined how scenarios, foresight, modeling and other anticipatory tools impact upon and steer future climate decisions. Gupta has also served as Co-Chair of a European Union COST Action on Global Environmental Governance. 

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Aarti Gupta holds leadership positions in key international networks in these research fields. Since 2018, she is a member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the international Earth System Governance Research Alliance, one of the largest interdisciplinary networks of social scientists, legal scholars and global governance experts working on sustainability. She served as its co-chair from 2022-2023, and was a Coordinating Lead Author of its 2018 Science and Implementation Plan. She has also been a contributing author to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES). She is a series co-editor of the Cambridge Elements in Earth System Governance (Cambridge University Press), and served as Associate Editor of the journal Global Environmental Politics. She is on the editorial boards of GEP and of the journals International Environmental Agreements and Earth System Governance.

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Aarti is a member of multiple advisory boards, review committees and expert groups. For example, she is currently Advisor to the Global Challenges Foundation in Sweden, and Member of the Advisory Board of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS)-Lorentz Center. As another area of extensive societal engagement, Aarti Gupta is a co-initiator and co-leads an academic initiative calling on governments and the United Nations to agree to an ‘International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering’, a call now signed by over 560 academics and endorsed by more than 2000 civil society groups. In this capacity, she engages with UN agencies, government representatives, the media and public arenas to highlight the ecological and political risks of normalizing solar geoengineering as a future climate policy option. Since 2020, she has also been a member of the United Nations Joint Group of Experts on the Scientific Aspects of Marine Environmental Protection (GESAMP) Working Group 41, addressing marine geoengineering. In 2023-2024, she was selected from natural and social scientists across Europe to be part of a 20-member European Union Expert Working Group, tasked to generate an Evidence Review Report on Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) as input into future European Union's policy on this controversial topic. 

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Aarti Gupta has extensive teaching experience in her fields of research. Both for her own performance as a lecturer, and for the courses that she has designed, she has received 7 Wageningen University Excellent Education awards. She has supervised more than 100 masters and bachelors’ thesis students and internships, and numerous PhDs and postdoctoral researchers. She regularly serves on Wageningen University education and management committees on a diverse array of topics, including most recently Wageningen’s policy towards engagement with and research funding from fossil fuel interests.​

 

She has received numerous international fellowships and awards, including a MacArthur Individual Research Grant; a two-year residential fellowship awarded by Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government to be part of the Global Environmental Assessment Project; and a Science, Technology, and Innovation postdoctoral fellowship on global governance of modern biotechnology from Columbia University.

 

She has also worked for international organizations and civil society groups, including the United Nations Development Programme in New York, Oxfam Novib in The Hague and Transparency International in Berlin, and as a consultant for other UN agencies, including FAO, and bilateral donor agencies such as GIZ. 

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Aarti holds a PhD from Yale University in Environmental Studies (2001), a Master of Arts degree in Political Science and International Relations from the University of Chicago, and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Political Science (summa cum laude) from Brandeis University, where she was also awarded the Milton Sachs Prize for Best Bachelors' Thesis in political science. 

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She has lived for multiple years in India, the United States, Germany and Netherlands; with additional residence of over three months each in Egypt, Nepal, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Taiwan, Spain, Sweden, Venezuela and Yemen.​ She is a Dutch citizen, and has Overseas Citizenship status in India.