Biplav Pradhan

Biplav is a Program Manager and Expert – Climate Adaptation and Resilience in PlanAdapt’s CLARE Capacity Strengthening Hub from Nepal, based in Bangkok, Thailand. He is also a member of PlanAdapt’s Coordination Hub.

Biplav brings over a decade of diverse experience in disaster risk reduction, climate resilience and humanitarian action at global, regional and local levels. Prior to joining PlanAdapt, he worked for the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), as part of its climate team in New York, where he worked at the intersection of climate adaptation and humanitarian action. He was engaged in the intergovernmental processes on climate, such as COP29 and COP28.

Before this, he was based in Bangkok, covering the Asia Pacific while with UNOCHA’s regional office and Asian Disaster Preparedness Center (ADPC). He was involved in several climate-related disasters in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Viet Nam, the Philippines and Mongolia, including climate risk assessments and field deployments for coordinating with national and international stakeholders. He actively engaged at the regional level on anticipatory action, disaster preparedness and response for climate-related disasters.

He began his career in his home country, Nepal, where he worked for the UN system and NGOs at the field level for five years before taking international assignments abroad.

His capacity-strengthening portfolio comprises the following experiences:

  • Led global consultations and drafted the IASC climate crisis roadmap, a guidance document for humanitarian organizations to incorporate climate considerations
  • Developed an online module and managed a knowledge management platform on climate-humanitarian issues as part of organizational capacity building
  • Coordinated peer exchange through a dedicated humanitarian hub at COP29 and COP28, allowing partners to showcase their work on climate adaptation in humanitarian contexts
  • Developed an online learning course on urban resilience and conceptualized guidance materials as part of a regional urban climate resilience programme in Southeast Asia
  • Oversaw the development of an urban DRR toolkit for stakeholders in Nepal
  • Facilitated peer learning workshops in several countries in Asia, both in-person and online, in collaboration with the UN system, NGO networks and ASEAN.

Biplav holds a master’s degree in disaster management with a specialization in urban resilience from the University of Auckland (New Zealand), and a bachelor’s degree in development studies with a focus on institutional economics from Lund University (Sweden).

For more information, see Biplav’s LinkedIn profile.