Narasimha Rao profile picture

Narasimha Rao

Senior Research Scholar

Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions Research Group

Energy, Climate, and Environment Program

Biography

Narasimha Rao is a senior research scholar in the IIASA Transformative Institutional and Social Solutions Research Group of the Energy, Climate, and Environment Program and an Associate Professor of Energy Systems at the Yale School of the Environment, in the US. His research examines the relationship between energy systems, human development, and climate change. He is a contributing author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)'s Sixth Assessment Report.

He is the recipient of the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant (2015-2018) for a project entitled Decent Living Energy, which explores energy and emissions thresholds for providing decent living standards for all. His research interests also include income inequality, infrastructure, and climate policy. For his current research, Rao was awarded the 2011 Amulya K. Reddy Prize for the Best Paper in the journal Energy for Sustainable Development for his paper entitled 'Kerosene Subsidies in India: When Energy Policy Fails as Social Policy'.

Rao obtained his PhD in Environment and Resources from Stanford University, California, and two Master's degrees in Electrical Engineering and Technology Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Last update: 16 JUN 2021

Publications

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Mastrucci, A. , Min, J. , Usubiaga-Liaño, A., & Rao, N. (2020). A Framework for Modelling Consumption-Based Energy Demand and Emission Pathways. Environmental Science & Technology 54 (3) 1799-1807. 10.1021/acs.est.9b05968.

Lanzi, E., Agrawala, S., Dellink, R., Lutz, W. , Zimm, C. , Nakicenovic, N. , Fritz, S. , & Rao, N. (2020). Developing Pathways to Sustainability: Fulfilling Human Needs and Aspirations while Maintaining Human Life Support Systems. In: Systemic Thinking for Policy Making: The Potential of Systems Analysis for Addressing Global Policy Challenges in the 21st Century. pp. 39-48 Paris, France: New Approaches to Economic Challenges, OECD Publishing. ISBN 978-92-64-49456-5 10.1787/879c4f7a-en.

Davis, K.F., Chhatre, A., Rao, N. , Singh, D., Ghosh-Jerath, S., Mridul, A., Poblete-Cazenave, M., Pradhan, N., & DeFries, R. (2019). Assessing the sustainability of post-Green Revolution cereals in India. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116 (50) 25034-25041. 10.1073/pnas.1910935116.

Rao, N. , Min, J. , & Mastrucci, A. (2019). Energy requirements for decent living in India, Brazil and South Africa. Nature Energy 4 (12) 1025-1032. 10.1038/s41560-019-0497-9.

Vinca, A. , Parkinson, S. , Byers, E. , Burek, P. , Khan, Z., Krey, V. , Diuana, F., Wang, Y., Ilyas, A., Köberle, A.C., Staffel, I., Pfenninger, S., Muhammad, A., Rowe, A., Schaeffer, R., Rao, N. , Wada, Y. , Dhilali, N., & Riahi, K. (2019). The Nexus Solutions Tool (NEST): An open platform for optimizing multi-scale energy-water-land system transformations. Geoscientific Model Development Discussions 13 (3) 1095-1121. 10.5194/gmd-2019-134.