Sarah Whitmee

London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine

Description

Dr Sarah Whitmee is an Assistant Professor at the London School for Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM) in the Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health. She was the lead author on the 2023 Lancet Pathfinder Commission Report entitled Pathways to a healthy net-zero future: report of the Lancet Pathfinder Commission. She is a co-PI on the Wellcome Trust funded Pathfinder Initiative, which aims to assess and synthesise lessons from the implementation of practical, evidence-based pathways to zero-carbon societies. Her role in Pathfinder involves working with institutional partners, including C40 Cities, SDSN, OECD, CDP, AFIDEP and APHRC, to design and deliver policy relevant research aimed at filling knowledge gaps on the co-benefits of greenhouse gas mitigation actions – namely which actions, when implemented, have the largest multiple benefits for health, the environment and prosperity. Prior to her position at LSHTM, Dr Whitmee was the Executive Secretary to the Rockefeller Economic Council on Planetary Health at Oxford Martin School and part of the Secretariat of The Rockefeller Lancet Planetary Health Commission, during which time she was lead author on the 2015 Rockefeller-Lancet Planetary Health Commission report entitled Safeguarding human health in the Anthropocene epoch: report of The Rockefeller Foundation–Lancet Commission on planetary health. Dr Whitmee has a background in conservation biology and macroecology and has published widely on biodiversity indicators in both terrestrial and marine systems, including for the WWF Living Planet Index, which tracks trends in the status and abundance of the world’s vertebrate biodiversity. She is an expert contributor to many international reports, including the 2019 IPBES Global Assessment and GEO-7 and she is a member of the steering committee for the 2024 What Works Climate Solutions Summit a major global conference on evidence-based policy for climate solutions.