Tessa Khan
Australia
Expertise:
Climate Change & Environment
Law & Policy
Founder & Director
Tessa Khan is the director and founder of Uplift, a United Kingdom-based NGO that supports the transition to a just and fossil fuel-free U.K. She is an international climate change and human rights lawyer, campaigner and strategist.
Before founding Uplift, she was co-founder and co-director of the Climate Litigation Network, a project of the Urgenda Foundation, which supports groundbreaking strategic climate litigation around the world. She has spent more than 15 years supporting grassroots, regional and international movements for justice and has served as an expert advisor to United Nations Human Rights bodies and national governments while working in Thailand, Egypt, India, the United States, the Netherlands and Australia.
Khan is a trustee of Global Greengrants Fund UK and a member of the steering committee of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative. Her writing has been published in international media outlets and academic publications, and she has been invited to speak at the United Nations and events convened by The Economist, The Wall Street Journal and TEDx. She holds a BCL degree from the University of Oxford, and LLB and BA degrees from the University of Western Australia. In 2019, Khan was named by Time magazine as one of 15 women leading the fight against climate change. She is also an awardee of the Climate Breakthrough Project.