Profile on Pachauri by A.J.S. Rayl

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri was born in August 1940, the second of three sons, into a family of educators. He was lucky enough to grow up in the mountains of Nainital, India, in a home with a view. Located in the Kumaon foothills of the outer Himalayas, the town, in the state of Uttarakhand, is 6,358 feet above sea level and nestled in a valley containing a pear-shaped lake, about two miles in diameter, and surrounded by mountains.

His father, Dr. Atma Ram Pachauri, studied abroad, earning his doctorate in educational psychology from London University before settling down in his home country. His mother, Sumitra Pachauri, who was born of Indian parents living in British Burma, instilled discipline and taught him the skills that have enabled him to cope with his ever-increasing workload. His work ethic, which involves a strict punctuality and completion of all tasks, is something he directly attributes to her.

With this background and a natural ability in school, particularly in mathematics, young Rajendra was able to attend the elite school in Lucknow, La Martiniere College. Under the tutelage of a master named Arthur Flynn who encouraged his mathematical abilities, he excelled. In fact, he was one of only eight students chosen from a tough, countrywide competition for admittance to the Indian Railways School of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering at Jamalpur. There, he studied mechanical engineering and graduated at the top of his class.

Pachauri went to work at the Diesel Locomotive Works in Varanasi on the management side of things and was promoted several times. However, he decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and continue his education abroad. He chose North Carolina State University (NCSU) in Raleigh and in 1972 earned his master’s degree in engineering, following it with a double-Ph.D. in industrial engineering and economics just two years later, in 1974, from the same institution.

He was immediately offered an assistant professor position at NCSU, which he accepted, but he also felt the pull of home. After one school year, Pachauri moved back to India, although he would return briefly to NCSU during the summers of 1976 and 1977 as a visiting faculty member in the Department of Economics and Business.

Back in his home country, Pachauri accepted a senior faculty post at the Administrative Staff College of India in Hyderabad in June 1975. Four years later, he was promoted to director of the institution’s Consulting and Applied Research division. Then, in April 1981, Pachauri received an offer he couldn’t refuse: the directorship of the Tata Energy Research Institute (TERI).

Founded by the Tata family in the 1970s, TERI’s mission has always been to guide India toward a more energy-efficient future. For one year, August 1981 to August 1982, however, Pachauri was also a visiting professor of resource economics at the West Virginia University and a senior visiting fellow at the Resource Systems Institute, East-West Center in the States. Juggling those responsibilities during this phase of his professional life gave would give him a sort of trial run at what has become a multi-faceted career-on-the-go.

Once his appointments in the U.S. had come to and end, Pachauri took up permanent residence in New Delhi in 1982. Professionally, he concentrated on developing TERI, while personally he and wife, Saroj, raised three children.

Under Pachauri’s leadership, TERI grew from a funding body for small research projects to one of the world’s best-known research institutes. As the company expanded its activities, it moved to its new Darbari Seth Building in the India Habitat Centre in 1994. Pachauri went on to oversee the design and creation of the visionary TERI Gram campus in Gual Pahari, 18.6 miles (30 kilometers) outside Delhi, a world-class ecological retreat run entirely on renewable resources—and complete with cricket, golf, and other outdoor activities.

The complex actually has become one of Pachauri’s favorite places, not only because it has been developed on the principles of sustainable resource management, but because it is also where he plays cricket as a member of the Institute’s team.

While Pachauri's overarching commitment belonged to TERI in those years, he managed to gain international experience and establish contacts with numerous other institutions overseas, elevating the Institute’s international profile. For three months during 1990, for example, he conducted research at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. In 1991, he worked as a lead author for Second Assessment: Climate Change 1991, the global warming report published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the scientific intergovernmental body set up by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 1988. Second Assessment is viewed as the foundation for the Kyoto Protocol in 1997.

In the meantime, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), which recognized Pachauri’s deep knowledge and experience in the energy-environment field, particularly in sustainable management of natural resources, appointed him as part-time adviser to the administrator in 1994. In 2000, he managed to squeeze in a McCluskey Fellowship, teaching a semester at the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University. By the time the IPCC’s third report was published in 2001, he was elected one of the organization’s vice-chairs.

Pachauri also stayed busy in India, serving as director of the board of the Indian Oil Corp Ltd., a Fortune 500 company, for three years beginning in January 1999, and chairman of the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway Heritage Foundation. In July 2001, he was appointed as a member of the Economic Advisory Council to the Prime Minister of India. With his breadth of experience at home and abroad, Pachauri soon became a favored candidate to take over the chairmanship of the IPCC from Robert Watson. In 2002, he assumed the command.

Under Pachauri’s leadership, the IPCC has produced its most important document to date: Climate Change 2007. The organization, despite some opposition, also produced a more accessible, condensed version of the report for policy makers and the public. The Synthesis Report, as it was called, was picked up by the global media and ultimately had a fairly profound impact on creating public awareness worldwide, as well as generating momentum toward a global agreement to succeed the Kyoto Protocol.

In the fall of 2007, The Nobel Peace Prize committee announced that it had chosen the IPCC and former Vice-President Al Gore to share that year’s prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” On December 10, 2007, Pachauri flew to Oslo and accepted the prize on behalf of the IPCC, sharing the podium with Gore. He hasn’t stopped since.

Beyond his primary commitments to the Energy and Resources Council, the IPCC, and TERI, Pachauri manages to be active in several international groups dealing with climate change and its policy dimensions. In addition, the Prime Minister of India, Manmohan Singh, Ph.D., has appointed him as a member of his Advisory Council on Climate Change. He had earlier served on the Prime Minister’s Economic Advisory Council, and in the 1980s as a member of the Advisory Board on Energy.

In the midst of his whirlwind life, Pachauri has managed to write more than 100 articles for academic journals and some 23 books. During his off-work hours, for “light relief,” as he puts it, he composes poetry, and when he’s not in a car or plane or train, you’ll find him on the field somewhere playing cricket.

Honoring the IPCC with the Nobel Peace Prize is, says Pachauri—who was re-elected IPCC chair for a second term in September 2008—“a clarion call for the protection of the Earth as it faces the widespread impacts of climate change.” As climate change sets in, environmental issues have suddenly taken on an urgency, and his schedule has expanded accordingly.

Since that memorable December evening in Oslo, Pachauri, already internationally recognized as a leading global thinker and researcher, has a new, unofficial role as international statesman promoting climate change awareness. These days he is constantly on the move, a highly-sought speaker crisscrossing the globe to build up and disseminate greater knowledge. And the work never stops. He recently accepted another part-time appointment as director of the new the new Yale Climate and Energy Institute.

A.J.S. Rayl is a freelance science writer based in Malibu, Calif. She has written on assignment for a variety of magazines, including Air & Space, Astronomy, Discover, Reader’s Digest, and Smithsonian, as well as online ventures including the Planetary Society’s website, http//planetary.org.