Tessa Khan

Tessa is an international climate change and human rights lawyer, campaigner and strategist. Before founding Uplift, she was a member of the legal team of the Urgenda Foundation, a Dutch NGO that was responsible for the first case in the world in which a court ordered a national government to reduce a country’s greenhouse gas emissions by an absolute minimum amount. She was also 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 fifteen years supporting grassroots, regional and international movements for justice and has served as an expert advisor to UN human rights bodies and national governments, while working in Thailand, Egypt, India, the US, the Netherlands and Australia. Tessa 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, Wall Street Journal and TEDx. She is a graduate of the University of Oxford (BCL(Dist)) and University of Western Australia (LLB(Hons)/BA). In 2019, Tessa was named by TIME magazine as one of fifteen women leading the fight against climate change. She is also an awardee of the Climate Breakthrough Project.