Piyush Dhawan
Piyush Dhawan is a German Chancellor Fellow, Humboldt Fellow and a TEDx speaker. Piyush has worked with the United Nations and German Technical Cooperation (GIZ) for ten years. He is also the co-founder of The Circular Collective, which aims to facilitate, activate and enable discussions for a circular economy in India. He has represented India at many international conferences, including the European Forum Alpbach (Austria), the Global Environments Summer Academy (Oxford), DAAD in Mongolia, Germany and Thailand, and the G20 Summit (Korea).
As German Chancellor Fellow for 2017-18, Piyush looked into how a city could become self sufficient without the need for resources from outside its physical boundaries. This utopian idea is also being referred to as a ‘circular city’, which is essentially about closing material cycles and making sure resources are reused indefinitely by not creating any waste. On his return to India, Piyush joined the United Nations Development Programme as Resource Mobilization and Partnership Lead, fostering partnerships with the private sector, academia, NGOs and civil society organizations for the UN Agenda 2030.
Prior to this fellowship, Piyush worked with Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH in India for five years on the Indo-German Biodiversity Programme. At GIZ, he coordinated the India Business and Biodiversity Initiative (IBBI) with the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII), the largest industry association in India with a membership base of more than 8000 member companies. Within IBBI, GIZ worked with 26 leading member companies, striving to incorporate biodiversity and ecosystem services within their core business operations. Involved with IBBI since its inception in 2013, Piyush has been working on a range of issues with respect to business and biodiversity, such as natural capital, access and benefit sharing, training of IBBI trainers on managing natural capital, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) studies, and biodiversity in supply chain. IBBI is seen as a forerunner with respect to business and biodiversity linkages.
I always see myself as a catalyst and an idea generator. I dream of a world where we create a positive impact for our generations to come. I sincerely hope that our future generations will be proud of us and not have to fight for basic amenities such as clean water and air, which is what our generation has already started fighting for.
