Kishan Khoday

When Kishan Khoday was deciding which law schools to apply to in the mid-1990s, he was drawn by Vermont Law School’s top-ranked environmental law program. Kishan, who lived in Montreal at the time, also liked what he saw in its international law courses and the VLS motto, “Law for the community and the world.”

“I took it to heart,” says Kishan, who as assistant country director for the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) in China leads a 15-member team tackling energy and environment issues there and in other developing countries.

Based in Beijing, Kishan and his team bring together government and private-sector partners, including NGOs, to work locally to implement international laws governing areas such as climate change, biodiversity and toxic chemicals. His work also addresses issues of environmental governance and natural resource management, viewing these issues through the lens of rights-based approaches and balancing development with the rights of future generations to live in a healthy environment.

A major focus of UNDP’s work in China is on supporting efforts to combat climate change. As China’s global role expands, it requires creating global partnerships to take action. Profiled in a recent “Principal Voices” series produced by CNN and Time, Kishan summed it up this way: “There is an increasing spirit of global environmental citizenship, a desire to address climate change as a matter of common concern for all humanity.”

Kishan has been working with the UN since 1995, keeping the affiliation while he attended VLS. Before assuming his current post in Beijing in 2005, he worked in Indonesia and India. He served in 2007 as a visiting scholar at Tsinghua University Faculty of Law in Beijing, where he lectured on rights-based approaches to addressing climate change and energy security. In recent years he has co-authored several journal articles and books on the issue of human rights and the environment and served as lead author on the UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment.

During a recent visit to Beijing, VLS Dean Jeff Shields met with Kishan over lunch. They were joined by Professor Tseming Yang, director of the VLS Partnership for Environmental Law in China. It was a reunion of sorts for Kishan, who took an international environmental law course with Professor Yang back in 1999 while pursuing his JD. The course, Kishan recalls, was a part of “the nice global edge” he found at VLS that prepared him for the work ahead.