Anshu Sharma

Co-founder

Anshu Sharma is the co-founder of SEEDS India (1994)[1], an Indian non-profit working on disaster relief and environment from New Delhi.

Anshu Sharma is an Indian urban planner and disaster risk specialist who, with Manu Gupta, co-founded SEEDS — the Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society — in 1994. SEEDS is a not-for-profit organisation working on disaster readiness, response and rehabilitation, and on community resilience to the climate emergency.

SEEDS reports having rebuilt more than 62,000 homes and 650 schools across India and assisted several hundred thousand people after earthquakes, cyclones and floods.

Early life and education

Sharma trained as an urban planner at the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi. He carried out doctoral research in global environmental studies at Kyoto University in Japan.

Career

Sharma has worked on disaster risk and climate issues for some three decades and across a dozen countries, coordinating community-based projects, training practitioners, leading inter-agency efforts, conducting research and evaluating programmes. He has advised and consulted for United Nations agencies, the World Bank, the European Commission and the Government of India.

At SEEDS he leads the organisation's training work and is a global tutor for Oxford Brookes University. He set up a disaster preparedness innovation laboratory in Bangladesh and climate schools in Sikkim.

He co-edited volumes on indigenous knowledge and disaster risk reduction (2009), urban risk reduction (2009) and climate and disaster resilience in cities (2011). He was a co-editor of the IFRC World Disasters Report 2016 and contributed to the UNESCAP Asia-Pacific Disaster Report 2017.[2][3][4]

SEEDS India

SEEDS (Sustainable Environment and Ecological Development Society) works on disaster preparedness, response and recovery, and climate resilience. It builds safer homes, schools and communities in vulnerable regions.

SEEDS India reports the following, on its own site:

1.25 crore lives touched through disaster readiness, response and rehabilitation since 1994
63,216 shelters built; 670 schools and aanganwadis built, repaired or restored
69 emergencies responded to; 47.2 lakh people given access to food, clean water and hygiene