Dr Katherine Maxwell is a climate change consultant, author and academic who specialises in urban decarbonisation and resilience. She studied at the University of Edinburgh and the University of Oxford, where she was the first to complete the DPhil in Sustainable Urban Development.
Katherine has held senior positions at Sweco and WSP, where she founded and led Net Zero Cities teams advising municipalities worldwide on climate action and resilience strategies. She previously served as Senior Manager for Climate Action Planning at C40 Cities, supporting over thirty cities in the Global South and developing data-driven tools recognized by the World Bank and Global Covenant of Mayors.
Her book, Governance Networks for Sustainable Cities: Connecting Theory and Practice in Europe (Routledge, 2023), examines how public, private and third-sector collaboration drives urban sustainability. She has published extensively on climate governance, net zero transitions and climate finance.
Katherine is passionate about bridging academic research with practical climate action. She is a Visiting Fellow at the Global Centre on Healthcare and Urbanisation at Kellogg College, Oxford, where she contributes to research and policy work, and an Associate with the Place-Based Climate Action Network. She has served on boards including UN-HABITAT’s Climate Action Planning Board and Resilience Rising – Engineering Leadership Group and was awarded the COP26 Climate Resilience Fellowship by the University of Cambridge in 2021.
She is currently an Associate at Arup, working on decarbonisation and resilience projects for cities and organisations.
Katherine Maxwell 