Biography
Tessa Khan has dedicated her career to supporting grassroots, regional, and international movements for justice, leveraging her expertise to advise UN human rights bodies and national governments. She co-founded and co-directed the Climate Litigation Network, which has successfully pioneered groundbreaking strategic climate litigation around the world.
From 2013 to 2016, Tessa coordinated a network of over 500 women’s rights organizations at the Asia Pacific Forum on Women, Law, and Development, advocating for unprecedented commitments to gender equality and women’s rights in the Sustainable Development Goals. She holds a Master’s in Law from the University of Oxford.
Tessa’s commitment to climate justice is driven by the recognition that individuals have the power to effect change by demanding governments be accountable for their actions.
“We all have agency and we can all make a difference. The history of social change will tell you that you can win through social movements,” says Tessa, who built a connection to environmental issues having lived in Bangladesh, where her family is from, and Australia, where she grew up.
Inspired by the landmark Urgenda Foundation v. The State of the Netherlands case, she co-founded in 2015 and co-directed the Climate Litigation Network (CLN), which supports groundbreaking strategic climate litigation around the world.
In 2019, Tessa was named by TIME magazine as one of 15 women leading the fight against climate change. In 2023, she joined Climate Breakthrough’s Board of Directors.
Breakthrough Program
Tessa was selected for the Climate Breakthrough Award program in 2018.
Tessa sought to expand the budding, yet promising strategy of CLN by using lawsuits to compel governments to take climate action. This strategy looked at tackling the root causes of inaction: weak accountability, fossil fuel influence, and political short-termism. Such lawsuits could spark public engagement and raise awareness of the urgency of climate action by taking the issue out of the realm of partisan politics. This was a big deal.
In late 2020, with CLN’s work proceeding smoothly, Tessa began to shift her efforts. She founded a new organization, Uplift, which works to galvanize a movement that drives UK policymaking more in favor of more renewable energy and greater energy efficiency.
This new initiative looks to build a distributed network that escalates the momentum around ending offshore oil and gas extraction in the UK. By supporting key interventions that dismantle barriers to change, they want to bring a complete end to oil and gas extraction in the UK, a strategic target due to its significant fossil fuel production and strong industry presence.