Shaila Shahid is serving as the chief operating officer of the Disaster Climate Change Support Unit in the Citywide Inclusive Sanitation-Field Service Management Cell under the Department of Public Health Engineering of the Bangladesh Government. Prior to that, she served at the International Centre for Climate Change and Development as the senior advisor of climate change, disaster risk reduction, and gender. With 15+ years of experience, Shahid has been working in the arena of action research, capacity building of different stakeholders, and policy advocacy level regionally and globally. She is an advisory board member of Tomorrow’s Cities, the United Kingdom Research and Innovation-Global Challenges Research Fund program, and an executive board member of Women for Climate Justice. She is the winner of the Mary Fran Myers Disaster Scholarship award for 2019 from the Natural Hazards Centre, Colorado University, U.S. In 2018, Shahid served as the lead discussant in the high-level political forum on the review of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11. Shahid was awarded the Charles Wallace fellowship by British Council in 2018. She is an environmental lawyer, climate advocate, and a World Wilf Life Fund fellow with long experience in disaster risk reduction, integrated water resources management, climate change adaptation, and building community resilience.
Shahid closely worked with the government and was involved with a number of policy development processes nationally and globally like Disaster Management Act, Water Act, Gender and Equity Strategy, and Risk Reduction Action Plan for Climate Change for different Ministries. She is the global and regional voice on women’s issues, disaster and climate justice, water and sanitation needs, and SDGs campaign.