Gary Haq

Dr Gary Haq is a Senior Research Associate at York. His research focuses on low emission mobility, transport policy, urban air pollution, climate change, ageing population, community resilience, behavioural change, public engagement and environmental assessment.

Gary initially spent 15 years at the York centre (1997-2012) working on projects related to transport, air pollution, low carbon futures, and climate change and older people, Prior to returning to SEI in 2020 he spent 8 years (2012-2020) working at the Directorate for Energy, Transport and Climate, EC Joint Research Centre (Ispra, Italy) where he undertook research to support European transport and environmental policy making.

Gary is a human ecologist with over twenty years of supporting the development and implementation of environmental policy in Africa, Asia and Europe. This has involved providing the evidence-base to support policy formulation, facilitating the policy process, building capacity, liaising with a wide range of stakeholders and communicating the result of his work to ensure it has maximum impact.

He has led a number of international multi-partner transport and environment-related programmes. These have included the Sida funded Air Pollution in the Megacities of Asia (APMA) project in collaboration with UNEP, WHO and Clean Air Asia, the EU funded Clean Air Asia Training programme together with Clean Air Asia and the Thai Pollution Control Department and the Transport and Environment Science-Technology Network in collaboration with UN-HABITAT, UNEP and six African universities.

He has also coordinated a UK regional climate change communication (Climate Talk) programme and held climate change workshops on the impact of climate change on older people (in collaboration with Age UK and Help Age International) and climate change communication for Pakistani media professionals (in collaboration with IUCN and Oxfam) and led regional and city-wide community pro-environmental behaviour change projects. He has been an advisor on low carbon transport for the former UK Department of International Development (DFID).

More recently, he has assisted in the coordination of work for the European Commission’s DG CLIMA and DG GROW to reduce emissions from the transport sector. He supported the implementation of the Strategic Transport Research and Innovation Agenda (STRIA) and has contributed to policy impact assessments which involved cost-benefit analyses, policy reviews and stakeholder consultations on a pan-European level.

Gary holds a Diploma in Economics, a PhD in Geography (Transport and Environmental Policy and Planning), an MSc in Environmental Impact Assessment and a BSc (Hons) in Human Ecology.

He is the author/co-author of five books including a Short Guide to Environmental Policy (2014), Environmentalism Since 1945 (2013), Urban Air Pollution in Asian Cities (2006), World Transport Policy and Practice (2003) as well as numerous academic papers and policy reports.