Christopher Beaton is a Senior Policy Advisor with GSI and Lead for the India Program.

His research role spans various projects within IISD’s trade and climate change portfolio. He conducts and manages research for projects in IISD’s Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI), including co-authoring, coordinating and editing its 2013 flagship publication A Guidebook to Fossil-Fuel Subsidy Reform; managing research to project the impacts of subsidy reform in India, Indonesia and Thailand; and managing the GSI’s country work program on fossil-fuel subsidies in Indonesia. Christopher also conducts research for IISD’s work streams on global environmental governance and the green economy, contributing recently to the publication The Future of Sustainable Development: Rethinking sustainable development after Rio+20 and implications for UNEP, and taking a lead role in researching and drafting the Enabling Conditions chapter of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Green Economy Report. He has also prepared research on green taxation in cooperation with the China National Renewable Energy Centre (CNREC), policy briefs on renewable energy for the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and a state of play of global initiatives to take forward international commitments to Sustainable Consumption and Production (SCP). Christopher’s communications role is focused on supporting the IISD’s Global Subsidies Initiative (GSI): managing its website, organising events, facilitating dialogues, representing the GSI and developing strategic thinking and interactive media for communicating the GSI’s research and policy recommendations. Recent projects include the development of an educational video with the World Bank Institute’s (WBI) Climate Change Unit, co-organising a meeting of the Network for Fuel Price Regulators in cooperation with the German development agency GIZ and developing an interactive timeline for the GSI website to highlight progress that has been made toward G-20 and APEC commitments to reform fossil-fuel subsidies.

Christopher has also combined his interest in policy research and communications through various projects investigating the linkages that exist between the major economic structural change that is needed to achieve sustainable development and the communications challenges that this creates for governments, both in developing transition strategies and implementing policy change.