About
From a feature interview in the leading Finnish national magazine Helsingin Sanomat
“Yes, yes, I know he is one of Them. But they often know things that we don’t – particularly about what we are up to”
welcome to the SYSTEMS TRANSFORMATION WORK of Nafeez ahmed…
Dr Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is an award-winning 20+year systems theorist, transdisciplinary academic, investigative journalist and strategy consultant, leveraging his skills to understand and drive systems transformation in response to humanity’s biggest global challenges. A bestselling author of seven books (including six non-fiction and a science fiction novel), he has founded and led a range of innovative organisations seeking to generate social change.
He is founding Director of the System Shift Lab, a systems transformation consultancy. Since 2023, he has been Director of The Futures Lab at Unitas Communications Ltd, where he leads on systems transformation advisory services to governments, businesses and charities. Previously he was Director of Global Research Communications and Research Editor at RethinkX, a technology forecasting think-tank based in San Francisco and London, where he led on a range of projects creating roadmaps for net zero through both technology disruptions and key societal choices. He was Systems Change Advisor to the Global Citizens Assembly which represented the global population at the United Nations COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, and was a senior delegate to the United Nations COP28 climate summit in Dubai where he worked closely with a range of governments in the Global South. He chaired the Future of Sustainable Innovation heads of state plenary panel at COP28, where he delivered a keynote on the ‘global phase shift’.
From 2019 to 2023, Nafeez was the Special Investigations & Global Trends Reporter at the monthly British newspaper Byline Times. Before that, he was 'System Shift' columnist at VICE's science magazine Motherboard where he reported on the great post-carbon transition, and a former weekly columnist at Middle East Eye where he covered regional geopolitics.
Nafeez previously wrote The Guardian's 'Earth insight' blog from 2013 to 2014, where he reported on the geopolitics of interconnected energy, environmental and economic crises.
He is a Distinguished Fellow at the Schumacher Institute for Sustainable Systems, a Commissioner at the Transformational Economics Commission of the Club of Rome and a Fellow at the Royal Society of Arts.
Nafeez' latest book, Failing States, Collapsing Systems: BioPhysical Triggers of Political Violence, is a scientific monograph published by Springer Energy Briefs (Springer Nature, 2017) that develops a new systems framework to study the intersection between Earth System Disruption and Human System Destabilisation. This systems framework continues to inform the priorities and directions of his investigative reporting, research and consultancy.
Nafeez's passion is to undertake deep, interdisciplinary research into the systems and structures that impact our lives, along with the potential to change them for the better; and to innovate powerful ways to communicate the learning from such research to mass audiences to facilitate coordinated action. Over the years, he has won a number of awards for both his journalistic and academic work.
In 2015, Nafeez won the Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for his Guardian story on the energy politics of the Ukraine crisis. The previous year he won another Project Censored Award for his first ever Guardian article covering the heightened risk of civil unrest due to climate-induced food crises.
In 2010, Nafeez won the Routledge-GCPS Essay Prize for his academic paper on the 'Crisis of Civilisation' published in the journal Global Change, Peace and Security.
He won the Premio Napoli (Naples Prize) in 2003, Italy's most prestigious literary award created by decree of the President of the Republic, for his first book, The War on Freedom, which critically investigated the Bush administration's narrative of the 9/11 attacks.
Nafeez has twice been featured in the Evening Standard's 'Top 1,000' list of most influential people in London, in 2014 and 2015.