Xuemei Bai is a Distinguished Professor in urban environment and human ecology at the Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University. Her research focuses on the science and policy of rapid urbanization and urban system sustainability, including: understanding the structure, function and processes of urban social ecological systems, the drivers and impacts of urbanization, evolution of urban systems, urban metabolism, cities and climate change, urban sustainability experiments, low carbon transition, and more recently on Anthropocene futures and Earth system sustainability. She published extensively on these topics, with many appearing in journals such as Nature, Nature Sustainability, and Science.
Prof. Bai is a member of the Earth Commission, leading its Working Group 5 on methods of cross-scale translation from planetary limits to local actors. She is the Co-Chair of Future Earth Urban Knowledge-Action Network, which was launched at the 2016 UN Habitat III Conference in Quito. She has served as a Lead Author for four major global assessments, i.e. the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, Global Energy Assessment, IPBES Global Assessment, and the IPCC AR6 WGIII. Prof. Bai is a Fellow of Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia since 2017, and was named as one of the World's 100 Most Influential People in Climate Change Policy in 2019 and 2022. She is the Laureate of the Volvo Environment Prize 2018, and the Global Economy Prize 2021.