Visiting Professor, at the Lau Institute, King’s College London, Isabel is Chair of the ‘Great Britain China Centre’, an independent executive non-departmental public body established by the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office in 1974 to support UK-China relations.

Isabel studied Chinese in Edinburgh and China and has a distinguished career in broadcast journalism and writing, covering global politics, conflict, development, human rights, climate change, and environmental degradation. She has authored and co-authored several books, made radio and television documentaries and presented both BBC’s Radio 4 current affairs programme The World Tonight and Radio 3’s arts and cultural strand, Night Waves. In 2023 she became a contributing editor at Prospect Magazine.

Recently Isabel’s work has focused on China with particular emphasis on climate change and China’s global environmental footprint. In 2006 she founded the ‘ChinaDialogue Trust’, a bilingual, non-profit organisation focusing on climate change and environmental issues in China and abroad. She served as senior advisor to the CDT until 2023.

Isabel is a non-executive Director of ‘Third Generation Environmentalism’, a non-profit climate change think tank that works to accelerate the global transition to a low-carbon, climate-resilient future. She was appointed OBE in 2009.