A new key biodiversity platform for cross sectoral collaboration
For its inaugural launch, World Biodiversity Summit will help define what world leaders and the private sector in biodiversity and climate action need to do in the medium and long term to achieve sustainable development and hinder further biodiversity loss, focusing on partnerships and investment mechanisms as levers of progress. World Biodiversity Summit is a platform for responding to accelerating biodiversity loss, by using the Paris Agreement as a framework to learn from, promoting relevant solutions, innovations, and leadership networks, strengthening nature restoration and conservation. Nature-based solutions will be highlighted, from specificecosystems to global possibilities.
Isabel Monilla
Director, US Financial Regulation, Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets at Ceres
Isabel leads advocacy strategy for US financial regulators in the Ceres Accelerator for Sustainable Capital Markets to ensure regulators urgently address climate change as a systemic risk. This includes engagement with the Federal Reserve, Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), housing finance agencies, and a range of other financial regulators at the federal and state level. Isabel conducts research and analysis to advance Ceres’ recommendations for addressing physical and transition climate risks through improved disclosure and prudential supervision of banking and other sectors. She engages regularly with Congress and NGOs.
Prior to Ceres, Isabel worked for 9 years at Oxfam America as Policy Lead for Extractive Industries Transparency in the agency’s global oil, gas and mining program. She led strategy, advocacy and research to support normative work on oil, gas and mining disclosure, including legislative, legal and technical work on securities regulation, tax, payment and contract disclosure norms. She led extractive project economic analyses and research on fossil fuel subsidies, oil and gas methane regulation and climate risk disclosure. She led Oxfam’s regulatory and legal strategy with the SEC. She led analytical projects and engagement with sovereign and equity investors, serving as an advisor to the Emerging Markets Investors Alliance. She led the agency’s strategy on the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI), including its domestic work with the Dept. of Interior, helping to found the USEITI, and serving on its Federal Advisory Committee.
She served as Global Council member of Publish What You Pay International and oversaw the Publish What You Pay United States (PWYP US) coalition as a member of its Steering Committee. She was a proud member of SEIU Local 500, and negotiated Oxfam’s DC Union contract in 2019-2020. Previously, she was the Director of PWYP US, leading advocacy with US government, EITI, companies, and development banks. She led PWYP’s 2010 drive to pass Section 1504 of the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act, requiring US-listed oil, gas and mining companies to publish payments to governments. Prior to PWYP, she spent 9 years at the World Resources Institute conducting research with civil society partners on social and environmental impacts and benefits of natural resource development in the oil, gas, mining and forestry sectors, in WRI’s Global Forest Watch and International Financial Flows and the Environment programs.
Publications include Oxfam’s Contract Disclosure Survey 2018, a survey of the contract disclosure policies of 40 oil, gas and mining companies, WRI’s People, Power and Pipelines: Lessons from Peru in the governance of gas production revenues and Breaking Ground: Engaging Communities in Extractives and Infrastructure Projects. She holds degrees in French and Journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park.