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.
Selwin Hart
Special Adviser and Assistant Secretary-General for Climate Action
United Nations
The Special Adviser ensures delivery of the Secretary-General’s priorities on climate change, from enhanced nationally determined contributions, fossil fuel and coal phase-out, ensuring public and private finance shifts and the transitions necessary to shift the world’s energy, transportation, land and natural systems in alignment with the goals of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.
Before his appointment, Selwin Hart served as the Executive Director for the Caribbean region at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB). He was previously the Ambassador to the United States and the Organization of American States for Barbados and Director of the Secretary- General’s Climate Change Support Team, leading the team’s delivery of the 2014 Climate Summit and the Secretary-General’s engagement in the process leading to the signing of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Throughout his career, Mr. Hart has served in several climate action leadership positions, including as a Climate Adviser for the Caribbean Development Bank, Chief Climate Change Negotiator for Barbados, as well as the Coordinator and Lead Negotiator on Finance for the Alliance of Small Island Developing States, a coalition of 43 islands and low-lying coastal States in the Caribbean, Pacific, Africa, Indian Ocean and South China Sea. He was a member of the Kyoto Protocol Adaptation Fund Board from 2009 to 2010 and was elected by the United Nations General Assembly to serve as Vice-Chair of the Second Committee of the United Nations General Assembly (Economic and Financial) during its sixtieth Session.