Executive Secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification; four decades of career in environment and development. National of Mauritania; first served as senior civil servant; also served as a specialist, a manager and an executive leader (Director-General ad interim) with the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) in Switzerland and in Burkina Faso. Joined the United Nations in 2007. First with the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) serving respectively as Division Director and Deputy Executive Director, before being appointed as Special Adviser of the Secretary-General of the UN for the Sahel (based in Dakar), and finally as Executive Secretary of the UNCCD (Bonn, Germany). Passionate about sustainable development issues, notably how environmental degradation affects human well-being in developed and developing countries. Sustainable production and consumption, ecosystem services and the synergies between climate change, biodiversity and land degradation.
The world’s population is on track to reaching 10 billion by 2050, just as the planetary systems that sustain life on Earth are being pushed to their limits — and with them, our ability t...
Land degradation — a crisis exacerbated by increasing droughts — poses an existential threat to our ecosystems and economies. Global GDP is inherently tied to the health of our land with ...
Our social and economic well-being is dependent on land. If adequately and sustainably managed, land regulates water and nutrient cycling, supports biodiversity, stores carbon and provide...
In 2022, fifty years after the birth of the environmental movement in Stockholm, action on everything from climate change to protecting nature must accelerate to avoid looming chaos and d...
As the world continues to struggle with COVID-19, it is faced with urgent, intertwined crises: climate change, biodiversity loss, land degradation, pollution, and international debt. Howe...
BONN – Face au réchauffement climatique, fournir une énergie renouvelable à tous ceux qui en ont besoin est l'un des plus grands défis de notre temps en terme de développement. Maintenir ...
For the last decade, bioenergy has been confined to the sidelines of climate-policy debates, owing to the environmental problems associated with its production. But recent innovations hav...
