Keith Alverson has been director of the UN Environment International Environmental Technology Center in Osaka, Japan since July 2016. The center serves as a global center of excellence on environmentally sound technologies with a focus on waste management. Prior to that he served five years as the Coordinator of the Freshwater, Land and Climate Branch in Nairobi, Kenya. In his previous position he oversaw UNEP’s global portfolio of projects in climate change adaptation and ecosystem based mitigation as well as terrestrial and freshwater ecosystem management. Prior to joining UNEP, from 2004-2011, Keith was Head of Ocean Observations and Services at the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO and director of the Global Ocean Observing System, based in Paris, France. Prior to 2004, he was executive director of the International Geosphere Biosphere Programme’s core project for paleoclimatic and paleoenvironmental research, Past Global Changes (PAGES) in Bern, Switzerland.
Keith has a degree in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, with a thesis from the Center for Energy and the Environment, along with a certificate in East Asian Studies from Princeton University (1988) and a doctorate in Physical Oceanography from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1995). His postdoctoral research in modeling past climate variability was in the Physics Department at the University of Toronto, Canada. Keith has over 150 publications including Resilience: The Science of Adaptation to Climate Change (Elsevier, 2018), Global Change and Future Earth (Cambridge, in press), Past Global Changes and Their Significance for the Future (Elsevier, 2000), Paleoclimate, Global Change and the Future (Springer, 2002), Watching over the world’s oceans (Nature, 2005) and Taking the Pulse of the Oceans (Science, 2006). He has served on a number of high level scientific panels including as elected President of the International Commission for Climate of the International Association for Meteorology and Atmospheric Sciences, Secretary General of the International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics Commission for Climatic and Environmental Change and Chair of the United Nations Interagency Coordination and Planning Committee for Earth Observations.
