Grenada's Former Environment Minister to Become UN Climate Secretary
The former environment minister of the Caribbean island nation of Grenada, Simon Stiell, will be the new UN climate chief. The office of UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres announced today in New York that Stiell has been appointed to succeed Patricia Espinosa of Mexico, who held the post from July 20216 to July 16 this year.
Simon Stiell was appointed as the new UN climate chief. / Picture: © UNclimatechange / Flickr Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The appointment was endorsed by the Bureau of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The UNFCCC secretariat (UN Climate Change) is the United Nations entity tasked with supporting the global response to the threat of climate change. The UN Climate Change Secretariat is based in Bonn, Germany. Simon Stiell will now be the head of the UNFCCC secretariat.
Before this appointment, he was the Minister for Climate Resilience and the Environment (March 2018 to June 2022), serving as a lead policy maker for the small island of Grenada which is one of the world’s most climate vulnerable regions.
He served in other key positions in the government, including as:
- Minister for Education and Human Resource Development (Sept. 2017-March 2018)
- Minister of State with responsibility for Human Resource Development and the Environment (June 2015-Sept. 2017)
- Junior minister within the Ministry of Agriculture, Lands, Forestry, Fisheries and the Environment (March 2013-June 2015)
During this time, Mr. Stiell held the position of Leader of Government's Business in Grenada's Upper House of Parliament, the Senate.
Before returning to Grenada, Simon Stiell held senior executive positions in several industry-leading companies, including Silicon Valley-based start-ups and major corporations such as Nokia and GEC, for over fourteen years.
A graduate of Master of Business Administration of the University of Westminster in the United Kingdom, he is originally trained as an engineer at the London Metropolitan University.
United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change
There are 197 Parties to the UNFCCC, which is the parent treaty of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement. Under the Paris Agreement, global average temperatures will be kept well below 2 degrees Celsius this century, and efforts will be made to limit temperature increases even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Also, the Kyoto Protocol was derived from the UNFCCC.
As part of the UNFCCC, all agreements are designed to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere in a way that prevents dangerous human interference with the climate system, within a timeframe that allows ecosystems to adapt naturally and enables sustainable development.