Pavan Sukhdev is a sustainability thought leader, an experienced innovator in practice, and an influential voice amongst national environmental policy makers and institutions focussed on sustainable development.
As Special Adviser and Head of UNEP’s Green Economy Initiative and Study Leader of TEEB (2008-2011), Pavan led the path-breaking TEEB report suite (‘The Economics of Ecosystems & Biodiversity’) and UNEP’s landmark report ‘Towards a Green Economy’. He now supports UN Environment and TEEB as Goodwill Ambassador as well as Special Adviser to its new study “TEEB for Agriculture and Food”.
Pavan was awarded the McCluskey Fellowship (2011) by Yale University, where he taught a graduate course on TEEB and wrote “Corporation 2020”, a book and a campaign (2012) on transforming business for tomorrow’s world. This campaign promotes tomorrow’s corporation as one with positive rather than negative externalities, & describes the four most important corporate change drivers to transition to an inclusive green economy.
Pavan is Founder-CEO of GIST Advisory, a global corporate sustainability consultancy which seeks to demonstrate and mainstream the vision of TEEB, Green Economy and “Corporation 2020”. In January 2018, Pavan was appointed President of WWF-International. WWF is among the world’s largest networks for nature conservation, with offices in over 80 countries and over 5 million donors and members
A career banker, Pavan delivered TEEB’s Interim Report (2008) whilst still working as a Managing Director of Global Markets Division at Deutsche Bank. His work has been recognized through several awards, including the Gothenburg Award for Sustainable Development (2013) and the Blue Planet Prize (2016).