Dr. Veerle Vandeweerd, a Belgian national, has more than 35 years of experience in global, national, and local Sustainable Development policy and program development and implementation, including 20+ years at the United Nations system. She initiated the UNEP Global Environment Outlook (GEO) report series and held several senior functions at UNEP. She directed the UNDP Environment and Energy Group for over 8 years, with an annual turnover of over 1.5 billion dollars. Her work spans diverse fields from environmental monitoring and assessments, green economic transformations, and global environmental norm setting, to environmental, financial, regulatory, technological, and institutional capacity building for Sustainable Development in over 160 countries. During these years, Dr Vandeweerd directed the production of more than 300 publications, chaired hundreds of international meetings, and contributed to all major environmental conferences of the past two decades. She was the Special Advisor to the UN Global Compact, the leadership platform for responsible corporate policies and practices, and served – and still serves - as a board and/or advisory member to several international, UN, and national organisations, including CCICED (China), CLASP (US), CfRN (Global), GESI (ICT companies), and DERA (EU). Before the UN, she taught at the University of Zambia, conducted research on African Sleeping sickness, and headed the environmental reporting department in the Flemish Government, Belgium.
She currently is co-leading several entrepreneurial initiatives, setting up innovative vehicles to finance and bring to the market new sustainable asset classes. She also is the co-founder of the Global Sustainable Technology and Innovation Conference Series (G-STIC) (www.gstic.org) and was its policy director from 2017 to 2019. In 2020, she set up the Platform for Transformative Technologies (P4TT), a private company, offering a collaborative platform to identify and bring to the market, innovative and integrated industrial solutions that substantially can contribute to the achievements of the Sustainable Development Goals.
Dr Vandeweerd has a PhD in biochemistry from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, and a master’s in chemistry from the University of Gent, Belgium.