Former Grenada Minister appointed as UNFCCC Executive Secretary
Simon Stiell has been named the new Executive Secretary of the United Nations Climate Change Secretariat.
The appointment has been endorsed by the Bureau of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and was confirmed by UN Secretary-General António Guterres.
Simon Stiell was a senior minister in the government of Grenada from March 2013 to June 2022. For five years, he was the Minister for Climate Resilience and the Environment. He was also Minister of Education and Human Resource Development, Minister of State for Human Resource Development and the Environment, and a junior minister in the Ministry of Agriculture, Lands, Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment.
In addition, Stiell served as a member of Grenada’s Upper House of Parliament, the Senate, where he held the position of Leader of Government’s Business throughout this period.
Before he moved back to Grenada, Simon Stiell had a successful 14-year career in the technology industry. He worked as a senior executive for several industry-leading companies, from Silicon Valley tech startups to big companies like Nokia and G.E.C.
He studied to be an engineer at first, and he has a Master of Business Administration from the University of Westminster in the UK. Stiell will be based in Bonn, Germany.
About the UNFCCC
With 197 Parties, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has near universal membership and is the parent treaty of the 2015 Paris Climate Change Agreement. The main aim of the Paris Agreement is to keep a global average temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius and to drive efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The UNFCCC is also the parent treaty of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The ultimate objective of all agreements under the UNFCCC is to stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system in a time frame which allows ecosystems to adapt naturally and enables sustainable development.